Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, wants to know why China has 60 cultural centers in the United States while the United States has none in China. Lugar questioned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the disparity a couple months ago, as reported by the Washington Times:

“The Chinese, according to our records, have now established 60 Confucius centers here in the United States, but they are permitting only four of our centers to be built in China,” Mr. Lugar told Mrs. Clinton. “So I call this to your attention for some potential negotiations with [our] Chinese friends, as we try to extend this idea of diplomacy centers, which I think is important.”
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China’s so-called Great Firewall is well known for filtering out controversial content relating to democracy, Tiananmen Square and criticism of Beijing. But as this New York Times article shows, a large part of the censorship effort includes positive spin to proactively promote the government’s view:

Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

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The New York Times has an interesting article on how technology is enabling protestors in Thailand. Well, actually the main point of the article is that Thais are losing some civility — “Thais Shed Culture of Restraint” — but an underlying theme is that technology has played a key role in making protests possible:

The role of technology in bringing together the protesters has been crucial. The leaders of the protest movement have used community radio stations, mobile-phone messaging and the Internet to forge an identity for lower-income Thais and connect a vast constellation of people in villages and towns.
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Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has denied charges by Google that Vietnamese-speaking users of Google were being targeted by hackers according to this New York Times article:

The country’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on Saturday after fielding a question from the press about Google’s blog post, which was published on its online security blog on March 30.
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Just a week after Google took on China directly by redirecting Google.cn users to Google.com.hk, the Mountain View behemoth is accusing Vietnam of cyber attacks directed at Vietnamese computer users around the world in its Security Blog:

In January, we discussed a set of highly sophisticated cyber attacks that originated in China and targeted many corporations around the world. We believe that malware is a general threat to the Internet, but it is especially harmful when it is used to suppress opinions of dissent. In that case, the attacks involved surveillance of email accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are not the only examples of malicious software being used for political ends. We have gathered information about a separate cyber threat that was less sophisticated but that nonetheless was employed against another community.
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Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times has an article about how some North Koreans are risking death to send information about their notoriously closed off country to South Korea and other Western allies:

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.
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An earlier post discussed ways to learn foreign languages online. But what if you don’t feel like lugging around a laptop or being chained to your desk?

LA Times blogger Zohreen Adamjee is trying an experiment in advance of a trip to Tokyo using only iPhone apps to try to get a basic grasp of Japanese in 30 days:

A quick search in the Apple Store results in dozens of applications promising to improve one’s Japanese. I’ve started with the first 13 free apps that I could find: Start Japanese!, Free Pocket Japanese, Free Japanese Essentials by AccelaStudy, Japanese for Beginners FREE, Human Japanese Lite, Japanese Phrases, Free Japanese WordPower, World Nomads Japanese, Free Japanese Audio FlashCards, Free Japanese Gengo Flashcards, gogoSpeak Japanese Lite, LinguaTalk Japanese 1, Firststep to Japanese Free.
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Google may have been first but it won’t be the last. Two companies that sell domain names announced Wednesday that they will no longer register new domain names in China because of demands by the Chinese government for additional identification from their customers. This AP story by Joelle Tessler has more:

One of the domain name companies, Go Daddy Inc., announced its change in policy at a congressional hearing that was largely devoted to Google Inc.’s announcement Monday that it will no longer censor Internet search results in China.

Christine Jones, executive vice president and general counsel of Go Daddy, said the company’s decision was not a reaction to Google but instead reflects its concern about the security of its customers and “the chilling effect” of the new Chinese government requirements.
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In a previous post I wrote about how a San Francisco start-up, Truth on Call, has a a service that lets people text questions to physicians then collects the answers. That’s one obvious way that technology is providing medical care to people who don’t have the time or means to see a doctor right then. But beyond the strictly medical component, the internet allows people who are housebound due to illnesses and chronic medical conditions to create online communities, as this New York Times story details in this story based on a Pew report:

People fighting chronic illnesses are less likely than others to have Internet access, but once online they are more likely to blog or participate in online discussions about health problems, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation.
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The New York Times has good article about some of the Chinese companies that are likely to benefit in the short term — but perhaps be less competitive outside of the country — due to Google’s departure. Google was never a great fit in China, with Baidu taking the lion’s share of the search market, and other American companies like Yahoo and Twitter faced obstacles as well:

Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.
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