plus 3, Chinese schools deny Google cyber-attacks: Xinhua - YAHOO! |
- Chinese schools deny Google cyber-attacks: Xinhua - YAHOO!
- Reviews Summary for Ameritron AL-811 - eHam.net
- A sign of California's dysfunction - San Francisco Chronicle
- Netbooking for a week: Part 1 - neowin.net
| Chinese schools deny Google cyber-attacks: Xinhua - YAHOO! Posted: 20 Feb 2010 02:13 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. BEIJING (AFP) – Chinese educational institutions named in connection with cyber-attacks on Google have denied involvement, state media said Saturday, as differences festered between Beijing and the Internet giant. The New York Times reported on Thursday that the cyber-attacks aimed at Google and dozens of other firms had been traced to Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, which the newspaper said had military backing. The paper cited anonymous sources for the report. Google vowed in January to stop bowing to Internet censors in China in the wake of sophisticated cyber-attacks aimed at the US firm's source code and at Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world. A spokesperson for Shanghai Jiaotong University told Xinhua news agency: "We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations, which may harm the university's reputation." "The report of the New York Times was based simply on an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Given the highly developed network technology today, such a report is neither objective or balanced." Li Zixiang, party chief at the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong Province, also named in the report, said: "Investigation... found no trace the attacks originated from our school." Li denied a relationship between the school and the military and rejected links made in the report to a computer science class taught by a Ukrainian professor. "There is no Ukrainian teacher in the school and we have never employed any foreign staff," Li told Xinhua. "The report was unfounded. Please show the evidence." Lanxiang teaches vocational skills such as cooking, auto repair and hairdressing, while the computer science class offers only basic courses, Xinhua reported. The director of the school's general office Zhou Hui said 38 students had been recruited by the military since 2006 "for their talent in auto repair, cooking and electric welding". Following its January comments Google has continued filtering searches in line with Chinese law while trying to negotiate a compromise with officials. Google's co-founder Sergey Brin said this month he hoped the Internet powerhouse would find a way to operate in China without censoring web search results. "I'm optimistic," Brin said during an on-stage chat at the prestigious TED Conference in Long Beach, California, on February 12. "I want to find a way to really work within the Chinese system and drive more information. "A lot of people think I'm naive, and that may be true, but I wouldn't have started a search engine if I wasn't naive." Brin declined to place odds on the chances of Google working out a compromise that would allow unfettered online searches in China, saying only that while it wasn't likely to happen now it might "in a year or two". He defended Google's decision to launch a filtered google.cn search engine in China in 2006, saying the company's presence in that market "made a big difference but things started going downhill after the Olympics" there. "We intend to stop censoring," Brin said. "We don't want to run a service that is politically censored." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Reviews Summary for Ameritron AL-811 - eHam.net Posted: 20 Feb 2010 01:23 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. This is a follow up review after owning the AL-811 for about 10 months. You can see from my initial review that I liked the amp and was initially happy with it even with the initial QC problems I found in it. I still "like it", but I had a LOT of problems in the first 6 months. (I will list them below.) I will say that Ameritron's technical support seems good, at least in the two cases I contacted them via their email system. Responses were 2nd day at the latest. After the TR relay failed, I sent it back to the factory for repair and the turn around time was reasonable. I did find it literally impossible to get through to them on the phone, which is the main reason I ended up with email exchanges via their "trouble ticket" system. Failures experienced:
1.) One of the 811A's failed by going gasseous. This tube short blew the meter protection diode (as it was designed to do) to protect the meters. 2.) I could not get the amplifier to load properly on the low end of 80 Meters; would not load a 50 ohm load! (low end of the CW band). Ameritron tech suggested I needed more capacitance in the load capacitor, so I added a cap. It still did not load. (Tubes got too hot/excessive plate glow). After further checking I concluded that possibly the 80 M tap on the tank coil was in the wrong place. A call to Ameritron confirmed that it WAS tapped wrong. I moved the coil tap and it was better, but still not where it should be. Apparently more C is still needed. Mis-tapping a tank coil is a BAD manufacturing Quality Control error. 3.) About 2 weeks after sorting out 1. and 2. above the Transmit/Receive relay failed and stuck in "transmit"; no signals were passed through the unit. This relay is mounted on a PC board and kind of "buried". Since (fortunately) the unit was still under warranty, I was not about to do the disassembly necessary to get the PC board loose and fix the relay. I boxed up the amp and sent it to Ameritron. They repaired the T/R relay and so far it has worked properly. Note the initial QC problems I found in my first review. BOTTOMLINE: I LIKE the amp; when it is working correctly it is pleasant and easy to operate and the 300 watts (CW) or 500+ SSB makes a surprising improvement in signal/success levels. At leat in my case, cold reality is that this unit has been seriously UNreliable. I am strongly hoping the "infant mortality" failures are now past and I can enjoy it long term. Any further failures and I would conclude it is not a good product; I have a lot of time invested in trouble shooting/repairing and shipping the amp. I would not want to continue doing this. FYI: Make no mistake! This is a 300 W (output) amplifier on CW. That is what 811A's are rated for with only 65 W of plate dissipation and the amp running about 60 to 65% efficiency. You can easily see that the plates glow "too much" if you start exceeding 300 W output on CW by very much. Above the 300 W level on CW you are begging for short tube life or catastrophic failure of the tubes. This is NOT a design problem or short coming of Ameritron... it is just normal spec's for 811A's. If you run RTTY or data I would HIGHLY recommend you stick with the CCS ratings on the 811A which are even lower. The amp will easily exceed these spec's but you are kidding yourself about tube life/reliability if you do. In SSB service which is about a 25% duty cycle, thing should run "forever" at 500 PEP output.
Based on the experiences I have had so far, even though I "like" the AL-811 I have to be objective 73, K0ZN
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| A sign of California's dysfunction - San Francisco Chronicle Posted: 20 Feb 2010 12:55 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. This "direct democracy" process was a product of Gov. Hiram Johnson's progressive reforms more than a century ago. The initiative was intended to counterbalance special-interest influence, particularly Southern Pacific Railroad's. Today, it is a tool of special interests. Just look at the measures on the June ballot. Neither of the statewide initiatives exactly amounts to a populist uprising - unless you believe that millions of Californians suddenly woke up one morning and decided that PG&E should be shielded from municipal takeovers, or the state's auto insurance laws needed to be loosened so that Mercury Insurance could be more competitive in the field. So what happened to the initiative that could have led to reform of the initiative process? It stalled for lack of money - and signatures.
Not surprisingly, the petition-gathering industry showed zero interest in helping the drive for a constitutional convention in which citizens would consider a wide range of reforms in the way state government is financed and structured. A revision of the initiative process is high on the list of most reform advocates. "As a business, I oppose it," Fred Kimball, owner of one of the state's leading signature-gathering firms, told the Economist. He acknowledged that he warned the independent operators who supervise the petition gatherers that he would blacklist them if they worked for the measure, the Economist reported. Contacted by phone last week, Kimball denied that he had threatened to blacklist anyone - but declined to answer further questions. "Regardless of whether they're on the street or not on the street, my attorney advises me not to comment on the constitutional convention," he said. Repair California, the group that promoted the constitutional convention, claimed to have abundant evidence of intimidation against the network of paid and volunteer petition gatherers it had to patch together. Workers had to be brought in from Arizona and Oregon "at great expense to us," said John Grubb, a spokesman for Repair California. As soon as they hit the streets and shopping centers, the constitutional convention crews encountered verbal abuse and, in some cases, were ordered by operators who worked with the established firms to trash the signatures they collected. "Most of the people who are working on our campaign have been told they will never work in the business again," Grubb said in an interview shortly before Repair California pulled the plug on its drive for a constitutional convention. Repair California referred me to three of its gatherers who had experienced such trouble. Two did not respond to phone messages. A third, one of Repair California's main organizers in Southern California, said the experience was too unsettling to recount. "I've made the decision to get out of the business completely," he said. The established firms are not going anywhere. Signature gathering will remain a lucrative enterprise as long as special interests can so easily exploit the initiative process to try to get their way without the scrutiny and compromise of the legislative process. Some of the signature firms complain privately that they are being made the scapegoats for Repair California's real problem: lack of money. But that, too, relates to the distortion in our democracy. Who spends the big money in California politics? The special interests who manage to manipulate the current system just fine. The last thing they want is reform. Good idea gone awryHere are the biggest problems with California's century-old initiative process - some of which could have been addressed at a constitutional convention: Qualification requirements -- It's nearly impossible to meet the signature threshold within the 150-day time line with volunteers alone. But "if you have the $1.5 million, you're on the ballot," said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. Expense -- The amount of money being spent for and against initiatives is exploding - $330 million in the 2006 general election alone - as special interests dominate the process. Confusion -- The text of measures tends to be long, complex or even deceptive. Opponents often cook up counterinitiatives as a tactic to confuse voters. Errors -- Once it's printed, it's printed, even if errors are discovered that undermine the authors' intent. Outcome -- Legislators are severely constrained from making even minor amendments to an initiative. Undoing one requires a second trip to the ballot.
From a Chronicle editorial, July 27, 2008 John Diaz is The Chronicle's editorial page editor. You can e-mail him at jdiaz@sfchronicle.com. This article appeared on page E - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Netbooking for a week: Part 1 - neowin.net Posted: 20 Feb 2010 01:16 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. There is one thing all computer users dread: something needing repair. This problem is especially bad when your main computer is a laptop: if something goes wrong with the hardware, you've got no choice but to send it in for service. Welcome to my situation, Neowinians. I know you've been here before, and I hope you can sympathize. So, here's the story. Some time last week, I brought my laptop home from school, opened it up, and noticed that despite being in a dimly lit area, the keyboard didn't light up. I didn't think too much of it at the time, and just figured it was a temporary problem. Later on, I required bluetooth. All of my bluetooth gadgets should automatically pair wit my laptop when it's within range, but my keyboard and mouse wouldn't do anything. After a combination of restarts, clearing of pram and smc's, and hardware tests, it was determined that my laptop would be going in for repair. So, all I had left was a netbook. Over the next week, that's all I will have. The netbook's a Gateway with a 250GB hard drive, 3GB of RAM, and a 1.4GHz Core 2 Solo. For a netbook, it's pretty powerful, but coming from a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, it's quite the change. But the real challenge this week will be getting things done, and that's what I really plan on documenting here: living in the cloud for a week. Most of my data is either on MobileMe, synced with Google for bookmarks, or hosted on Google Docs. I don't want to leave a trace on this computer; it doesn't belong to me, and in a week I need everything to go back to my real computer without any problems. Things I'll be doing are pretty simple: university and scholarship applications, a few school assignments, and light web browsing. Needless to say, I won't be developing on Neowin without all of my usual development software, so I'll really be living much like a regular joe would. It'll be a huge change in my habits, and an interesting experiment: can a geek live on a netbook? Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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