ဒီေန႔ Apple က၄င္းရဲ႕ iPhone ကို ဂ်ပန္နဲ႔ အျခား ၂၂ ႏိုင္ငံမွာစတင္ေရာင္းခ်ေနပါျပီ။ ဂ်ပန္က iPhone အခ်စ္ေတာ္ ၈၀၀ ေက်ာ္ကေတာ့ ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ကတည္းက ညအိပ္ေစာင့္ျပီးတန္းစီ ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ဂ်ပန္မွာကအျခားႏုိင္ငံေတြထက္ (စံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ကြာဟမွုေၾကာင့္) ၅ နာရီေစာျပီး ေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့တယ္ လို႔ဆိုပါတယ္။ နယူးဇီလန္၊ ၾသစေၾတးလွ် နဲ႔ ေဟာင္ေကာင္တို႔မွာလည္း တစ္ျပိဳင္တည္းေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံမွာေတာ့ အေမရိကန္စံေတာ္ခ်ိန္ မနက္ ၈ နာရီမွာစတင္ေရာင္းခ်ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ဆိုပါတယ္။
For a search engine company, Google has today made a very strange move by starting up a Sims-type virtual reality website where you can set up your own avatars and virtual reality environments. No prizes for guessing what I’ve been doing for the past several hours - yep, pushing a bed up two flights of stairs.
I was initially dismissive of Lively and at Google’s attempts to imitate “The Sims” and “Second Life”, but in the end curiosity got the better of me (as it always does). After trying it out, I have to admit it does have potential and a certain fun factor, but I am still scratching my head wondering why Google of all companies chose to make this. What does Lively have to do with search?
You have to hand it to Chinese bloggers - they are determined to get the truth out, no matter what. OK, they are not facing the death sentence like their fellow counterparts in Iran but nevertheless, they still face prison for their opinions. At the very least, their work will be deleted by faceless humorless bureaucrats.
So the bloggers are trying out new methods to evade Chinese government censors - the latest one is they are using tools and software to write backwards. Or write vertically instead of horizontally. This is apparently confusing the censors because they now cannot automatically track “objectionable phrases” (aw my heart bleeds for them). One such “text flipping” tool is here. Obviously the government will eventually find a way around it but the resourceful bloggers will probably have found another solution by then and will have moved on.
It’s easy for us in the democratic west to take our freedom of speech for granted. We don’t think twice about giving an opinion online and then hitting the “publish” button. We don’t have to fear the knock on the door or awkward questions being asked about our loyalty to the state. We take our freedoms for granted because they’ve always been there. But our fellow bloggers in China and Iran are not so lucky. They have to look over their shoulder all the time and resort to text flipping tools, codes and guarded language to protect themselves and their family, while at the same time trying to break through all the officially sanctioned propaganda and get the real truth out to the world.
These are the unsung unrecognised heroes of the world. It’s time we should recognise them more. Plus if Iran passes that idiotic and insane death sentence law, we should all as an international community collectively do something, short of invading the country.
