Malaysia Now

Here I am in Chinatown of Penang, Malaysia. The weather is hot and humid．Even though the fans are swirling at their top rates, the room is still full of sweaty people sitting uneasily in front of computers getting here and away.

It is such a lovely trip that I found most of the food on street are affordable compared to their counterparts in Melbourne. Today seems to be an Indian food day for us.

Now we realized how common Chinese is used in Malaysia. As the approaching of Chinese new year, Penang is full of sales and new year musics which made me reluctant to realize that I have to go back to Melbourne for Chinese new year. Anyway this would be my first time of having new year without family so could be novel or painful.

Tomorrow a friend will accompany us to the sites around Penang. I will take a lot of photes of course and upload them to facebook or/and flickr.

Applause to Google

The sensational news in China yesterday was baidu.com, the biggest search engine of that country, was hacked by an organization claimed themselves as Iranians. Comments and observers, however, doubted this claims based on the fact that there were no major conflicts between the two countries.

While the only time I used baidu.com was when I wanted to input some Chinese characters on a computer without Chinese input programs. What I did was input pinyin into baidu and copy the Chinese characters it prompted. However baidu.com still became the largest search engine of China, partly because the illegal piracy mp3 links it provides and other secret ingredients appealing to the massive Chinese netizens. Though I don't use baidu.com that much, I still feel sorry for its being hacked. On this particular occasion, it seems to be innocent based on the information I am concerned.

The sensational news in China today is, Google, after struggling from censorship scandals and high pressures from Chinese authority, is thinking about to quit Chinese market. (A New Approach to China, Official Google Blog)

According to the author David Drummond, a high level official in Google, the company is 'no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn'. Besides, he suggests that Google has been investigating several cases of Gmail accounts being hacked, most of which belong to Chinese human right activists.

Someday, Google will return in glory.