This afternoon, in Denver, Colorado, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known in US political circles as the “stimulus bill”.
The bill provides new spending, tax cuts and aid to state and local governments all totaling almost $800 billion US dollars, making it the largest spending bill in that nation’s history. Designed to create jobs and provide a boost to a sagging economy, the bill focuses on green, renewable energy and investments in health care technology.
Of immediate interest to us, however, is the accompanying website, recovery.gov, which — you guessed it — is using Drupal!
Drupal is no stranger to the political arena, and has been used for many campaign and government sites before. Recovery.gov, though, is a definite coup for Drupal — there are not many Drupal sites that have their own post on Whitehouse.gov. Or on the Huffington Post. Or is featured on CNN all day long. Or has its own YouTube promo by the US President. Unbelievable!
http://buytaert.net/obama-using-drupal
If you are going to build a website in china ( host inside china mainland network ), two kind of licences you may need to apply before you start to run your site.
1- for non-profit from internet website, such as personal blog, company site, forum etc, you need to apply (or called check in with Gov monitor ) a licence to make sure your website under all Gov law. All in one word, no sensitive political topic, no horn things!!
2- for those websites which want to make money via internet, such as selling shared hosting, running IDC, providing information based on a member fee, you have to get permission first. There are many conditions, you need lots of money ( 1 million RMB ), employees, office, and have to prove you know how to operate online business ( lots of document work ).
China want more controls of internet, but it looks a impossible … So get a local guys for more information if you want to host in china, that will be easy.
Google, between 1430 and 1525 GMT, sites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: “Warning! This site may harm your computer.”
Why? Here is the answer
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“What happened? Very simply, human error,” Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company’s official blog.
Google receives regular updates to a list of malicious websites from StopBadware.org, which investigates consumer complaints.
“We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning,” Mayer explained.
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.”
Users who tried to access the site were blocked by Google, which directed them to StopBadware.org. The firm works with Google to determine which sites are dangerous.
“This led to a denial of service of our website as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information,” StopBadware.org said in a statement.
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A simply mistake but cause outage of internet, because google controls 70% of internet search market. Big news, happy news for Baidu ( which take 70% of chinese internet search market ) .
Okay, that’s a small mistake, but so many people found it.
Internet Usage Rises in China
BEIJING — The number of Internet users in China has reached 298 million, nearly equal to the population of the United States, according to official figures. Although only 23 percent of Chinese use the Web — compared with 73 percent in the United States and 22 percent worldwide — about 88 million people went online in China for the first time last year, a 42 percent increase over 2007, the official China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.
China surpassed the United States as the biggest user of the Internet last June.
In 2008, there was also a spike in mobile Web surfing, with 117.6 million users, a 113 percent increase over the previous year.
Internet use is restricted in China and the government regularly blocks Web sites and blog postings that it views as a threat to state security. Last week, officials announced a crackdown on 91 Web sites that it said featured lewd content. It also shut down Bullog, a popular blog aggregator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/asia/15beijing.html?ref=world
Published: January 14, 2009
Have to say “hosting in china is much more expensive than that is in us”. I just built a small website for a shenzhen company ( job hunter — willcan executive search ) last month. After job done, they asked me to move their website and email box to a new server.
I recommended EBLhost to them as I want to host their site on a cpanel host ( easy for me to maintain and backup ) . When I show eblhost ’s quote to them, they were suprised by the price
“Gee, so cheap!” me panic … They told me they host their site with http://www.net.cn/ the top one hosting and domain provider in china with a space 300M, ￥1150/year(plus mailbox). My god, a space with limited managed service can be sold in $150/year. But eblhost ’s standard package ( 1G space ) with cpanel licence only $40/year.
Can I raise the quote? …
Looks i have to learn more about china hosting market, i believe there is big space left for good overseas IDC or hosting company like hostgator etc