At first, it sounds like a good idea. Nanchang, the capital of China's eastern Jiangxi province, is requiring Internet cafe operators to replace pirated server software with legal copies of Red Flag Linux or Windows Server. What's not to like? It's estimated that China has an 82% software piracy rate. Getting businesses to go legal with a native Chinese Linux sounded like a win to me.

I learned two things today: 1. People are still having LAN parties, even the Internet-disconnected kind. 2. They're doing it on Linux.

The hegemony that Internet Explorer once upon a time had is... over. Right now, other browsers are fighting amongst each other, and it's all about how much of IE's share they are getting. The war is over: Internet Explorer lost. Everybody else won. So, what kind of scenario has the IT world painfully missed?

Google announced that it was delaying the launch of two Android phones in China due to a dispute with the Chinese government over censorship issues. The delay will affect Google-endorsed Android phones from Samsung and Motorola that were to be carried by China Unicom, says an eWEEK story.

Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are "wrong by default". It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's "birth tribe" and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which linux distribution they love.

"The Swedish legal system - running errands of Hollywood and the recording industries - have decided that helping people to share their digital data across the Internet is illegal. They might be guilty in the eyes of a corrupt court of law and in the corporate press, but in my book they are fine people, caring and sharing.

"On September 25, 2009, the Great Firewall of China blocked the public list of relays and directory authorities by simple IP address blocks. Currently, about 80% of the public relays are blocked by IP address and TCP port combination. Tor users are still connecting to the network through bridges.

"As part of my campaign for social change, I have slowly been getting involved in different types of activism in the recent past, Free Software being one of them. Being a technologist, I have been trying to use Internet as the medium to promote the causes that I have been standing for.

SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. A screen copy of the command “tracert www.sourceforge.net” shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.