Following appeared today on the English website of the Party’s mouthpiece newspaper, People’s Daily:
Better not to piss in diaper in space, says China’s first spaceman
“Better not to piss in diaper,” said China’s first man in space, “Baby doesn’t like it, neither does an adult.”
Senior Colonel Yang Liwei of the Chinese astronaut brigade told a curious audience who questioned Yang about his experience in the country’s first space mission, Shenzhou-5, in October 2003.
So far, Yang and other two Chinese astronauts who flied the second space mission in October 2005, had never pissed in a diaper, though they all wore it at the time. There was a toilet in the spaceship, but it could not be used before the spaceship entered the orbit.
“Astronaut does a very hard job, but it is also a job that makes us feel very proud,” said Yang, at a seminar of the current 36th Committee on Space Research Scientific Assembly on Wednesday.
Full text of the article is here. The rest is just propaganda, although not without its amusements (To wit: “When the spaceship entered the outerspace, I saw my beautiful homeland,” he said to recall his first space mission, “I was shocked by the view”).
Much hype and media coverage right now surrounding the first ever Beijing-Lhasa train journey, which set out from Beijing yesterday. But the best story has so far nabbed only a sentence in Alexa Olesen’s story on the voyage for AP:
On Friday, three protesters from the United States, Canada and Britain were detained after unfurling a banner at Beijing’s main train station reading, “China’s Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy.”
Never mind that the train left from a different station. According to a fellow journalist I talked to yesterday, the sign they displayed was in English, not Chinese. They apparently climbed to the top of the station to display it, but no one noticed them because they didn’t say anything. Just stood there silently. And when the calvary arrived—a single policeman, according to my source—they submitted with equal aplomb, quietly rolling up the banner and walking obediently behind the cop to be interrogated.
Real protests have been going on elsewhere, to which the government has responded predictably:
The official Xinhua News Agency lashed out at critics, calling them hypocrites who want Tibet to remain undeveloped and a “stereotyped cultural specimen for them to enjoy.”
Yet one detects just the slightest enjoyment of Tibet as a “stereotyped cultural specimen” in effusive coverage of the trip from the Chinese press. Take the the Beijing News (新京报). The once-rebellious but lately compliant paper led this morning with a front page photo of a 54-year-old Tibetan woman named Qiangba Dama (Chinese transliteration) riding the train in a full complement of traditional garb, smiling beatifically as she eats from a boxed lunch, so so happy to be on her “first ever” train ride!
For those who want to see for themselves what a happy minority are the Tibetans, Duncan Peattie has just produced a fine English translation of the train timetable with prices for major destinations. The less user-friendly Chinese original is here.
Rice Cracker managed to get itself blocked by the Great Firewall after only its first breath outside the womb. Not sure why or how, but the problem’s been fixed with a move to a new IP address.
While it probably doesn’t clear up the Rice Cracker story, some good firewall-related news out of England: Researchers at Cambridge have reportedly discovered how China accomplishes automatic blocking of web pages that contain counterrevolutionary keywords. Andrew Lih, a new media researcher at the University of Hong Kong, explains it in lay terms:
…the simple explanation is that the GFW sends a “TCP reset” packet to both the web server supplying the suspicious page and to the client (ie. your computer) loading it. It’s the equivalent of an “emergency stop” packet usually reserved for situations of bad connectivity so that both sides know to disconnect abruptly.
Lih goes onto to marvel at the system’s simplicity:
GFW operators could use off-the shelf Cisco (or whatever) routers with no modified firmware whatsoever, and just have a set of machines sit on the side detecting keywords, and sending out “TCP resets.” Simple, effective, and with a low impact for network engineering.
This raises the interesting possiblity that Cisco’s claims it hasn’t actively colluded with the CCP in choking off Chinese people’s information supply might actually true. Or more true, at any rate. [Although it doesn't get them off the hook for reaping profits out of the whole odious operation.]
More importantly, the use of TCP reset packets means that banned information gets through into China, all the way to the front porch of your browser, before your computer slams the door in its face. The solution, at least in theory, is as simple as the problem: tell your computer to be more hospitable (i.e., ignore TCP reset orders). Lih points out a catch: Both Web servers and client must be programmed to do this, so builders of major operating systems would have to get on board. Mabye unlikely, but still, score one against bad guys.
The reasearchers–Richard Clayton, Steven Murdoch and Robert Watson–go into more detail on their own blog (with a downloadable PDF of their original report).