And if they haven't, everything's written in PHP. During my freshmen year, I comped the web team (by team, I mean all of two, sometimes three people) with the Harvard International Review and redesigned most of the front page. They've redesigned it several times since, the only remaining elements of my work being the globe in the logo and the color scheme -- not that I blame them -- I had no clue what I was doing at the time. I ended up quitting (neglecting) the HIR due to lack of time and interest, but before that, I managed to pick up a bit of PHP and SQL while working with the site -- meaning tinkering with Wordpress plugins is pretty straightforward.

And so is editing the theme. I'm using a modified version of Ainslie Johnson's Chameleon theme. Let me know if this works out. I wanted to provide a disinctive "crazed squirrel" look for the site (as oposed to the ubiquitous "variations on the color blue" floating around out there) while keeping things mostly readable, but red can sometimes be a little hard on the eyes -- so let me know if you think I should change things around.

The only disadvantage of using Wordpress is that I'm no longer part of Google's happy little Blogger community. But I didn't have much invested in that, so no biggie. And given Blogger's lack of plugin support, I think it's the right choice. I mean, for all of Google's open-sourciness, the Blogger platform isn't nearly as open to tweaking as Wordpress.

I'll keep cross-posting at CampusTap for the Harvard link -- not that it's a great platform or anything, but it works.

Insofar as it means "If it works, it works" I'm with DeLong. Politics shouldn't get in the way of good policy -- good being something along the lines of "greatest good for the greatest number of people."

You can argue that "good policy" isn't useful on issues like abortion where there are "fundamental differences of opinion," but I think that's just asking the wrong question. The question isn't "Is abortion right or wrong?", it's "we disagree on whether abortion should be legal -- how can we resolve this?" Once you start thinking like that, you end up with a lot of "third ways" to a previously black-and-white issue. You can leave it up to the states. You can promote birth control to reduce the demands for abortion in the first place. You can improve the socio-economic conditions that cause certain people to use abortion as a means to solve that problem. And so forth. Eventually, you'll find something.

But what about those times when there really is no third way? Well, my hunch is that it's probably not that important anyway. And there are fewer of those than most people think. Go hop on essembly.com. Even with your worst "nemesis", you usually end up agreeing more than you would expect.

However, Atrios does raise some valid points, namely his second and third one that technocrats are also tained by ideology and sometimes, technocrats get things wrong, really wrong. We all know a few professors who get so hung up on a pet theory that they begin to treat said theory as an objective fact.

However, that's a critique of a small group of experts leading the country though, not of placing policy before politics. I do have a populist streak, but it's not because I think it's morally correct or anything like that. It's just that, ultimately, you get better policy when you have more minds working on it. The world is way too complex for a bunch of wisemen at the center to plan everything out. You need more brains to handle all that information.

For the computer geeks out there, it's a preference for "open-source" policy.

For those of you who remember Professor Unger before he vanished to run for president of Brazil, he was big on "experimentation" (often used it in conjunction with FDR and the New Deal). I guess I lean the same way. Let's play around with stuff and see what works. But let's also remember that this is a collective process, not a game of "follow the egghead".

How serious of a crime is theft in Hong Kong? Well, apparently it's worthy of big red A. Sticker located near some place that sells suits across the street from G2000 in Mong Kok.

I dunno, sounds like something that'd cause cancer.

In the Mong Kok MTR stop, Argyle Exit (D), there's a "report a (mosquito?) chicken and be pleasantly surprised" sign.

7-Eleven + Chicken = Self Reporting Station, Prevent a chicken left close? My translating ability needs work. Perhaps it's a reference to Bird Flu?

What makes this particularly interesting for me is how this information gathering mechanism relies only on the subconscious consent of the user. When most people use the web, odds are, they're only thinking about the explicit purpose of that usage. That is, I'm using Flickr to share some photos I took while hiking yesterday. I'm using my blog to keep my friends updated on the current dreary state of my life life. I'm using YouTube to share with folks some funny ass shit I filmed at my my best friend's birthday party. And so on.

What people don't consider is how much information the sum of all those interactions provide about a person's life. For example, as a user, most people don't think that when they use Flickr, they're announcing their brand preferences. They may simply be sharing a photo of a birthday party for instance. Yet in the background of that photo, I might notice an empty Coke bottle. And if, while watching your Flickr photostream long enough, I notice more instances of Coke than Pepsi, I could probably conclude that you prefer the former over the latter.

And while that single instance seems mostly harmless, there's a lot of data that can obtained this way. As you upload more photos and videos online, it's the equivalent of announcing your brand preferences to every marketer in the world, providing detailed information about where you were at a particular time, and even providing hints about how you feel towards certain people (e.g. by looking at the body language in all the photos you two are together).

For those of you who've seen Minority Report, remember how early on in the movie, Tom Cruise uses the image of a merry-go-round in one of the visions to figure out where a murder is going to take place? It's something like that.

And with that example, we need to worry not only about overzealous marketers but about the government as well. The NSA doesn't need to look at your e-mail if it can figure out almost as much from your publicly available blog, Flickr account, YouTube videos, bulletin board posts, facebook profile, online dating information, and so on.

But that's not really the point. The government could always figure out stuff like this whenever it really wanted to. Police officers have using these tricks ever since Sherlock Holmes was written.

What makes this different is that information is now publicly available to ... well ... anyone. What keeps them from taking advantage of that information at the moment is that it's a huge pain to sort through all of it. Yet as search technology advances, that barrier will become increasingly meaningless.

On another note, I recommend checking out John Battelle's Searchblog.

My concern isn't really unique to missile defense though, but rather, harks back to this idea of the US playing world cop. I don't necessarily oppose that -- provided it's done right. My fear is just that it's not going to be done right.

Feasibility aside, if we actually did get a missile defense up and running--and assuming we deployed it worldwide (e.g. in space) --wouldn't that make us responsible for the launch of every missile around the world?

If Israel launches a pre-emptive strike on Iran, and we could have stopped it, but we didn't, isn't that effectively condoning a missile strike against Iran? As I mentioned in the discussion. It's like playing God. You get blamed for everything no matter what you do.

The way around this, sort of, is to clearly define when you will act and what that act consists of. Using Thomas Barnett's terms, we create a "rule set" about the usage of our missile defense system. Ideally, we get people to buy into that rule set as well.

It's the difference between the world cop adhering to the rule of law (even if the law is mostly written by himself) and the world acting as a vigilante making things up as he goes along. Who would you rather trust?

One part of me believes we can do this -- that someone has to be the world cop and that we can do it. Sure, we'll fail a few times, but eventually we'll get it.

But in light of things like Iraq, I can't say I'm terribly optimistic.

What makes this particular proposal interesting however (and you can read more at Richard Clayton's (one of the researchers) blog, is that he's proposing a solution that makes it easy for the user. Rather than have the user look for a proxy server, he's asking that content providers (i.e. website servers) and operating system manufacturers (i.e. Microsoft) work together to "ignore" the Great Firewall of China, or more broadly, produce a standard that makes it more difficult to censor access to particular pieces of Internet content.

Ultimately, I think that's the key to breaking down censorship in China. When people say that economic progress and globalization will loosen up this authoritarian state, there are two general assumptions behind this. The first is that a growing middle class demands freedom, has access to information from outside the country, yada yada. The second is the state, in order to function within this new global system, has to conform to certain standards of that system (which we assume is relatively good).

The problem is that China could just as well force the system to adapt to it (or create its own systems) rather than the other way around. The key then is to make these standards so fundamental to the system and to China's own national interests that it's forced to adopt those standards (e.g. plenty of dogs don't want to take their medicine, but if you mix the medicine in with their food, they'll scarf it down with knowing it).

As far as Internet access in China is concerned, the goal then is to integrate standards and technology that makes it more difficult for the government to control that access into standard technology (i.e. an operating system). And Microsoft knows how to integrate stuff into Windows. We're not just talking about the Cambridge solution of ignoring RST packets but other solutions that work as well (i.e. finding encrypted proxy servers). If these solutions are tied fundamentally into standard technology, and that technology is tied fundamentally to something the government wants (i.e. economic progress), what's the PRC to do?

Ban Windows?

There are also a number of other Wordpress hosts such as Blogsome, but after opening up an account to play around with, their implementation of Wordpress doesn't seem to be up to par (no option to import existing posts for example).

Given that, I'm probably going to wait until I get back to the States to set up Wordpress. For now, Blogger'll do.

In the meantime however, I've already started adding embedded tags into these posts. You can't see them because I have the CSS hiding them, but if you look at the HTML source, you'll notice things like "[tag]Blogging in China[/tag]" at the bottom of the posts. This is the Ultimate Tag Warrior format for embedded tags and it'll allow me to easily transfer to Wordpress later on. Also, to handle extended posts in Blogger, I enclose the extended bit with <div class="fullpost"> ... </div> tags. In Wordpress, the delineation is to simply place <!--more--> at the point you want to break your post into summary / full post sections. Given that adding it in the html doesn't affect Blogger, I've gone ahead and done that.

The nice thing about this is that it's fairly easy to use a search and replace to change all of these if I need them in a different format. As an added bonus, since I'm using Ecto to write up these posts on my PowerBook, I can easily export my posts to an RSS / Atom format to upload into Wordpress later on.

In order to get around the Great Firewall, I first tried using a program like Ecto. Ecto allows me to edit my blog offline and then sync changes through a XML-RPC connection. For some reason, although I can't edit my page via the normal HTML feeds, XML-RPC works just fine.

However, Ecto only allows me to edit posts, not edit all the other options on my page (e.g. layout and design). So the next thing I did was to try using a proxy server. The idea behind a proxy server is that instead of establishing a direct connection between my computer and a particular website, all data is routed through an intermediate first. Therefore, while the Great Firewall may block a particular website, it doesn't necessarily block a particular proxy. This allows me to access that website via the proxy. And finding a proxy isn't all that hard. All you have to do is Google "public proxy".

The problem is that while proxy servers can hide the identities of the users on both ends, they don't necessarily encrypt the data passing through. Therefore, the Great Firewall is still capable of scanning the content of data passing through the proxies, and, if it doesn't like what it sees, will block off access to said proxy.

For me, that meant an attempt to update my Blogspot template also meant me changing my proxy every few minutes. Use proxy. Connection dies. Find new proxy. Rinse. Repeat. And given how slow some of these proxies are (some of them are located in countries pretty far away), it became a pretty frustrating experience. Add in the fact that several proxies have their own "protection" software that keeps you from accessing certain sites (my guess if that some of these "public" proxies are really servers used by corporations that don't want their employees wasting hours on Blogspot), and it gets real tired real quick.

After about an hour of this, I finally got a decent connection and was able to make the minor template changes I wanted. But when I went back to look at my proxy settings, I had forgotten to check off proxy access and was actually using a direct connection to edit my Blogspot page. Maybe I made a mistake earlier about not being able to login via blogger, but my guess is that the Great Firewall suddenly decided to ease off what it was doing to make my life so difficult. In any case, I was left in the strange situation where I was able to edit my page via blogger but not able to actually see it (without a proxy) via Blogspot.

And I suppose that's the most annoying thing about the Great Firewall. Maybe it's just me and my limited knowledge of how the Internet works, but the firewall seems ridiculously inconsistent. Why block Blogspot.com but not Blogger.com? Why shut down a particular proxy but not shut down a list of proxies? Why am I even allowed to use a proxy service like Anonymous in the first place? Maybe it's intentional. The point of the Great Firewall isn't necessarily completely block access, just to annoy the crap out of the average user.