Al-Jazeera has become the most recent high-profile hacking victim, after a group of pro-Assad Syrian hackers breached the site’s security on Tuesday. The hacker collective, known only as “al-Rashedon”, defaced the site’s front page in response to the organization’s “positions against the Syrian people and government.” Al-Jazeera was one of the first organizations to begin covering the events of the Syrian uprising, which have become increasingly sectarian in nature, and is based in the majority-Sunni nation of Qatar. (Photo via Mattthew Keys)source
“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the conditions of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls.”
it’s only day 2 but i am learning much on to novi sad tomorrow, then to bosnia, croatia and slovenia so many thoughts so far on tito, non-violent struggle, orthodox christianity, nationalism, having a cause vs living in fear, ah and it’s so good being with a huge clump of princeton people again - makes for conversational gold at any given moment. superlikee
“NAKED GUY IS NOT OUR PARTY CHIEF: LOCAL AUTHORITY” was the headline in the Global Times after the Communist Party committee in Lujiang county declared a case of mistaken identity in response to the suggestion that a bespectacled participant bears an extraordinary resemblance to Wang Minsheng, the local Party secretary…
At bottom, the sex party is vexing for the Party because it highlights the gap between the artifice of official solemnity and the unadorned reality beneath, a gap that has become more pronounced in recent years as the Web eats away at the monopoly on authority.
”
—
evan osnos does a great summary & commentary on the “lujiang indecent photos incident”
- great points esp on local vs central government and censorship - also his final hit at the US:
So, what’s the future? After all, we are the mouse. Whatever the future is, we should fight against the mouse. There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats… SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP and ITU. And also, like Facebook and Google, they claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see them dating the cats. So my conclusion is very simple. We Chinese fight for our freedom, you just watch your bad cats. Don’t let them hook [up] with the Chinese cats. Only in this, in the future, we will achieve the dreams of the mouse: that we can tweet anytime, anywhere, without fear.
“Of the three hundred domestic-terrorism cases studied, about a quarter arose from anti-government extremists, white supremacists, or terrorists animated by bias against another religion. And all of the most frightening cases—involving chemical, biological, and radiological materials—arose from right-wing extremists or anarchists. None arose from Islamist militancy.
—
Why do these statistics seem so poorly publicized? Is the media a symptom of this problem or a cause? Why, to choose only the most recent indicator, would the Times fail to place on the front page any enterprise story about Oak Creek Wednesday morning, only the second day after the shooter’s racist background became known? (The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times did put massacre stories on A-1.) It is not hard to imagine the floodtide of sidebar stories and the legions of reporters summoned off the campaign or home from vacation by now if Page had been a converted Muslim and the sanctuary he attacked were in a Christian church.”
— steve coll on domestic terrorism and (lack of?) coverage on wisconsin
sooo i’ve actually secretly been lusting after EVERYTHING on this blog the entire summer. haaha. DC has been great but in a week and a day i will step off my plane, go immediately to 饒河街夜市 and make contact with an 蚵仔煎…! yessss
not to mention my family at last, of course :) final week let’s make it rock, then 亚洲 take me home <3
