huetsch

The A1530 actually falls back to 3G and then 2G depending on the part of Beijing. I don't really understand how that works, but the 3G is also much better than the 2G, which is pretty awful.

One very painful thing about the A1530 is that the 4G connection gets broken (and thrown back to 3G or 2G, depending on location) whenever a call comes in or you make a call out. You then have to manually reconnect to the 4G network. I don't really understand why this is. Maybe the voice data is being sent over the 4G network during a call or something? The China Mobile people told me explicitly about the problem. 4G has only been available since the 18th, so haven't had that much time with it, but coverage seems decent.

iPhone 5s's bought in Hong Kong (model A1530) work on the LTE network. The iPhone 5s's previously sold in the mainland, however, will not, as they lack the right chipset for receiving a TD-LTE signal. I'm guessing China Mobile will just be selling the A1530s.

McDonalds and KFC do deliver in major Chinese cities. The biggest difference is the cost structure. Chinese cities have a very high population density, which makes delivery much easier. They also have relatively cheap labor (although this is changing). And people here ride electric scooters, which are much faster at navigating big cities than cars. McDonalds in Beijing charges a little less than $1.50 USD for delivery.

I've been skeptical of Google-branded hardware ever since my Nexus One stopped working due to a non-functioning power button. I find myself associating "beta" with their stuff - that's fine for software but not so much for physical goods.

Did you hesitate before sending this out due to the fear that such a letter might itself push the market closer towards a vicious cycle?

This series has been some of highest quality material I have seen in a long time regarding entrepreneurship. PG's writings are pretty good too.

Anyone have recommendations for other writings covering similar topic material and with a similar signal-to-noise ratio?

This isn't all true: The US used mills (1/1000 of a dollar) up until the 1960's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)

Thanks so much for this. This will be incredibly useful for me (behind the GFW, which gets moody about Wikipedia pretty often). Could this easily periodically update itself to grab fresh versions of articles? I think that would be a great feature, especially if you could do it without having to pull down the whole database each time you wanted to update, instead just updating on an article-by-article basis.

Would an outgoing ssh request be hard to discriminate from an outgoing openvpn request or an outgoing https request? I don't know enough about how the protocols work to understand.

So then you're theorizing that this is a whitelist approach to VPN connections. Again, this would seem really heavy-handed, since it would block the vast majority of VPN traffic. It's certainly not the case for me currently (I'm in China), but it's possible that other cities are taking that approach.

How could such a technique actually give the firewall information pertinent to whether or not the offending site was illegal? It's like a MITM attack where they intercept the outgoing ssh connection, send seemingly arbitrary data to the ssh server on the non-Chinese internet, and then sometimes disrupt the ssh connection or allow it pass through.

What information could the response to garbage possibly convey beyond: "how does this server respond to garbage"?

How would that even help with fingerprinting, which is his suggestion? Would there even be much variation in how different sshds would respond to that? So what could you do with that information? 30% of known Tor servers use sshd version X, so let's ratchet up the frequency of RST packets for connections to servers of version X? Seems like a long shot: that would be both a sophisticated attack and have pretty hamfisted results. And how could this information be used to find open relays? Just guilt by sshd version again, since statistically machines with open relays have a tendency to run version X of sshd?

I'd like to hear a security person come and talk instead of my wild speculations.

It sounds like you were trying to do click arbitrage. Is that forbidden by Google / FB ads? I don't really understand why it would be, but I guess I could understand that being a more reasonable cause for a ban than the fact that you were advertising a chicken coop.

As other commentators have pointed out, much like the actual Great Wall of China, the Great Firewall of China is not a singular entity but rather a patchwork of potentially overlapping walls whose policies vary by ISP, city, and province.

Inner Mongolia has been having uprisings recently, it does not surprise me that reddit would be blocked there (actually, I believe most internet was severed from Inner Mongolia a month or two ago).

I love the 3.1 rcs but using 3rd party css files that reference images are kind of painful to deal with in conjunction with the asset pipeline. I find myself making awkward directory structures in the vendor directory to avoid making modifications to 3rd party css libraries (like jQuery UI). I'm hoping a lot of this will go away when those things are packed into gems that I can just put in my Gemfile and forget. I'm sure Compass and Blueprint will get to that point pretty quickly but I'm not sure that something custom-generated like by jQuery UI ThemeRoller will ever be smooth to set up.

Until recently, carriers were apparently able to avoid missile hits simply by moving at full speed - I guess it's still not trivial for a ballistic missile to hit fast, mobile targets (the US missile defense program probably faces similar engineering issues). The Chinese recently shifted the balance of power in the Pacific theater by developing a missile theoretically capable of taking down US carriers from afar. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e69c85a-1264-11e0-b4c8-00144feabd...

Regarding whether or not this is a practical asset, so much of military power is "soft" (you might say political, but I think that's an oversimplification), I don't think you could fairly call this an impractical asset. China has traditionally focused on maintaining power in there sphere of the world. As others have noted, the power of an aircraft carrier is that it allows you to project power globally. They could send the aircraft carrier to a lot of places that would make other countries unhappy, but not unhappy enough to actually start a military attack over it - thus the carrier would have been an effective tool.

From a more political perspective, there's been a regional arms buildup. India already has a carrier and is building more, and India and some other Asian countries have been buying up submarines.

This is my first exposure to Backbone (aside from hearing DHH recommend it at RailsConf). It looks like it helps formalize a lot of what I'd already come to realize was a good way of doing large JS apps - MVC design.

However, I've found one of the most painful things I have to do when doing a lot of JS is dealing with HTML as a string. Escaping quotes is a pain in the neck, syntax highlighting is broken in my editors. The HTML here is pretty simple so it's not problematic, but sometimes you need to render larger, more complex blocks of HTML. HTML is just not as easy to work with in JS when you compare it to the templating systems provided by Rails, Pylons, etc. Does Backbone have anything to help this?

What are some potentially practical uses of WebSockets?

I hacked on Pidgin a while back and people talked about the Skype plugin a bit. From my understanding, the issue is that the Skype code is very obfuscated and reverse engineering the protocol would be very difficult - apparently, no one with the ability and time to do that has stepped up thus far.

This article from May of last year claiming a 31.4% m/m plunge is interesting:

http://www.economicsjunkie.com/beijing-property-prices-plung...

It's possible that there are significant seasonal fluctuations in the market.

That said, the three-month average is still significantly negative: "Beijing property prices rose 0.4% m/m in February, 0.8% in January and 0.2% in December". And word on the street is that it's getting a lot harder to sell property.

I'd be interested to see a graph with average housing price data stretching back for the past few years.

That 3 million figure is operating under the assumption that the hacker already has good market research (he is building something people want) and distribution (he is able to get it to those people). Those are the costs you are paying for when you work for a large company.

If the hacker does not have those two things, it is quite likely that he will generate significantly less than 3 million dollars of value.