U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum on the 16th. In answering a question about Internet openness, Obama said that the freer the flow of information, the stronger society becomes, because that way citizens around the world can hold their governments accountable. [Obama] Well, I’d now like to call on my ambassador, Huntsman. A netizen has submitted a question through our embassy website. [Jon Huntsman] First, in a country with so many Internet users, with 60 million bloggers, do you know about the firewall? Second, should we be free to use TWITTER?

I’m behind the times again, aren’t I? If you’re even more behind than me, come on in and take a look—makes me feel a bit better about myself.

Talk about rotten luck! Today while making a payment, I discovered that the familiar [E-Payment Card Payment] button had vanished into thin air….. I went to the ABC (Agricultural Bank of China) official site and found that just 16 hours earlier, ABC had suspended most e-payment card payment services:

(Late May update: Firefox screen word capture is now supported!) On May 8, Kingsoft and Google, the world’s largest search engine company, jointly held a press conference at the Avic Hotel in Beijing to announce the official release of their co-branded product, Google PowerWord. http://cp.iciba.com/news/2008/05/08/120894.shtml Downloads are already available online. http://download.iciba.com/pwl/powerwordlite.25269.3008.exe PowerWord’s size has shrunk from over 300 MB to just over 20 MB! This makes downloads easier for users while saving disk space. PowerWord users will also get timely access to a rich vocabulary sourced from the internet. Google PowerWord has three major features: Free Internet-based Innovative machine translation technology