UPDATE II: After asking for comments, I’ve decided that my inclination to post workarounds is the right idea. Here’s the link I temporarily removed: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/zh/wiki.

Commenter htchien
points out that Chinese users can now reach the Chinese-language Wikipedia through the site’s SSL-encrypted gateway.

UPDATE: At Ted Chien’s request, I have (at least temporarily) removed the secure URL from this post. His concern is that posting the URL might tip off Chinese authorities and cause that portal to be blocked as well. I have posted a call for comments as to whether bloggers should post workarounds to online censorship. -Graham

The standard site, zh.wikipedia.org, is still blocked. (The URL I thought led there, cn.wikipedia.org, sent me to Yahoo China last time I tried.) But for now at least, the secure URL is functional and could open the big wiki to more participation from China.

Pac-Attack (1993, Super Nintendo, 800
Wii points)–See Pac-Man like you’ve never seen him before in Pac-Attack. One of the first games to remove Pac-Man from his white-dot labyrinth dwelling, Pac-Attack had gamers using the hero in a puzzle game in which you must gobble up ghosts to progress.

Riot Zone (1992, TurboGrafx 16, 800 Wii points)–What seems like it was torn out of a page from the Double Dragon series, Riot Zone has you beating up goons from an evil crime organization. Choose to play as either Tony or Hawk (I’m not joking) in this side-scrolling fighting game.

The glasses are capable of reading MP3 and WMA audio formats, and playing video formats MP4, MPG, AVI, and ASF. That means you can listen to music or watch movies (at a squinty 432×240 resolution) on the specs themselves. This is no Cinemax, to be sure, but the glasses could be a fun diversion on a train or park bench if you don’t mind the bulk. Note to wearers: please lay off the films while crossing the street.

Audio files, videos, and photos are stored in a miniSD card loaded on the flank of the glasses, which come with a remote control, AC adapter, earphones, USB cable for charging the device and transferring files, and carrying case. They also come with four equalizer presets and a lithium ion battery. Oh, and they go for $364–we know, we know, for that amount you could get an iPhone.

The Thanko All In One Sunglasses out of Japan look more 3D clunky than Prada sleek. But what else would you expect from a pair of shades that incorporate a media player?

(Via Newlaunches.com)

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the company’s efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.

(Credit:
Google)

“Google Translation Center is the fast and easy way to get translations for your content. Simply upload your document, choose your translation language, and choose from our registry of professional and volunteer translators. If a translator accepts, you should receive your translated content back as soon as it’s ready,” the site said.

Google prefers to rely on computer algorithms rather than humans, so at first glance the Google Translation Center looks somewhat anomalous, even though Google is only playing a middleman role. But it’s possible that the human translators might be gradually improving Google’s machine translation technology as they work, in effect helping to put themselves out of a job.

That’s because Google’s translation system uses a statistical model that works better the more it can compare the same text in two different languages. And Google evidently will track translation work in its database; according to the center’s introduction for translators, “our translation search feature matches your current translation with previous translations, so you don’t have to translate over and over again.”

Google is fervently interested in better machine translation. With it, it can use its search technology to link people with data around the world, regardless of language barriers, making its search engine significantly more powerful.

Wanted: More Rosetta Stones
Google’s translation technique essentially relies on having as many Rosetta Stone-like documents as possible. The more documents it has in two languages, the better able it is to match words and phrases from one language to another, according to a recent speech by Jeff Dean, a Google fellow who works Google’s computing infrastructure.

“By computing statistics over all words and phrases, you…get a model of word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase replacements,” Dean said. Machine translation often produces awkward results today, but “the impact of having a really large language model makes the sentences flow a lot more easily.”

The screenshot below, from Google, shows the online interface a Google translator apparently will see. It shows text in two languages, with the passage broken down into chunks of text. It also suggests a previous translation of one chunk, offering a “use suggestion” button to employ it. It’s not clear if the previous translation draws just on that individual translator’s work or a larger collection.

Google Translation Center offers tools to speed translation.

(Credit:
Google)

Based on the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy method for rating translation accuracy, Google scored first place in a 2005 evaluation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology evaluation.

Google was mum about the project. “We’re always looking at new ways of providing tools for users to connect with each other, share information, and improve access to information on the internet, but we don’t have any new details to share at this time,” the company said in a statement.

Paying the middleman
It’s a time-tested business to be the middleman who connects customers to those willing to pay for a product or service, but the Internet has taken the role to new heights by more easily enabling that process on a national and sometimes global scale. For example, Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, Serebra Connect, and Elance can help companies that need tasks done find people who can do them.

But the Google Translation Center seems to have a different approach. Translators get access to free Google tools, and it appears Google isn’t involved in any payment transactions, according to the site.

“Google Translation Center provides a venue for you to enter into and complete translation transactions. Except when you use Google Translation Center as provided in Section 4, Google is not involved in any transactions in Google Translation Center. Your interaction with any third party participant(s) or user(s) within Google Translation Center, including payment and delivery of goods and services…are solely between you and such third party participant(s) or user(s) and Google is not involved in such dealings,” according to the terms of service. Section 4, titled “Google Participation,” says just that “Google and/or its subsidiaries and affiliates may use Google Translation Center from time to time.”

So what’s in it for Google?
Of course, Google has a strong search-ad business that it uses to subsidize any number of efforts that may not be profitable for years, if indeed ever. After all, Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

But even if Google doesn’t charge a percentage, improving automated translation could be a powerful incentive as Google tries to keep its core product, the search engine, competitive.

Google’s translation technology is available through the Google Translate site, but the company also has technology called Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that builds translation into its search engine.

This Google screenshot shows the interface to the Google Translate Service.

(Credit:
Google)

Search increasingly is the gateway by which people discover what’s on the Internet, so building automated two-way translation into the process could open up the very parts of the Internet that today are available but effectively hidden by language barriers.

CLIR can translate a search query into a foreign tongue then translate the answer back into the search results. Clicking a link produces the translated version of that page.

For example, a search in Russian for Tony Blair’s biography will present an option, in Russian and presented at the bottom of the search results page, to search pages written in English. Clicking on a link then translates the English page into Russian.

Google executives have given indications recently about just how grand the company’s ambitions are for the automated language translation. The company wants people from any major language to understand any other.

“We will eventually do 100 by 100 languages, to take this set of languages and convert to another,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a June talk. “That alone will have a phenomenal impact on an open society,” he said, a reference to concerns many have expressed about Google’s censored search results in countries such as China.

Coming soon, perhaps: Google Translation Center

(Credit:
Google)

OK, I’m doing what I can to speed along discussions between Microsoft and Yahoo. I’m taking a vacation.

Ordinarily, me leaving the country would be a sure sign that something would happen. Indeed, as soon as I hopped on a plane to Colombia last month, Microsoft issued its three-week ultimatum to Yahoo.

The question here is whether Murphy’s law is stronger than Jerry Yang’s desire to stay independent. And, since I know companies, like reporters, respond best to a deadline, I’ll be back in the country June 8 and back in the office June 12.

Rest assured, that if something does happen while I am exploring sunny Toronto (or rainy Toronto), my News.com colleagues will make sure you don’t miss a beat.

Cut-and-paste on the iPhone, via a Web service.

(Credit: iCopy video)

iCopy is a clever hack that lets you select text or a link from a Web page and paste it into another page, or an e-mail. It gets around the lack of
iPhone-native copy and paste by sending selected text to a temporary online repository when you “copy,” and retrieving it when you “paste.” In operation, it’s a horrible kludge–it requires a lot of Web page switching and too many visits to the iCopy site to do a simple copy/paste operation. But the fact that Monroe figured out a way to make the Web a giant clipboard in the sky is pretty cool.

iCopy illustrates that while the Web can be employed to do a lot of things that we’ve formerly thought of as belonging solely in the domain of local computing, it doesn’t mean we should do so.

I edit a blog about Web 2.0 apps. It’s my job to push the vision of Web-based products and cloud-based resources. But even I realize that local processing has a place. I find it curious that many people I talk to think Microsoft’s rumored Midori project, for instance, is a “cloud OS.” While there’s no question that an operating system written from the ground up today should use Internet resources in a more native fashion than most OSes do today, the change should be seen as one of degree, not replacement.

The Internet can be used to deliver apps and updates, for storage and backup, for social networking and person-to-person communications, and other functions. But for the moment and the near future, you need local processing to maintain speed and robustness of applications, and native graphics capability to present the interface. One of the reasons Web 2.0 apps can work well today is because today’s browsers have deep user interface and graphics capabilities, and because they run on powerful local PCs. Many popular Web apps–like Google Docs and Microsoft Live Search Maps–rely on capabilities that were simply not present in PCs only a few years ago.

That’s why I continue to refer to Web operating systems like G.ho.st as science fair projects. They’re really cool, and they provide glimpses of the evolution of personal computing. Much of what we do on a PC today can be done over the Web. But a lot cannot, at least not well. To deliver the best experience–the best user interface, reliability, collaboration, and so on–smart developers don’t force all their apps either onto the Web or the local PC. Today’s architectures make distributing applications among platforms easier than ever. They even make it possible for apps to adapt to their environment and redistribute themselves depending on circumstance (see Google Gears). The really interesting upcoming apps and operating systems will not just be hybrid (online/offline), but adaptive.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in how copy and paste might work on the iPhone, check out Proximi’s Magicpad, a text editing app that offers cut and paste controls. Proximi has also published video proposing a user interface for general cut and paste on the iPhone. This is the work Apple should have done. Although for all we know, the company has done it already, but in secret.

Despite the efforts of software companies large and small, spammers and phishers continue to find and exploit weaknesses in junk-mail filters at the server and client levels. After years of foil and parry between these two forces, you would think that Microsoft Outlook, the most widely used e-mail program in the world, would be a paragon of in-box defenses.

Then again, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, a company not noted for being the paragon of anything more than profitability.

A few years back, Service Pack 2 for Office 2003 added phishing filters for Outlook that move suspicious messages to your Junk E-mail folder automatically and turn off links in the messages. Outlook 2007 was released about a year-and-a-half later with only a few new junk-mail defenses. In fact, the Junk E-mail Options screens of the two versions are nearly identical.

The junk e-mail options in Outlook 2003 don’t offer many options.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The only difference between the Junk E-mail Options in Outlook 2007 and its predecessor are the bottom two options.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

In the past, I have created a series of Outlook rules to stem the flow of junk to my in-box. The process is straightforward though somewhat time-consuming: Click Tools > Rules and Alerts > New Rule, and step through the Rules Wizard. You can also right-click a message you want to base the rule on and choose Create Rule, and then either make your selections, or click Advanced Options to open the Rules Wizard.

If you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with junk e-mail, your best solution is a third-party spam and phishing filter. There are lots of free versions available for download, but the freebies either require too much work on your part to make them effective, or they work with only a single mail account, place text ads on your outgoing messages, or come up short in some other way.

Your best bet may be to bite the bullet and pay for a commercial junk-mail filter. My favorite is one that has been around for a long time: Cloudmark Desktop, which comes in versions for Outlook and Outlook Express, as well as for Mozilla Thunderbird. The program is available for a 15-day free trial. A one-year subscription for two PCs costs $40 (multiple licenses and volume discounts are available).

Cloudmark adds a toolbar to Outlook that lets you scan a folder for junk with a couple of clicks. It places spam and phishing attempts in a Spam folder and lets you block and unblock mail from specific senders. The program works quickly: It scanned a folder with more than 2,000 messages in just a couple of minutes, and I didn’t notice any slowdown when I sent and received mail.

The Cloudmark Desktop junk-mail filter adds a toolbar to Outlook that lets you scan a folder for spam, and block or unblock specific senders.

(Credit:
Cloudmark)

You get more control over how junk mail is treated via the program’s Options menus, which let you scan for junk selectively rather than automatically, and change the location of your junk-mail folder. You can choose to delete the junk immediately, after a week, or after a month. Your Outlook contacts can be added to your trusted
list with a single click, and you can see how many messages have been checked, how many were identified as spam automatically, and how many spam and phishing messages you’ve blocked.

Cloudmark Desktop’s options let you change the folder your junk mail is stored in, and decide when to delete the junk.

(Credit:
Cloudmark)

When you’re ready to get serious about locking spammers and phishers out of your Outlook in-box, Cloudmark is ready to do the heavy lifting.

Monday: simple ways to speed up Windows shutdowns.

Qwest, the only major phone company without its own wireless service, has been reselling wireless service from Sprint Nextel. But Qwest CEO Ed Mueller said earlier this week at his company’s analyst conference that he is not happy with the arrangement and is looking for a new partner.

The problem with the Sprint deal is that Qwest is unable to offer the same services and handsets that Sprint offers when they are first introduced at Sprint. This lag time puts Qwest at a disadvantage, Mueller has said.

Instead, Mueller said he’d like a more tightly integrated relationship with a wireless operator that might enable the company to get paid a commission for subscribers or would be tightly integrated to its broadband or landline voice service.

Qwest has not confirmed that it has been talking to Verizon specifically, but Mueller mentioned that the company is interested in striking a partnership with any of the four major wireless carriers in the United States.

Meanwhile, Verizon Chairman and Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg has confirmed that the two are in talks. The Journal reported that Seidenberg said Tuesday at a Merrill Lynch analyst conference that his company, which owns Verizon Wireless in a joint venture with Vodafone Group, has had conversations with Qwest about a possible wholesale deal.

Some kind of wireless deal is important for Qwest, not because the company expects to generate a lot of revenue from the service. Rather, Qwest believes that it’s important to offer wireless as part of its bundle to keep customers loyal to its other profit-making services, such as broadband.

Mueller said this week that customers who sign up for only one Qwest service are three times more likely to cancel the service than customers who sign up for at least two services.

In a statement, Lofgren said that between January 2003 and July 2007, the taxation rate on wireless services increased four times faster than the rate for other taxable goods and services. As a result, consumers pay 15.19 percent in federal, state, and local taxes on their cell phone bill, compared with 7.07 percent in taxes for most other goods and services.

“The Cell Tax Fairness Act will help ensure that consumers make choices about communications technology based on the merits of that technology, rather than on the rate of taxation,” Lofgren said. The legislation “does not take away any existing revenue for state or local governments.”

The bill, which is similar to Senate legislation introduced last year, would not affect current taxes, nor does it call for a ban on any new federal taxes. Furthermore, the ban would not apply to fees meant to subsidize emergency 911 services nor the universal service charge, which funds telecommunications infrastructure for low-income and rural residents. The federal excise tax on phone services, which was originally created to support the Spanish-American War, was dropped by the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of the Treasury in August 2006.

The wireless industry’s lobbying arm, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), is supporting the bill, calling it “a step in the right direction.” In its own statement, the association joined Lofgren in saying that a ban on new taxes would help encourage new innovation in the wireless sector. “We should do everything in our power to remove the roadblocks–such as excessive, discriminatory wireless taxes–that stand in the way of progress,” said
CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent.

Cell phones taxes and fees have been the target of a few bills in Congress since the Democrats regained control of the House, but lawmakers and the CTIA haven’t always seen eye to eye. Separate bills in both the Senate and the House propose eliminating early termination fees and handset locking. The latter issue has become particularly controversial following AT&T’s well-publicized lock on the iPhone, even though handset locking has been standard practice in the industry for years. Though the Senate bill won support from Senators in a hearing held in October, Largent and the CTIA have declined to support it, calling it “unnecessary.”

Three of the largest broadcast TV networks have sent a cease-and-desist letter to RedLasso , a little-known but rapidly growing video syndication site.

Fox News Network, NBC Universal, and CBS sent a letter on Monday, accusing the company of “building a business based on the unauthorized syndication of” the content owners’ news, sports, and entertainment shows.

RedLasso records TV shows and then indexes clips so users can find, pull, and embed them on other Web sites. Reporter Liz Gannes over at Newteevee.com saw this one coming. Two weeks ago, Gannes noted that RedLasso had grown from 2 million unique users in November to 24 million in April.

Gannes wrote: “Now might be a pretty good time to get permission.”

She added later that RedLasso executives told her they were on good terms with broadcasters. The executives’ assertions, however, are untrue, the networks said in their letter to RedLasso. In the letter, the entertainment companies wrote that such statements “falsely convey an affiliation…when there is none.”

At a time when the networks are giving their content away for free, one has to wonder why RedLasso would even get into this business. Anyone can go to Hulu and grab embed code for many NBC Universal shows without violating the law.

I was in Los Angeles for the Digital Hollywood conference earlier this month and there was plenty of discussion about the influx of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs moving in to make deals with the studios. The big entertainment companies were more open to cutting deals than ever, insiders told me.

They also said that partnerships awaited those that could help the entertainment industry solve problems of advertising, marketing, and syndication on the Internet.

Executives from King of Prussia, Pa.-based RedLasso were unavailable for comment.

Disclosure: CBS has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.