The Dark Visitor

One of the Chinese blogs I read had a post about this Baidu dictionary reference.

Loosely translated: Freedom of Speech – basically not in China. It gives a link to a board where it may have picked up this definition. The author, greysign, laments that there are rampant lawless anti-party elements slandering China. Is it really slander to say that there isn’t freedom of speech in China?

The Iranian Cyber Army has compromised the DNS records for baidu.com by logging into their DNS management portal at register.com.  You might remember the Iranian Cyber Army from their recent twitter DNS compromise.  There are many blogs and news outlets reporting on this.

I know some readers might wonder if this will spark some sort of cyber war between Iran and the PRC. 

From BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8453718.stm

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/17/twitter-reportedly-hacked-by-iranian-cyber-army/

On May 1, a zip file was posted to wikileaks.org that contained several internal files that appear to be from Baidu.cn, the most popular search engine in the PRC.  There is an html file within the zip that contains several sections with a list of key phrases that will cause the search engine to filter the results.  Here is an automated translation of each category (after the jump):

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Things that freakin’ haunt you.  Once when I was in Beijing, a teacher asked me about the meaning of the phrase, “dressed to the nines.”  She was using the Madonna soundtrack, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” to help her class learn English:

Me: Oh, it means to be well dressed.

Her: (Horror!!!) What is the origin of this phrase?

Me: Well…it came from.. history…about…stuff.

Her: If you don’t know answer, that is okay.  I’ll ask someone else.

Me: No, I’m sure that is the meaning…really!

Okay now I know.  Still, a horrible feeling.

I often have this fear of not being able to answer simple questions about things I should know.

So, in the interest of useless knowledge, the origins of the word Baidu.

Not really what you would call an arts sort of guy but for some reason I always enjoy seeing what Google does with their logo during the holidays.  Weird.

So, I give you Baidu’s.

Click to see the search categories (English translations via Google)

Not sure when Baidu added the “more” section to their search but I could swear it wasn’t there just a few days ago.  Who knows, maybe it has been there for years. Anyway, much like Google, these new (or old?) functions makes life a lot easier if you research China.

Some of the stuff I found interesting: government websites, statistics, universities, documents and books. Plus the normal entertainment, games, music, television, culture…etc.