Following racial riots in China a few days ago, China has blocked access to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Earlier, about two weeks ago, the Chinese government has already blocked access to Google’s communication applications from Gmail to Talk.

Well, who else is not surprised? While China tries to project a liberal image, they are still heavily dependant on censorship, thought the reason for Google’s blockage was said to be because of porn content and not because of the riots.

But even with heavy censorship, those who are so inclined could still access these websites via proxies, which are readily available online. Now, the Chinese government should ban those sites if they want to go all out in stopping the dissemination of information in China! LOL

Just after writing a post earlier this morning that Microsoft’s Bing is out beta in a few countries, following Bing USA, Google has announced that they will be removing the Beta tag from a slew of Google applications, including Gmail, Talk and Docs, which are some of the applications in Google Apps Premier Edition. Google’s move is a bid to lure enterprises like software companies to subscribe to their paid service.

While I think that it is high time these Google applications come out of Beta since Gmail, for example, has been in Beta for at least five years, if memory serves me well, I am not sure if Gmail, at least, is ready due to my bad experience with it which has not been addressed or acknowledged by anyone in Gmail until today.

In any case, hopefully, now that they are coming out of Beta, we will see improved services for these apps, even for users of the free versions.

Microsoft issued an urgent warning about a security hole to their Internet Explorer browser where hackers exploit the hole to hijack the systems of victims. Vulnerable systems are those that run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

According to Microsoft, attacks have happened for a week already and they are rushing to come out with a patch for this security hole. Meanwhile, we could visit the website of Microsoft to remove the problem from our Internet Explorer browser for the time being as a solution is being worked on.

The scary thing is that anyone could be a victim by just clicking a link from a spam email that would lead to a hacked website that would look like the legitimate website.

But I guess, whether we are using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome or anything else, we should never use simply click on links that come in spam emails, or even emails that we perhaps know the sender.

Microsoft has decided that Bing is ready to be out of beta in Australia, Canada, China, the United Kingdom and Japan. Obviously, with just a short while being launched, many features are still missing from the Bing compared to Bing USA, which has been out of beta already.

I have to confess though, that since Bing’s launch, I have not used it at all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying I do not like Bing or that Bing search results are irrelevant or more irrelevant than other search engines but Google has served me so well I see no reason to change.

Perhaps, out of habit cultivated through years of searching with Google, the first search engine I will fire up is Google. If I could not find the desired results, THEN I will continue my search with other competing search engines but that rarely happens, which explains why I have never used Bing yet. LOL

I read an article in an online newspaper which highlighted that there seems to be more perverts and sexual predators using MSN. This came after being made aware by two readers. Just a couple of days ago, I also read on a blog of a girl’s encounter with a guy on MSN which she said stalked her for a year.

Based on these two incidents, I wonder why these so-called “victims” never used the BLOCK feature. I use it liberally and would block anyone whom I think has gone out of line. Of course, in the first place, I will only allow people who know me or have dealt with me one way or another to add me to their messenger.

One thing I noticed from the screenshots provided is that these victims had strung along with these “perverts” which they shouldn’t have. Just let these perverts have a one-sided conversation and they will leave soon enough.

This morning, I decided to finally do something about the junk I am getting in my Yahoo! Mail. No, I don’t blame Yahoo!’s spam protection for not doing a good job. I brought it on myself by signing up with all sorts of websites and mailing lists and get spammed in return.

So, this morning, i decided to move important email from specific people to my Gmail. I know that Gmail has an import email feature but I decided not to use it as if may mess up my account by importing other irrelevant email, especially junk email. I decided to do it manually by forwarding the email from my Yahoo! Mail to Gmail account.

I have always disliked Gmail’s conversation view but have never felt as inconvenienced by it as now. You see, over the years, this particular friend used the same subject title more than a couple of times and even though the topics were totally different, Gmail “smartly” grouped them together. Of course I hate it!

I know I could use Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook Express to retrieve my Gmail and view them in Folders like conventional email clients but I prefer to view my Gmail via my browser. My Outlook Express is already choked with email, as I am retrieving my Hotmail with it as well as mail to my email account assigned by my Internet Service Provider.

Anyway, I know there is no way to disable conversation view in Gmail but I still felt the need to vent. LOL I did, however, like some people advised, put in my suggestion to Gmail techs to consider giving us the option to disable conversation view.

I believe that most of us have friends or even family who are suffering from one form of addiction or another. I personally know of people who need help with smoking and drinking while a friend is addicted to gambling. None is like David Duchovny, addicted to sex, as far as I know.

These people actually need help and support, which is why a lot of them join support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, just now, I got to know that we can easily find updated lists of InTheRooms Meetings for Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meetings and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings.

What I like about these lists is that they are in wiki form which means that anyone with information could update the lists; or even suggests new fellowships. As a form of control, users have to be registered with the site and revisions will be reviewed and approved by the moderators of the site.

By the way, InTheRooms is actually a social networking protal just like the fellowships mentioned above, but happening online. This isn’t to say that if you participate in InTheRooms, you could quit your fellowship meetings. Many of the users here look for support in addition to what they are getting from fellowships.