Thursday, June 9, 2005

Murder for a virtual sword Reuters: Shanghai resdient Qiu Chengwei was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for killing an online competitor who stole his virtual sword and sold it for USD 870. A suspended death sentence normally means that the will end up with live in prison. Qiu will not have access to online games in Chinese prisons, that is for sure. 9:58:05 AM    comment []

Internet registration Lots of posting on the internet in recent days on registration requirements for websites and weblogs in China. I had some serious problems myself with some of the websites I own, as most of them suddenly did not load in China anymore. Chijs.com, marc.cn and marc.com.cn all got error messages, but vanderchijs.com (my first site, and the only one still hosted with Yahoo) still works. A call to Shanghai Telecom revealed that they were blocked, but they could not tell me why. Strange enough, the sites are hosted outside China and the sites where they point to are not blocked. For chijs.com I changed the DNS to a server owned by a friend of mine in Holland, and now that works fine. I guess I might need to register all the sites, and then they might be unblocked. Not sure how this works for sites that are forwarded: you need to put a small piece of software on your site, but that is not possible if the site is redirected to another site. 9:49:16 AM    comment []