Chinese names | Farewell the red soldiers | Economist.com

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This is messed up. The computer systems used by the government have problems dealing with rare Chinese characters. Instead of fixing the software, they are trying to ban “problematic” Chinese characters in names. Seems a bit backward to me, as I am sure there are millions more “problematic” names than the number of software that have to be upgraded or replaced. Actually, only the input methods and fonts need to be upgraded.

Chinese names | Farewell the red soldiers | Economist.com (subscription required):

The problem is that commonly used software for inputting Chinese characters, including that used by police departments responsible for issuing identity cards (which every Chinese must carry), cannot handle very rare characters. In China, the usual way of writing a character on a computer is to enter its pronunciation using Roman letters, then choose from a list of possible options (most characters have many homonyms). A rare character might not show up on the list.
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For the police all this has become a particular problem with the introduction in 2004 of new identity cards with embedded microchips. Rather than getting better software, a senior police official has announced that the answer is to ban problematic characters.

Women and the world economy | A guide to womenomics | Economist.com

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Women and the world economy | A guide to womenomics | Economist.com:

?WHY can’t a woman be more like a man?? mused Henry Higgins in ?My Fair Lady?. Future generations might ask why a man can’t be more like a woman. In rich countries, girls now do better at school than boys, more women are getting university degrees than men are and females are filling most new jobs. Arguably, women are now the most powerful engine of global growth.
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In particular, there is strong evidence that educating girls boosts prosperity. It is probably the single best investment that can be made in the developing world. Not only are better educated women more productive, but they raise healthier, better educated children. There is huge potential to raise income per head in developing countries, where fewer girls go to school than boys. More than two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women.

The language business in China | English beginning to be spoken here | Economist.com

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The language business in China | English beginning to be spoken here | Economist.com:

Today the Chinese are obsessed with English. Anything up to a fifth of the population is learning the language. As Gordon Brown, the British finance minister, observed on a trip to China last year, in two decades China’s English speakers will already outnumber native English speakers in the rest of the world. This is fuelling a market that comprises everything from books, teaching materials and tests to teacher training and language schools themselves. At $60 billion a year, China is already the world’s largest market for English-language services, estimates Mari Pearlman at ETS, an American group that developed TOEFL, a well-known test of English-language proficiency.

Shops I plan to hit when I’m in NYC next weekend

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It sucks that SuperFuture is down at the moment, as there was a thread with a list of streetwear and denim shops already. I don’t have the NYC SuperMaps either, which sucks big time, I knew I should’ve downloaded them to my phone…

Anyway, this is basically what I’ve got planned, I only have about 4 hours to do this so I need to do it the TSP way… 🙂 Good thing they are all around SoHo.

  • Supreme NYC, to pick up some tees and hoodies, I wonder if they still got the SS06 Kate Moss tee, if they did I’ll cop a few and eBay them
  • BWS for tees and hoodies, I don’t think I’d buy anything from them though, way too hyped up
  • Uniqlo, for regular streetwear
  • APC to check out the sizing for the military-style/M65-like jacket
  • Jack Spade to see if they got any loopwheeler tees and hoodies left, but most likely I will have to use a shopping service like celga or juno in Japan to get them

If I got time:

Here’s my attempt at using the Google Maps API, I didn’t have time to figure out how to link the above text to move/center/zoom the GMap2… 😆 btw, this doesn’t show up in NetNewsWire, and probably not other RSS readers either, so view this entry in a browser that is supported by Google Maps…

Theo doesn’t like PAM either…

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I haven’t checked my bugtraq folder for a long long time, today while waiting for a long compilation and simulation I looked and I liked Theo’s comment on PAM:

Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Strengthen OpenSSH security?
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 19:15:30 -0600
From: Theo de Raadt

> > It seems to me that sshd should not tip its hand by returning different
> > responses when a user ID can be used for logins than when it can’t —
> > allowing an attacker to focus password guessing attacks on user IDs with
> > which it would have a chance of gaining access. For those folks out there
> > who are more familiar with OpenSSH than I am: How hard would it be to
> > make the responses indistinguishable?
>
> Are you running the latest version of portable OpenSSH? If not, you need to
> upgrade. As far as I know, there should be no more leaks of this sort in
> the current code. If there are, please notify the openssh developers (and
> include your authentication configuration – your PAM modules may be leaking
> the info, and there’s nothing OpenSSH can do about that).

He’s right. If there are still problems with leakage, it is due to PAM.

And we can’t do anything about it.

I will try to be as nice as anyone has ever seen me be:

PAM is completely and utterly broken and cannot be fixed.