- Maintain a collection of napkins, serviettes, wetnaps, tissues, or toilet paper on your person at all times. Public toilets are abundant, but they seem to run out of these items fairly often. To that end, you may also find it necessary to maintain a small bottle of soap or hand sanitizer available as well.
- Hats, sunscreens, and parasols are mandatory, especially if you're a redhead.
It appears to require a particular dermal fortitude to withstand the solar onslaught in China. The sun seems to take it as a personal challenge to deliver the same amount of UV power per capita in China as it would deliver to any other country in the world. People who fancy themselves as the tanning type will find themselves burning. Those who burn will burn nearly instantaneously. Even some who have grown up in China find that after returning from extended trips abroad their dermal armour is not what it once was. Perhaps it thinks that it can finally relax after those endless years of vigilance. - Forget all of your preconceived Western, bourgeois notions concerning personal space.
Only the rich can afford to have personal space. Everyone else shares the People's Body Odour, and inhales the People's Morning Breath every day on every underground, every bus, and every lift in China. This is especially true in large cities. - Green does not mean go; red does not mean stop.
Chinese vehicles and pedestrians follow a very strict set of rules when in traffic. However, these rules aren't written down in any Highway Traffic Act that I'm aware of. For example, traffic lights do not dictate the movement of vehicles, but rather suggest at possible trends in local avenues of transport. You may find yourself caught by conflicting green lights, and aggressively barging your way into and out of traffic will become a necessity. Playing chicken as a pedestrian in a road full of zippy cars, lumbering buses, weaving bicycles, and other chimeric variations on wheeled vehicles will soon become your predominant pasttime. - Always keep an eye on where you're going.
Better yet, watch your feet as you walk to avoid such punishments for absent-minded pedestrians as construction, holes in the ground, crouching children, sleeping hobos, small women, animal feces, and gobs of poisonous tar disguised as spit. Picking a careful footpath is essential to the health and safety of your feet, which will be critical to your ability to continue living and travelling in China; destinations and edifices are rarely accessible. Those that are, are purely so by accident. - Everything is small in China, built on an industrial scale.
Here you will find the shockingly incongruent warehouses filled with small 10 square foot stalls selling all manner of clothing, toy, trinket, and thingummadooer, and the eyebrow twitch inducing juxtaposition of former Cultural Revolution-era factory complexes occupied by innumerable artists' galleries, collectives, cafes, and studios. Beehives have nothing on Chinese infrastructure. - China smells. Always.
When you arrive in China, your senses will not be merely assaulted by the new experience that is China, but assaulted then battered. Your sense of smell is not exempt from this brutality. The following smells will be your dominant nasal experience in the following order: internal combustion engine exhaust (complete and incomplete), tobacco smoke, refuse (food, animal, and human), body odour. (See items 1, 3, and 5.) - If you have a puffer, keep it on you at all times. If you don't, consider getting one.
Although the air quality in many cities has improved from what it once was due to such incentives as the 2008 Olympics and encroaching deserts, depending on the time of year and the location it can still be fairly poor. Fewer people walk or bike around the city with pollution masks on now, but there are still some and for good reason: you won't want to see what colour your snot is here. - Don't travel alone.
Nearly everyone will at some point become disoriented, lost, lonely, and overwhelmed by the strange perpendicular way in which China is foreign to our sensibilities. It is much easier to deal with all of this with another sentient being sharing your travels and travails; it doesn't even matter if they speak the same language, simply the shared understanding helps. - Anything someone may have told you about life and travel in China older than a few months is likely out of date already.
This entry is included in the previous statement.
Sunday, September 23
When in China...
That was a little heavy to start things off with, and it won't always be that way. In order to move on, I need to take care of some unfinished business. Herewith, things one should know when travelling in China, with specifics concerning Beijing:
Friday, June 22
What did I say?
With one day left in my stay in China, I have discovered that my blog has been blocked. Specifically blocked, too. Blogger is still accessible, and I can (as you can see) still post and edit, but I can't view anything coming from jmaginary.blogspot.com.
Woot?
Woot?
Friday, June 1
First post
This is not what I had intended to be the post to begin my new blog and it's much longer than I had anticipated. However, a news item has recently caught my eye: the attacks to Estonian Internet infrastructure that may or may not have been perpetrated by Russia, with which some have already started using colourful terms like Internet warfare and the 1st cyber-war. As I am not well-versed in the history and politics behind the relationship between Estonia and Russia, nor am I an information security expert, I won't try to discuss the technical details of the attacks or the particulars of the incidents. I'll leave that up to more knowledgeable and interested parties. There is, as always, the ever-increasing swamp of online articles, columns, commentaries, and blogs available covering this situation.
The story, as far as I'm aware of it, is that between April 26 and May 18 of this year, there were a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Estonian computer networks. I believe an analogy can be made to deliberately sending a flood of vehicles and pedestrians in order to create a massive traffic jam that clogs up a country's entire transportation system. And for exactly the same reasons, a massive DDOS attack on a country's networks can conceivably bring it to a standstill. These attacks peaked on May 9th and 10th when the largest bank in Estonia, Hansabank, is forced to shut down its online banking network.
These attacks have been associated with an Estonian government decision to relocate a World War II memorial that was erected when Estonia was still a part of the U.S.S.R. This is where it all starts getting hazy because initially there were allegations that the Russian government was directly responsible for these DDOS attacks. However, there are now other sources who say that the Russian government wasn't responsible, and that it was a group of independent Russian citizens with nationalist tendencies. It appears that the exact origin of these attacks is hard to trace because of the many computers located around the world that became involved in delivering these data floods. In other words, no one is quite sure who is ultimately responsible for bringing down the Estonian Internet infrastructure.
This uncertainty is quite the problem because disabling a country is, on the world stage, a bad and hostile thing to do. And, of course, everyone wants to know who is responsible, what can be done so that this won't happen to them, and how to punish the bad guys once they are found. However, given the difficulties that the experts have had in defending against and tracing these attacks, this is turning out to be quite a beast of a problem. Unfortunately, I can't answer these questions and I only have more of my own.
I found this situation very interesting because it relates to some ideas I've had about the Internet and its effect on modern lives and lifestyles. Namely, in a near future when the Internet is as ubiquitous and essential as water and electricity are now, what would happen if the Internet went down? I had considered a number of social and logistical ramifications, but hadn't anticipated some of the ones that have already appeared in the Estonian situation. For example, the shutdown of banking systems, emergency services, and other facets of everyday life that are built upon an underlying backbone of communication.
It's also interesting because even though hackers and hacktivists have been poking holes, defacing websites, and bringing down selected computer networks for fun, profit, or ideological awareness for some time, this could conceivably become something much larger and, hence, very different. As I understand it, these sorts of activities have been performed by relatively small groups of individuals in the past. Whether condoned by national governments or not, the idea of Internet warfare raises a whole new idea of how these sorts of things can happen. No longer will hacking be limited, at least ideologically, to the realm of one-off, unannounced and unexpected potshots on relatively small computer systems and performed by relatively small groups of individuals. In the language of early warfare, the hackers we are accustomed to hearing about are like raiding parties. By extending the analogy, it is then possible that hacking can develop into more complicated practices and patterns that are more similar to things like siege, ambush, guerrilla warfare, and other more complicated strategies. The fortifications employed to defend against these kinds of attacks will have to evolve correspondingly. (Moat-and-bailey defenses are no good against mortars or bombers.)
On the other side of Internet warfare is the economy. It has always played some part of conventional warfare in terms of the access to resources and the effective application of these resources for use in warfare. In the past, (as in Starcraft,) if your nation was richer, then you could buy more expensive and advance weapons, train more troops, move more units. However, how does that map to Internet warfare? Relatively speaking, computers and Internet infrastructure are inexpensive and widely accessible. It would appear to me that the emphasis in effective Internet warfare is more heavily based on the ingenuity and skills of the combatants, where the weapons need to be programmed, than in conventional warfare, where the weapons can be made by an uninvolved party and bought. As far as I know, these sorts of attacks take some degree of skill and know-how in terms of commandeering other computers, obscuring the trail, understanding the mechanics and complexities of a computer system, that is not as easily solved by the brute force methods that can be employed in conventional warfare. Suddenly, due to the widespread use of computers, relatively poor countries or countries that have not maintained standing armies and collections of weapons are now in possession of the means to attack larger, richer countries.
There is also the obvious consequence of conventional warfare where people get injured and die. So far, this has yet to occur in the realm of cyberspace, but is it possible? How dependent on the Internet will our society become with such possibilities on the horizon? Will we web-enable every facet of our lives in spite of it? Or will we shy away from Internet-based solutions for more Luddite approaches due to it? How real is the threat to our lives? Or is it only a threat to our lifestyles?
Back to Estonia: I have a number of questions that I would like to see answered regarding the idea of Internet warfare. First of all, how can you find the real perpetrators? Due to the distributed nature of the Internet, it can be hard to track the attacks to the original group of computers. But once you do that, how do you find the people who did it? Can a few manage a large-scale attack? Or does it have to be many? Should computers be monitored if these large-scale attacks become more frequent? Should computer use then become controlled and regulated? And if you find the people who did it, how do you determine that the government of a country is definitively responsible or affiliated with these attacks? Specifically, what would a government have to do or not do in order to be in support of or condone such actions? Is it implicit in freely giving public access to the Internet? Or citizenship? Ideology? How far does a government have to go to stop its citizens from executing these attacks before it cannot be held responsible for the actions of renegade individuals?
What does territory mean on the Internet? What does this all mean for international peace treaties, relations, and regulating bodies? How can you be sure, or at least without a reasonable doubt, that you are retaliating against the right people? What form would that retaliation come in? Is a corresponding Internet attack enough? Do you physically attack their Internet infrastructure? Would physical attacks be considered an escalation of the situation?
How do you keep it from happening again? Should there be national firewalls and security measures in place? Is it a plausible solution? Will nations become isolated islands in cyberspace? Should programmers, IT professionals, and people with such "dangerous" skills be tracked? Regulated? Are they national weapons or resources? Should there be standing armies made up of professional hackers and Internet security experts? Would they be our new snipers and sappers? This is starting to sound a little extreme, spawning from the world of Ghost In The Shell, but due to the inherent differences between Internet warfare and conventional warfare the methods currently employed to deal with these sorts of situations seem to be a little ambiguous and ill-defined. It sounds like something that could be very different from what we know now, and could mark a turning point for conflict resolution, development, and international relations.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. But there's definitely a lot to think about, and I'm interested to see how things develop.
The story, as far as I'm aware of it, is that between April 26 and May 18 of this year, there were a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Estonian computer networks. I believe an analogy can be made to deliberately sending a flood of vehicles and pedestrians in order to create a massive traffic jam that clogs up a country's entire transportation system. And for exactly the same reasons, a massive DDOS attack on a country's networks can conceivably bring it to a standstill. These attacks peaked on May 9th and 10th when the largest bank in Estonia, Hansabank, is forced to shut down its online banking network.
These attacks have been associated with an Estonian government decision to relocate a World War II memorial that was erected when Estonia was still a part of the U.S.S.R. This is where it all starts getting hazy because initially there were allegations that the Russian government was directly responsible for these DDOS attacks. However, there are now other sources who say that the Russian government wasn't responsible, and that it was a group of independent Russian citizens with nationalist tendencies. It appears that the exact origin of these attacks is hard to trace because of the many computers located around the world that became involved in delivering these data floods. In other words, no one is quite sure who is ultimately responsible for bringing down the Estonian Internet infrastructure.
This uncertainty is quite the problem because disabling a country is, on the world stage, a bad and hostile thing to do. And, of course, everyone wants to know who is responsible, what can be done so that this won't happen to them, and how to punish the bad guys once they are found. However, given the difficulties that the experts have had in defending against and tracing these attacks, this is turning out to be quite a beast of a problem. Unfortunately, I can't answer these questions and I only have more of my own.
I found this situation very interesting because it relates to some ideas I've had about the Internet and its effect on modern lives and lifestyles. Namely, in a near future when the Internet is as ubiquitous and essential as water and electricity are now, what would happen if the Internet went down? I had considered a number of social and logistical ramifications, but hadn't anticipated some of the ones that have already appeared in the Estonian situation. For example, the shutdown of banking systems, emergency services, and other facets of everyday life that are built upon an underlying backbone of communication.
It's also interesting because even though hackers and hacktivists have been poking holes, defacing websites, and bringing down selected computer networks for fun, profit, or ideological awareness for some time, this could conceivably become something much larger and, hence, very different. As I understand it, these sorts of activities have been performed by relatively small groups of individuals in the past. Whether condoned by national governments or not, the idea of Internet warfare raises a whole new idea of how these sorts of things can happen. No longer will hacking be limited, at least ideologically, to the realm of one-off, unannounced and unexpected potshots on relatively small computer systems and performed by relatively small groups of individuals. In the language of early warfare, the hackers we are accustomed to hearing about are like raiding parties. By extending the analogy, it is then possible that hacking can develop into more complicated practices and patterns that are more similar to things like siege, ambush, guerrilla warfare, and other more complicated strategies. The fortifications employed to defend against these kinds of attacks will have to evolve correspondingly. (Moat-and-bailey defenses are no good against mortars or bombers.)
On the other side of Internet warfare is the economy. It has always played some part of conventional warfare in terms of the access to resources and the effective application of these resources for use in warfare. In the past, (as in Starcraft,) if your nation was richer, then you could buy more expensive and advance weapons, train more troops, move more units. However, how does that map to Internet warfare? Relatively speaking, computers and Internet infrastructure are inexpensive and widely accessible. It would appear to me that the emphasis in effective Internet warfare is more heavily based on the ingenuity and skills of the combatants, where the weapons need to be programmed, than in conventional warfare, where the weapons can be made by an uninvolved party and bought. As far as I know, these sorts of attacks take some degree of skill and know-how in terms of commandeering other computers, obscuring the trail, understanding the mechanics and complexities of a computer system, that is not as easily solved by the brute force methods that can be employed in conventional warfare. Suddenly, due to the widespread use of computers, relatively poor countries or countries that have not maintained standing armies and collections of weapons are now in possession of the means to attack larger, richer countries.
There is also the obvious consequence of conventional warfare where people get injured and die. So far, this has yet to occur in the realm of cyberspace, but is it possible? How dependent on the Internet will our society become with such possibilities on the horizon? Will we web-enable every facet of our lives in spite of it? Or will we shy away from Internet-based solutions for more Luddite approaches due to it? How real is the threat to our lives? Or is it only a threat to our lifestyles?
Back to Estonia: I have a number of questions that I would like to see answered regarding the idea of Internet warfare. First of all, how can you find the real perpetrators? Due to the distributed nature of the Internet, it can be hard to track the attacks to the original group of computers. But once you do that, how do you find the people who did it? Can a few manage a large-scale attack? Or does it have to be many? Should computers be monitored if these large-scale attacks become more frequent? Should computer use then become controlled and regulated? And if you find the people who did it, how do you determine that the government of a country is definitively responsible or affiliated with these attacks? Specifically, what would a government have to do or not do in order to be in support of or condone such actions? Is it implicit in freely giving public access to the Internet? Or citizenship? Ideology? How far does a government have to go to stop its citizens from executing these attacks before it cannot be held responsible for the actions of renegade individuals?
What does territory mean on the Internet? What does this all mean for international peace treaties, relations, and regulating bodies? How can you be sure, or at least without a reasonable doubt, that you are retaliating against the right people? What form would that retaliation come in? Is a corresponding Internet attack enough? Do you physically attack their Internet infrastructure? Would physical attacks be considered an escalation of the situation?
How do you keep it from happening again? Should there be national firewalls and security measures in place? Is it a plausible solution? Will nations become isolated islands in cyberspace? Should programmers, IT professionals, and people with such "dangerous" skills be tracked? Regulated? Are they national weapons or resources? Should there be standing armies made up of professional hackers and Internet security experts? Would they be our new snipers and sappers? This is starting to sound a little extreme, spawning from the world of Ghost In The Shell, but due to the inherent differences between Internet warfare and conventional warfare the methods currently employed to deal with these sorts of situations seem to be a little ambiguous and ill-defined. It sounds like something that could be very different from what we know now, and could mark a turning point for conflict resolution, development, and international relations.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. But there's definitely a lot to think about, and I'm interested to see how things develop.
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