瞼書找台灣人麻煩嗎?Is Facebook giving Taiwanese trouble?

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綠營政治人物臉書帳號紛傳出被停用！

(巳知受害者: 陳致中、謝長廷、賴清德、游錫堃)

日前李登輝前總統也跟上年輕人的腳步，開始玩起網路社群工具Facebook(臉書)，但說來也奇怪，最近綠營政治人物的Facebook帳號卻紛 紛因為不明原因而遭到停用。目前已經傳出謝長廷、游錫堃、賴清德、陳致中等人的帳號因遭檢舉，而被停用，但向Facebook投訴後，也都沒有得到回應。

今年六月份時高雄市議員參選人陳致中因為遭到「冒牌陳致中檢舉正牌陳致中」，導致臉書帳號被無法使用，還大費周章地向網友解釋帳號遭盜用。

而在父親節當天，有網友反應無法在Facebook上搜尋到前行政院院長謝長廷的帳號，經了解之後，證實謝長廷本人的臉書帳號確實被停用，連同一帳號管理的謝長廷臉書粉絲專頁也不見了。

正當網友們懷疑是否這一切都是「阿共仔的陰謀」的時候，大台南市長參選人賴清德的臉書粉絲專頁竟也因為不明原因停用，競選總部只好在第一時間宣布，另外成立新的臉書粉絲專頁，號召網友重新加入。

不過農曆七月發生的怪事不只這一樁，今(25)日上午前行政院院長游錫堃也在噗浪上發難：「為什麼Facebook停用那麼久？已 經三天了！信也寫了！毫無回應？不知有誰能夠幫助我？」，原來臉書帳號被停用的綠營苦主又多了一位，還有網友忿忿不平地說：「現在是逼著大家用中國的微博 嗎？」

民進黨中央網路部主任林閣雍表示，去年民進黨的所設立的Facebook個人帳號Dpponline也因不明原因被幹掉。他建議可 以先寫信向臉書抗議，再成立新粉絲專頁同步處理，而新設立的新粉絲專頁，可以多設幾位管理員，以防止因個別帳號停用，造成粉絲專頁也停用的情況發生。

這些遭到停用的綠營政治人物，賴清德已經再成立新的粉絲專頁，而陳致中也在臉書成立了「陳致中後援會」，但現在只有261人加入； 游錫堃則考慮另外在 Facebook成立粉絲專頁，取代原先的個人帳號；而謝長廷目前則暫時以噗浪(Plurk)經營為主，保持和網友們的互動。

ISO insists on calling Taiwan a province of ChinaKnowing full well that it is absurd and unjustISO sets an exmple of diminishing human morality

台灣告ISO　瑞士法院不受理

（中央社記者謝佳珍台北9日電）台灣控告國際標準組織（ISO）侵害姓名權，外交部今晚表示，雖然瑞士聯邦法院以無管轄權為由不受理，但外交部仍將繼續努力，以維護台灣合法權益。

外交部發布新聞稿表示，瑞士聯邦法院於台北時間9日晚間針對台灣控告國際標準組織（ISO）的民事案件作成判決，5名承審法官再次肯定台灣有權作為訴訟當事人之一造，符合國家要件，具有國際法人地位及訴訟當事人能力。
外交部說，瑞士聯邦法院另以外交承認與否的政治考量，而作出本案無管轄權的不受理判決，認為台灣所提出的民事訴訟具有政治目的，致使台灣訴求有關民法上的姓名權保護未被受理。
外交部表示，本案因ISO對台灣的不當稱呼，經外交部及相關駐外館處一再與ISO交涉未果，才循瑞士民事司法途徑尋求救濟。
外交部指出，這次案件為民事訴訟案件，並無所謂政治意圖。雖因瑞士聯邦法院以無管轄權為由不受理，但外交部仍將繼續努力，以維護台灣的合法權益。
總部設在日內瓦的非政府組織ISO 在它所訂定的「ISO 3166」國名與地區編碼表中，將台灣稱為「中國台灣省」，廣為國際沿用。台灣於民國96年7月20日在日內瓦提起訴訟，要求正名為「中華民國（台灣）」。

Thoughts on the August 2010 Singapore WASET multi-conferences

On 2010-02-11, I submitted a paper Some questionable web construction approaches and practice to WASET August 2010 International Conference on Internet and Web Engineering.   This conference is one of some ten conferences of the WASET multi-conferences held at the River View Hotel, Singapore, from August 25 to August 27.  I could no longer find the list of the conferences for this WASET multi-conferences, but it is similar to the 2011 International Conference on Information, Communication, Electrical & Computer Engineering in Singapore that consists of eleven conferences.

I discovered WASET conferences from Google search. They looked impressive. I submitted the paper to WASET's August Singapore conference because during the summer months I will be in Taiwan, an easy four hour flight to Singapore.

Before I went to the Singapore meeting, I wrote about WASET in I will be presenting a paper Some questionable web construction approaches and practice at WASET Singapore 2010.

On 2010-08-25, I checked in at the WASET registration desk in the River View Hotel, Singapore.  I was given a lunch voucher, my name tag, a receipt of registration fee, with my name and 600 [sic] handwritten,  a copy of the conference proceeding (WASET year 6 issue 69 August 2010),  and a conference CD.  I read my paper starting around 4:15 PM.  Even though my talk was well received,  it was unclear anyone was interested in the topic.  

Some thoughts on WASET's conference:

1. Paying for WASET conference registration feels more like paying for ransom than paying for a conference.  Wiring 450€ to an unknown account in Dubai, UAE to register for WASET conference is a good source of anxiety for many and will make others think twice about registering.    I was relieved to see that there was really a WASET conference in the River View Hotel, Singapore.  I advise WASET to accept credit card payment like everyone else.
2. WASET must answer authors' messages instead of ignoring them.   Read I will be presenting a paper Some questionable web construction approaches and practice at WASET Singapore 2010 to see how they ignored my messages to them.
   The following private correspondence from IIT Roorkee, India, suggests a general pattern:
   
   

   ... then I wrote this things to  alerts@waset.org. But they did not respond. Finally I send my paper as attachment to alerts@waset.org. But still they didn't respond. ...

3. I wish WASET great success in bringing conferences to such cities as Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, Rome, Tokyo, Singapore as advertised in http://www.waset.org.  This would offer scholars more conferences to choose from, a wonderful contribution.  Judging from my experience with the Singapore conferences, WASET has much work to do to make its conferences useful.  I see the following serious problems:
1. The WASET Singapore multi-conference program lists 257 papers in 11 conferences with an average of 23 papers per conference.  Out of 257, 44 are posters listed in the e-Sessions (page 11 of the PDF program).  There are two parallel sessions in Halls A and B.  The posters are supposed to be in Halls A and B during all three days, but I did not see any in Hall A.  I hope other attendees can share their experience by leaving comments.  Excluding posters, each conference has an average of 19 papers.   The audience is small, around 30,  in the afternoon of 2010-08-25 in Hall A.   That is on average less than three attendees per conference.  With this small number of attendees, the likelihood is small that one will meet people in one's field, or potential collaborators.
2. One way to get a sense whether a conference offers good value is to see how many papers are of interest.  I invite you to read the conference program to decide.  Leave a comment as a service to others.
3. There were no free Internet connection in the conference halls.  I borrowed a hotel Wi-Fi account from a WASET lady staff immediately before my talk.   It worked when I began, but soon started asking for a password.
4. Each talk is 20 minutes.  Yet in session III (see picture below) which went from 3 to 5 PM, there were fourteen talks scheduled, arithmetically could take up a total of nearly four hours. How can this impossibility be achieved?
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. The conference program lists 257 papers, the conference CD contains 245, but the hard copy conference proceeding contains only 25.  Why are 232 papers excluded from the proceeding?  What is the criterion for a paper to be included in the proceeding?
6. I had the misfortune of having a 100 % failure rate interacting with WASET's web (PHP) programs while submitting my paper and while submitting registration.  WASET must fix these web programs right away.
7. Conference programs should not be published as PDF files as they shape up.  Such practice is ineffective and does not engender professional respect.
8. WASET papers are published to the web at http://www.waset.org/journals/waset.  As of today, 2010-09-05, the most recently published papers are those from the April 2010 conferences at http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v64.php.  Only 8 such papers are visible with the rest labeled under construction.  Assuming WASET had published 2010 April conference CD,  it should be little or no work to also have these papers published to the web.  Likewise, there is no excuse not to publish August 2010 conference CD to the web site immediately.  Not publishing papers timely, WASET hurts its credibility and authors' visibility.

If WASET can improve to offer genuinely useful conferences, I will not hesitate to attend its other conferences in exciting cities such as Paris, Tokyo and Rome.  I wish it success.

Microsoft and I

I use very little Microsoft software.  For the last four years, my main machine is a MacBook Pro that only very occasionally runs Windows XP  on a VMWare virtual machine.  Before that, my main machine was a Dell notebook that ran Redhat Linux most of the time, and only very rarely did it boot into MS Windows for special needs such as when I was traveling in Mexico.  Most of my life,  I do not need Microsoft software.

I advise people to stay away from Microsoft.    Here is why:

• Microsoft Windows purposely leave out or play down the most powerful and most important software, viz a terminal program that lets you control your machine and other servers.     The terminal program that Microsoft operating systems offer used to be called MS-DOS, and is now called cmd.    The MS terminal program does not include a most important suite of programs that allow your PC to communicate with other machines.  I am talking about programs such as ssh, scp and sftp.   To illustrate, a straightforward way to transfer files between a PC and an iPhone would be to use scp.  True, one can install cygwin to turn a Windows PC into a Unix machine.  Or, one can install a ssh client such as PuTTY.  But this begs the question as to why Microsoft chooses not to give users the most fundamentally powerful terminal program, out of box.
• My guess is that Microsoft believes most users do not need a powerful terminal program.   Instead,  they need a word processor such as Word, a spreadsheet program such as Excel, a personal data manager such as Access, and a presentation tool such as PowerPoint.   I agree these programs can be useful.   But I find no use for Word except when a paper I publish needs to conform to the style set in a Word template.   PowerPoint has been faulted to divert people's attention from essence to trivial and flashy presentation tidbits.  See US military: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.    I do not ever use PowerPoint even though I give many talks.  My slides are always themselves web pages such as those generated by a Google Docs presentation (Here is an example).  I do not use Access unless a client makes me.  For relational DBMS, my favorite is Postgresql.   I use Excel for very simple jobs. 
• Microsoft software has caused a lot of grief for the world.  This bullet addresses the problem caused by its client-side computing model.  This means, Microsoft's programs such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access save user data to the user's PC, instead of a server machine such as in the case of a Google doc.  Many years ago, my teaching assistants would keep the students work record in an Excel spreadsheet.  When I ask for it, they would email me the spreadsheet file.  I would be helpless if my TA was not responding to my requests for the Excel file, or worse if my TA had taken off vacationing in the Himalayas, thinking she had sent me the file which never arrived.  Clearly, client-side based computing makes information sharing and collaboration difficult and problematic.  Nowadays,  my TAs and I share class grades using Google spreadsheets.  I collaborate with coauthors using Google docs.    Microsoft offers similar service in its software SharePoint.  Since I do not use Microsoft software,  I have not found any use of it.   Finally, I like to mention Evernote, which as a note taking software saves user data to both the user's PC and Evernote's servers, all transparently. 
• Consider the afore-mentioned problems of Microsoft software,  you might think people will have second thoughts about Microsoft.  Here is the frightening fact that boggles the mind: Microsoft owns Taiwan   

ISO is absurd and immoralwhen it calls Taiwan a province of China

 
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) calls Taiwan a province of China in ISO 3166.  See English country names and code elements.

I consider this alone a crime against humanity, as bad as Hitler or worse (most certainly from Taiwanese point of view):

• What gives ISO the right to claim Taiwan a part of China against all historical facts and political realities?
• If Taiwan were a province of China, then it is not a country.   Why then does ISO list it as a country?
• If Taiwan were a province of Taiwan, why do people obtain visa from Taiwan, NOT China,  to go to Taiwan?  When in Taiwan, why do they use Taiwan dollars and NOT RMB?

All I ask from ISO folks is FAIRNESS!  Whatever country you are from, do you appreciate this:

Yo, Swiss, you are from a province of china. 

We Taiwanese resent ISO for its extreme insensitivity towards 23,000,000 Taiwanese.

Many of the 23,000,000 Taiwanese are devastated by this ISO 3166 madness that calls Taiwan a province of China, but they don't understand how extremely damaging ISO 3166 is.

A consequence of ISO 3166 is that tons of software have been written based on this standard.  As a result, ISO helps spreading the Chinese lie Taiwan is a province of China like wildfire.

With ISO 3166, ISO has made many angry Taiwanese write to companies asking them to stop calling Taiwan a province of China.  Most of these Taiwanese do not understand that the real culprit is ISO.   Otherwise they would have condemned ISO, instead of writing to companies that are simply using software based on ISO 3166. 

To clarify, I hereby show a response of a letter I wrote Moodle protesting its web site listing Taiwan as a province of China:

Thank you for contacting us regarding this matter.

Moodle uses the International Organization for Standardization list on moodle.org and in the software (see http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm). We do not decide what countries are included or the naming conventions. The administrator of a Moodle site can modify this list. For more information, see this thread: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=117990

Regards,
Michael Blake
Operations Manager
Moodle.com

ISO folks, what inspiration caused you to hurt 23,000,000 Taiwanese calling Taiwan a province of China? Why don't you say:

Switzland, a province of China

 or

China, a province of Taiwan

To the latter, Taiwanese will surely protest. Because Taiwanese have no territorial ambition towards China.

I will be presenting a paperSome questionable web construction approaches and practiceat WASET Singapore 2010

2010-08-12: I wrote the following about WASET in a correspondence:

WASET's management is a huge problem.  WASET may have some good ideas, but their web sites and management styles are ineffective and easily raise suspicions about their competence and credibility.   Some examples:

• Registration should be done online with a credit card.  The current practice of requiring wiring money must be abolished.
  
• Final conference program should not be published as a PDF file.  Such practice is ineffective and does not engender professional respect.
  
• Owing to the same ineffectiveness, as of today,  post-April 2010 WASET papers remain invisible on the Net.  See   http://www.waset.org/proceedings.php
  

2010-08-09:

I searched Google for WASET Singapore 2010 and could scarcely find any information.   It appears that the original web pages that announced and attracted me to WASET August 2010 International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Electronic & Communication Engineering mega conferences in Singapore have been taken off line.  To promote the conference, more information about the conference should be available, instead of less or none.  If WASET is not promoting the conference in which I am presenting a paper, then I feel I should.  Thus, this update.

2010-08-03: An update:
I took this entry off line after I finally received a response from WASET on 2010-07-29, as follows:

Dear Delegate,
The Updated Singapore Conference Program is available at http://www.waset.org/programs/Singapore10.pdf

Best regards,
B. Brojack

Reading the pdf, you can see my paper Some questionable web construction approaches and practice is scheduled to be read on the first day of the multi-conferences, Wednesday, 2010-08-25.

WASET does not respond to my request for refund, so I assume it will not happen.

I decided to bring this entry back online after I received inquiries about it.  Many people are as anxious and curious about WASET as I.

A friend wrote:

I hope for your sake that WASET turns out not to be a fraud. Do Tweet or ILT [meaning, send updates to the I Love Taiwan google group] the updates on the situation as you have them. 

I too hope WASET offers genuinely useful conferences for scholarly presentation and publication.   If I go to WASET August 2010 Singapore multi-conferences, I promise the world an update.]  

After a paper I submitted to the August 2010 WASET (World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology) conference in Singapore was accepted for presentation and publication,  I began to suspect that WASET is a fraud.  To my surprise,  before mid-June 2010, repeated google searches for waset resulted in no negative comments against WASET, save for one web site I could not take seriously.   I will explain later why I suspected WASET a fraud.

I decided not to pay the $450 Euros registration fee until I received an email from alerts@waset.org, stating

the Tentative SINGAPORE 2010 Conference Program is available at http://www.waset.org/programs/Singapore10.pdf

I was not impressed with the conference program.  But it changed my mind about not registering because it appeared to show some real people presenting papers.  I am a University of San Diego professor.  I submitted a paper to WASET August 2010  Singapore conference because I will be in Asia at that time.  I had invested a significant amount of time with WASET after I made a decision to submit paper to it, and made my paper conform to its required layout, format and style.   If I had made a mistake, let me bite the bullet.

As a prerequisite to register online, I needed to wire 450 Euros to an account in Dubai, United Arab Emirate.  This felt more like paying a ransom than paying for a conference.   Why couldn't WASET accept a credit card, like anyone else? Worse, my bank charged me $35 for the international wiring.

Interesting, yet most unpleasant things began to happen after I wired the 450 Euros. Here is a summary

• registration for the conference at http://www.waset.org/author.php failed using whatever browser and whatever file format the registration page instructs.
• To date, I sent more than fifteen requests to WASET  for help.  They ignored most of them.   When they did respond,  they wanted me to try http://www.waset.org/author.php again and again.

One response was promising.

Dear Author,

Thanks for registration! We have received your documents.

Best regards,
B. Brojack, Secretariat
Editor-in-Science
http://www.waset.org/

In this message, Brojack, Secretariat assured me that I had finally registered.  But her/his next message asked me to try http://www.waset.org/author.php again, even though I complained repeatedly that this registration page always failed with  the same error message.

Finally, I wrote B. Brojack, Secretariat of WASET, for either straightening out my registration impasse, or else refunding my 450 Euros.   No response!

To summarize, I wired 450 Euros to an account in Dubai, UAE to pay for the registration fee for a WASET conference in Singapore.  I was instructed to register for the conference online at http://www.waset.org/author.php, which always failed. I wrote WASET to request for help. They ignored me.  I asked for refund, they also ignored. 

一分鐘破陳致中 疑召妓案

既然有召妓的時間和打到應召站的電話通話記錄, 用通連記錄來追查不是馬上水落石出嗎? You might be interested in reading a related true story on the same blog: Alibi everywhere.