Linked List: January 30, 2006

Monday, 30 January 2006

Official Google Blog: Google in China ★

Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel:

Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world’s population, however, does so far more severely. Whether our critics agree with our decision or not, due to the severe quality problems faced by users trying to access Google.com from within China, this is precisely the choice we believe we faced.

This is the sort of straight-forward explanation I was hoping to see. But McLaughlin is dissembling with regard to his explanation why the regular google.com domain doesn’t work well in China — he makes it sound like a technical problem, but the real reason is that the Chinese authorities block it.

fseventer ★

Freeware app allows you to monitor all file system changes; uses the same underlying mechanism for noticing file system changes as Spotlight. (Via Rentzsch.)

Update: Siracusa has informed me that the fsevents API is undocumented and not supported for third-party use, and that apps that play with it like fseventer risk hosing Spotlight. So consider yourself warned.