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Today the news agencies, mainstream media and the blogosphere are all abuzz about Google's decision officially announced earlier today regarding the company's intention to stop censoring search results on Google.cn, the search giant's destination site in China. Back in 2006 Google was heavily criticized for their decision to agree to implement censorship on the site at all - but since it was the only way for the company to enter the giant (and growing) online market in China, the decision was that censored search was better than no search at all.

Now they make a different decision after they uncovered numerous hacker attacks on Gmail accounts belonging to Google, some other corporations that have not been named (at least 20 of them exist based on the information available to Google) and accounts of human rights activists in China...Today the news agencies, mainstream media and the blogosphere are all abuzz about Google's decision officially announced earlier today regarding the company's intention to stop censoring search results on Google.cn, the search giant's destination site in China. Back in 2006 Google was heavily criticized for their decision to agree to implement censorship on the site at all - but since it was the only way for the company to enter the giant (and growing) online market in China, the decision was that censored search was better than no search at all.

Now they make a different decision after they uncovered numerous hacker attacks on Gmail accounts belonging to Google, some other corporations that have not been named (at least 20 of them exist based on the information available to Google) and accounts of human rights activists in China. The damage was not really significant judging by the explanation coming from Google but one thing was cl[...]

The New Year vacation is normally the time when I reevaluate the results of the previous year and consider plans for the upcoming year. This year these thoughts are more or less focused on various tech-related aspects for two reasons. The first reason includes me getting an iPod Touch as a gift and spending probably too much time in the App Store downloading and buying apps - and then even more time playing with them on the gadget...

Can you imagine going to YouTube following a link on Twitter to watch some video recommended by a friend as a funny one (though NSFW) and since you are not at work, you feel perfectly safe clicking the link to watch it as this is exactly the activity you want to be involved in right now. And all of a sudden, instead of seeing the familiar player interface loading the video itself, you are served an error message reading something like "Sorry, this content is not available at your location at the moment. You will be able to watch this video in 2 hours...

Due to some urgent work I had to finish over the week, I have left my email inbox unattended for a few days - which normally results in a huge overload and a few hours to sort everything out as a result. This time is no different other than it is Christmas day today on the web (I mean the English-speaking portion of the world wide web here, of course) so there are some difference that I have noticed that I could not ignore and decided to share here.

First of all, my spam folder is full of holiday wishes - both from the real companies I know for some reason and from spammers...

The situation with Apple iPhone in Russia is a very peculiar one but Russian mobile carriers still seem to believe in the geeky gadget - believe in it enough to arrange for the new model, iPhone 3GS sales in Russia even despite of the disaster with the previous model, iPhone 3G.

The very first iPhone model was never officially sold in Russia but Russian users still managed to buy their gadgets from various online stores that brought the devices in illegally here. iPhones were brought here in suitcases full of the gadgets - and easily found the buyers on the gray market...

I don't think that fascination with making money blogging is such a popular trend that it used to be a few years ago when we only started Profy here - at the time everyone seemed to be determined it was dead-simple to start a blog and begin making money off the blog by sharing some thoughts accompanied by Adsense blocks. Launching two or three blogs simultaneously definitely sounded like a surefire way to maximize revenue so we saw tons of blogs no one ever read advertised heavily by their authors everywhere in hopes they could get yet another reader...

Earlier this month a leading Russian email provider and portal Mail.ru made huge international news due to rumors about the company abandoning Yandex search engine for Google. As of now, web search on the portal is powered by Yandex, the local Russian leader in online search. But rumors everywhere had it that the company would replace Yandex by Google in 2010 - which definitely posed an appealing opportunity for Google with its not very solid position in the web search in Russia.

But today the rumors have been confirmed officially by the companies in the press release about the new partnership. What Mail...

I've been working in the startup and entrepreneurial online community long enough to notice one trend: almost every startup wants one of two things - either be acquired by Google or become the next Google themselves. Of course there are some realistic guys who know that any of these two things happens so rarely that chances are neither of them will happen to this particular startup. But even the most reasonable startups at least secretly dream about becoming the next Google one day - even if they keep silence about this secret desire...

When I sift through dozens of spam emails that land in my inbox daily or moderate numerous spam comments here on Profy, I can't help but repeat the same questions again and again because some things in the behavior of spammers are totally beyond my understanding. So I thought that I'd publish the questions here - and who knows, probably some people who are actually engaged in these activities will arrive here and answer some of them so that spam will at least lead to irritation without any further curiosity in the future...