Author: Admin

Friday, June 19, 2009

Several organizations have increased their Farsi services in the wake of the events surrounding the recent presidential election. Google has added Farsi-to-English translation as one of its translation options to its Google Translate service. Similarly, Facebook has launched a Farsi version of its web site. The BBC has increased the number of broadcasting satellites that it uses for its Farsi news channel, BBC Persian Television.

Google’s translation services currently only provide translation from Farsi to English. Franz-Josef Och stated that this was to enable people in Iran to communicate directly via the Internet with the outside world, saying “Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.”. The company states that it is working to provide translation between Farsi and the other 40 languages that it provides on its Translate service.

Facebook’s Farsi version of its web site, which is still marked as a beta-test version, was launched rapidly, with, the company states, the assistance of more than 400 Farsi speakers who submitted translations of the contents of the site.

Both companies state that their reasons for expanding their services are to promote communication, and are not politically motivated.

The BBC has increased the number of broadcasting satellites that it uses for broadcasting its Farsi news channel. This is, it states, in response to signal jamming of its broadcasts by the Iranian government. (The Iranian government accuses BBC Persian Television, which is funded by the British Foreign Office, of being a propaganda service for the British Government.) It states that its broadcasts on the Hot Bird 6 satellite had been aggressively jammed, and that therefore it was now also broadcasting from the Eutelsat W2M satellite, and planned to start broadcasting from Nilesat as well in the near future.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Marion Schaffer is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the Oakville riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed her regarding her values, her experience, and her campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

The popular social news site Digg.com was suffering from what appears to be a user revolt in response to the deletion of several articles revealing the encryption keys for HD-DVD, which would allow individuals to remove the encryption from HD-DVDs. Users are posting articles with links to the codes. At approximately 1:40 a.m [Eastern time] Digg.com was no longer online but returned online with a message from Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, who declared that he would not delete any more articles that contain the code.

“We’ll be back shortly. Digg.com will be down for a brief period while we make some changes,” said a statement previously posted on Digg.com’s website. The notation (Out of service) appeared as the page’s title.

According to co-founder Jay Adelson, the stories were deleted as a result of intellectual property infringement, although some users of the site speculate that the stories were deleted as a result of ties to the MPAA and its Diggnation podcast.

“We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code. But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be,” said Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg in a statement on Digg’s blogging site. The message also appears as a story submitted by Rose on Digg’s main page. Rose included the encryption key in the title of the story, and joined countless other users by repeating the key in the comment section of the story.

A large number of Digg.com users were spamming the site with the 16 byte key to such an extent, apparently, that the site became almost unreadable. Users were not able to submit new material even though a “success” message was displayed after clicking submit.

As with Digg, during the past 48 hours, Wikipedia also has experienced some intensive user (and non-user) efforts to post the HD-DVD codes. Pending legal instructions to the contrary, Wikipedia volunteers (“administrators”) have struggled with limited success to keep the codes off its site. Wikinews also experienced some trouble with users and non-users posting the code.

==Sources==

• Kevin Rose. “Digg This” — Digg the Blog, May 2, 2007
• Chris Scott Barr. “Extra Extra! Mob takes over Digg – Riot ensues!” — SlashGear, May 2, 2007
• kdawson. “Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt” — Slashdot.com, May 2, 2007
• Jay Adelson. “What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?” — Digg the Blog, May 1, 2007
• Elijah Horton. “Was it Worth It, Digg?” — fieryprophet, May 1, 2007
• On Wikipedia’s situation, see: [1]

Friday, January 25, 2008

Pioneer modern Anaesthetic techniques Thomas Cecil Gray, born 11 March 1913 in Liverpool, died peacefully 5 January 2008 at home in Formby. A requiem mass was held at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral on 26 January 2008.

Born in Liverpool in 1913, educated at Ampleforth College, he qualified in medicine at The University of Liverpool in 1937. He began his career as a General Practitioner before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps.

He later returned to the University to become Head of the Department of Anaesthesia and was made Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1970, retiring in 1976. As Senior Lecturer he established the Department of Anaesthesia at Liverpool University, the ‘Liverpool technique’, based on the triad of unconsciousness, analgesia and muscle relaxation, was developed as a result.

Professor Gray was the editor of the British Journal of Anaesthesia from 1948 to 1964. Until recently Professor Gray continued to give occasional lectures at the university.

Professor Gray was presented with a CBE by Queen Elizabeth and in 1982 was honoured by Pope John Paul II who made him a Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. In 2007 the Liverpool Echo included him in its list of the 800 greatest Liverpudlians, as part of Liverpools 800th anniversary.

Married twice. He married his first wife Marjorie Kathleen Hely in 1937 they had 2 children, she died in 1978; He married Pamela Mary Corning in 1979, they had 1 son. He had four grandchildren.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

On Monday, at 10.14 pm UTC, the Wikimedia server cluster experienced a total power failure, taking down Wikipedia, Wikinews, and all other Wikimedia websites.

The servers are housed in a colocation facility (colo) in Tampa, Florida, USA. They occupy two racks, with each rack receiving electricity from two independent supplies. However, both supplies have circuit-breakers in them, and both opened at the same time, leading to a total power failure. All computers immediately went down. It’s normal for fire safety regulations to prohibit uninterruptible power supplies in colos, with the colo providing its own UPS and generator instead. The circuit breakers were on the computer side of this emergency power system, so none of the computers continued to receive power to survive the breaker trip or shut down safely.

The actual reason why the circuit breakers tripped is currently unknown.

When power was restored, it was discovered that most of the MySQL databases that store the data which makes up Wikipedia et al had been corrupted. The main database and the four slaves had all damaged the data on their hard disk drives beyond the ability of the auto-correction to repair. Only one copy survived safely, on a machine that is used for report generation and maintenance tasks, which remained 31 hours backlogged while catching up after an unusually heavy update load during the previous week.

Volunteer Wikimedia engineers worked through the night rebuilding the databases from the sole good copy onto the other servers. The Wikipedia database is over 180Gb in size, making the copying process last 1.5 – 2 hours for every server it was performed upon.

Regular back-ups of the database of Wikipedia projects are maintained – the encyclopedia in its entirety was not at risk. The last database download was made on February 9; all edits since then could only have been laboriously rebuilt from logs and recovered from the damaged database requiring much more time and effort.

Limited read-only service was established late Tuesday afternoon, with editing becoming possible 24 hours after the power failure. Final repairs continue now, as well as upgrades to prevent similar issues in the future. Server-intensive features, such as categories and ‘watchlists’ that display recent changes to selected articles to registered users, remain disabled to ease the load on the recovering systems.

The process which led to the damage originated with the operating system, disk controllers, or hard drives failing to flush the data correctly.

If the power to a database server is cut mid-write, the database may be corrupted and unreadable, however the operating system, hardware, and software are designed to make this very unlikely. In a previous incident in 2004 power was also lost to a server but the database was undamaged.

To avoid such damage, each database server saves a copy of an edit to be applied to the database on a separate storage system before making the actual update to the database itself. This so-called ‘write-ahead logging’ should ensure that in the event of a system crash, the database can be rebuilt from a ‘last-good’ state by replaying the edits saved in the log.

Earlier this year popular blogging site LiveJournal suffered a similar power failure when another customer at their colocation facility pressed an Emergency Power Off button, intended for use only by firefighters. The company suffered database corruption similar to that seen at Wikimedia.

LiveJournal are now fitting UPS to their servers to ensure that they have time to shut down safely in the event of a power failure. Wikimedia was said to be investigating the possibility of fitting similar equipment at the time of this failure.

Several pundits have suggested that the use of another database, such as the proprietary database Oracle or the free PostgreSQL, would have avoided the database corruption seen at the server cluster. A post-mortem of the incident show the failure was in the operating system, or the hardware, or some combination of the two. LiveJournal, which also uses MySQL, reported similar database corruption after their power cut.

The Wikimedia foundation only allows the use of free software on its systems, and future versions of the Mediawiki software will support the PostgreSQL database.

Users are reminded that during times of system failure or excessive demand, they can still search Wikipedia using Google. The articles may be viewed using Google’s cache.

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Monday, July 6, 2020

A number of Muslim-majority countries around the world implement Shari’a — commonly known as Islamic law — and have laws against apostasy and blasphemy. Numerous times, over the years, people have been sentenced to death penalty for renouncing Islam. In 2018, a Pakistani journalism student Mashal Khan was killed by a mob lynch after he was accused of blasphemy. At times there have been protests against the restrictions on free speech in Islam.

Other than the restriction of free speech, many Muslim majority countries have declared homosexuality as a capital crime, and observe a strict dress code for women. Iran has banned a number of female chess players for not wearing a hij?b. An Iranian woman was sentenced 20 years for removing hij?b while protesting the strict dress code.

Wikinews had gotten in touch with Tanzanian-born ex-Muslim Zara Kay to discuss the struggles an ex-Muslim woman faces, as well as her organisation: Faithless Hijabi.  Faithess Hijabi is an organisation which helps other ex-Muslim women by sharing their stories and experiences.  Its Facebook page has over 7000 likes, and Zara Kay, who identifies herself as an antithiest, had previously helped a Saudi teenager Rahaf Mohammed escape to Canada.

The following is the interview with Zara Kay that took place in 2019.

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