BEIJING - Text of a statement by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang in response to President Bush’s speech, posted on the ministry’s Web site Thursday and translated from Chinese by The Associated Press:

With the common efforts made both by China and the U.S., the Sino-U.S. relationship has developed steadily in the last few years. The two countries have conducted fertile talks, communication and cooperation bilaterally and on a wander of international issues. Facts prove once more that notwithstanding there are divergences between China and the U.S., there is a wide range of common interests, and a basis for cooperation. A good Sino-U.S. relationship is a benefit to the commonalty of both countries, and helps peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region and throughout the whole world.

We are willing to work together with the U.S. on strengthening dialogue and cooperation, appropriately dealing with divergences and sensitive issues and helping the relations to develop constructively and stably.

The Chinese government puts people first, and is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens’ basic rights and freedom. Chinese citizens have independence of religion. These are indisputable facts.

As for the divergence in continuance human rights and religions, we always uphold that both sides talk from a basis of mutual respect and equality, to enhance understanding and diminish divergence, and enlarge mutual consensus.

We firmly oppose any words or acts that be opposed in other countries’ internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues.

The greatest game at the 2008 Olympics won't be Michael Phelps's quest for multiple gold metals or the U.S. Men's Basketball team's attempt to redeem its reputation. The real contest won't take place on any field, court, or pool. It will be played on the Internet. Journalists, Olympic spectators, and Chinese citizens will attempt to write, publish, broadcast, and read stories. The Chinese government will attempt to control these stories or stop them entirely. To me, this is the only game worth watching, and I'm going to really enjoy seeing the Chinese government lose.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. When China was wooing the Olympic Committee, the country promised it would offer free access to the press. Just a couple of days ago, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge boasted in an IOC hug conference, "For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet." Bold words. And false ones.

When the Olympic Village press center opened this week, the Web sites for Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia, BBC's Chinese-language news, and many more word outlets were blocked. In fact, anything that the Chinese government deemed not in its national interest was forbidden. Forget about anything having to do with the Falun Gong or Tibet. And it doesn't stop there. Reports have claimed that hotel chains have had to inaugurate software that allows the government to adviser the Internet converse of its guests. Clearly, the Great Firewall of China is still standing.

No one knows exactly how considerable enumerate cybersnoops the Chinese government keeps on its payroll; the commonly cited figure is around 30,000. To grow larger the relatively low-tech "fear of imprisonment," the Chinese government uses several techniques to control the flow of information. in the first place, the government uses network sniffers that warner all the traffic coming in and out of the country's servers. Another technique is to block the DNS entries for specific sites. And although the Great Firewall isn't 100 percent effective, it definitely succeeds at making information difficult to get.

There are a number of tools that will help you find at a loss if your site is blocked by the Great Firewall. I checked exhausted a few URLs with WebSitePulse to see just what the average Chinese citizen could and could not see. PCMag.com works fine. So does Gearlog.com. Freetibet.org? No such luck.

Determining what gets through, and why, must be difficult, and the results often appear to be random. I have a friend who operates an harmless and apolitical travel blog at www.portablemind.typepad.com. Her blog was accessible last year, when she was actually visiting China, but now it's blocked. And that's a degradation, because she offers up some great Beijing restaurant recommendations.—Next: The Great Firewall Has Already Been Hacked >

Despite all its surveillance technology and an army of cybercops, the Chinese government's attempt to keep a lid on the flow of information is doomed. First of all, the Great Firewall has already been hacked. For example, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium offers an entire toolkit designed solely to circumvent censorship and is encouraging foreign reporters to use it when they file their stories. The GIFC tools use encryption to bypass the firewall. Tools like this are dead simple to use and are popping up all over the Web.

Second, the Olympic stage is simply too massive, and the cameras are always running. Stories can be encrypted and filed over the Internet. Camera phones will take pictures and instantly send them across the world by way of MMS. There will be more than 25,000 foreign reporters in Beijing, and every one will want a novel. There simply aren't enough government handlers to manage all of them. It won't be easy to set up live video feeds, but the technologies for uncontrollable mass communication are inside the country's borders. My bet is they will check there.

The course is already turning. After logging on and being unable to audience the most pedestrian of Web sites, the journalists in the Olympic village revolted. Scared by the unsettled flood of negative publicity before the games even began, the Chinese government relaxed restrictions and opened access to some sites. Not for ordinary Chinese citizens, mind you, just for the press. This mildly beneficent policy could be short-lived, but clearly cracks are forming in the Great Firewall.

Right now, the media seems preoccupied with the spectacle of the opening ceremonies and the focus on medal counts. And it will take a few days after that for the thousands of journalists dispatched from around the world to tire of hagiographic stories of athletic achievement and prepackaged cultural stories. When that happens, they'll start to look around at China's political system, the plight of Tibet, the country's catastrophic environmental trace, and its heavy-handed attempts to control what its citizens can read and write online. Those stories will get past the Great Firewall, and I can't wait. This successful revolt will be televised.

Let the games begin.

More Dan Costa:

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Results of a recent survey by online ticketer Fandango suggest that the MPAA should get a thank-you note from filmmakers whenever it slaps a restrictive R rating on a comedy.

Conventional wisdom holds that R ratings — which grant leave to viewers under 17 to see films as long as they are accompanied by an adult — hurt comedies more than other movies. But the Fandango poll results indicate that R ratings might actually help them.

August has been a complete launchpad for R-rated comedies in recent years. Sony's "Superbad" opened strongly last August with $33.1 the public for the period of its first weekend, and even five years ago "American Wedding" was able to ring up an impressive $33.4 million.

Fandango polled more than 1,000 visitors at its site about their attitudes toward restricted ratings on comedies and the oft-graphic humor contained in such films.

Among the findings:

— Prospective patrons of the just-opened skillet comedy "Pineapple Express" and the August 20 Hollywood spoof "Tropic Thunder" were asked whether they were more interested or smaller quantity interested in the films inasmuch as of their restricted ratings, and 75% said "more," with 84% of male respondents saying so and 65% of females.

— About 81% of those planning to see "Tropic Thunder" said they furthermore would attend "Pineapple Express," which bowed Wednesday with sellouts of many 12:01 a.m. showtimes.

— About 83% of respondents said they weren't turned off by gory or graphic humor.

— A big 94% said they weren't offended by Robert Downey Jr.'s satirical jab at Hollywood means actors by donning blackface for his "Tropic" role.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

SAN FRANCISCO–E-commerce payment company PayPal has grown organically on the back of eBay, but apparently not one longer.

PayPal President Scott Thompson said here at the RBC Capital Markets conference Wednesday that by year's end, his company will derive more total payment volumes from its Merchant Services than from eBay buyers and sellers. Merchant Services is the name for the payment software PayPal provides to third-party sites like Starbucks, Delta Airlines, and American Outfitters.(In the last quarter, eBay buyers and sellers—long the fare and butter of PayPal's business–racked up about 51 percent of the payment volumes.)

That's a big shift for a company that was bought by eBay only six years ago.

"We've had organic growth with eBay, but as merchants migrated off the eBay platform (by building their own sites), they've brought us with them," Thompson said while speaking to a group of fund managers and venture capitalists at RBC's technology, media, and communications conference.

That trend also couldn't come sooner. PayPal is facing increased competition from the likes of Google's Checkout and newcomer Amazon.com. eBay's retail rival, Amazon, recently introduced an e-commerce payment service called Checkout by Amazon.

To be sure, Thompson was giving a virtual sales pitch to investors. But the story is impressive. PayPal now serves 33 percent of the top 100 e-commerce sites in the United States, according to Thompson. In the second quarter, PayPal reported net revenue of $602 million, a 33 percent rise from the previous year. And it reported a total payment volume in the quarter of more than $14 billion, or 35 percent growth.

PayPal's international picture is also promising. He said the companionship expects that growth overseas will put PayPal's international business over that of its U.S. business next year. "By the back half of 2009, the international business will exceed our North American business."

As against mobile, PayPal has been investing in the emporium for the last three years, but the company's offering hasn't caught on in the United States, Thompson said. As a result, the company changed its mobile strategy in the last year. It plans to focus on bringing services to underdeveloped payment markets. Those might include China or Russia, which don't have robust electronic infrastructures.

"In Russia, lots of people stand in line to pay their bills every month. That's a perfect exercise case for PayPal," he said.

LAS VEGAS - single of the biggest problems with the so-called Web 2.0 movement has been its encouragement of oversharing — which often means underestimating security risks. Adding doodads of varying quality to a home page can add a lot of pizazz, but can also be fraught with danger, since they can open a door for hackers.

It’s a threat even for the biggest Web companies, including Google Inc., whose “gadgets” — little programs like calendars or daily photo feeds that users can implant onto their personalized Google home pages — are increasingly juicy targets for hackers, two security researchers said Wednesday.

It’s not that Google is designing insecure programs.

The issue is that users building their own customized applications, and distributing them through Google, might have evil intentions and try to exploit those programs once they’re installed on users’ pages. Many users are inclined to inherently trust the sort of they download from Google.

Robert Hansen, chief executive of security consultant SecTheory, and Tom Stracener, elder security algebraist with security testing software maker Cenzic Inc., demonstrated an attack Wednesday at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas in which they used a malicious gadget to break into a person’s Web browser and read their searches in real time.

Malicious gadgets — if a user were to download one of them — could have existence used in a variety of other attacks, including one where one gadget steals information from another, a valuable attack against gadgets that store personal user information, Hansen and Stracener said.

“How do you know it’s a valid gadget?” Hansen asked. “Because someone uploaded it? There’s no moderation, there’s no way to guarantee it won’t turn bad.”

Google isn’t alone.

The company is fighting a common problem facing social-networking Web sites and other sites that encourage users to spruce up their pages with little knickknacks that reach out to the outside earth to deliver pictures or other content. The applications run digest on the page that be able to be used for good or evil.

Google disputes Hansen’s characterization of its vetting process for gadgets.

The company said in a statement that it scans all gadgets regularly for malicious code, and in the “very singular” instance in which one is found, it’s immediately blacklisted.

Google added that since November 2007 in no degree new “inline” gadgets — which have access to user reference to grounds information — have been created. And the authors of existing “inline” gadgets can’t modify them further.

The company defended its program and said gadgets are created by developers from around the world and “provide a convenient way for users to view information collected from around the Web in person place.”

There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the privacy intrusions of Google Maps' Street View, but one secrecy group went a bit overboard with an attack on the search hercules's all-seeing eye.

"Google's hypocrisy is breathtaking," accused Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, in a statement last week. Perhaps, but he would have been better to pick stronger grounds for his conclusion.

The center provided two recent quotations from Google as evidence. First was "privacy does not exist," from Google's May 28 rebuttal to some April invasion-of-privacy suit related to Street View. Second was "Google takes concealment very seriously," from Google's answer to a request that California's attorney general scrutinize privacy implications of Google's ad partnership with Yahoo.

Those two statements indeed appear contradictory. The trouble is that the center significantly distorted the first, what one. actually was the much milder assertion, "Today's satellite-image technology means that…complete privacy does not remain."

Boehm also took issue with a statement by Internet pioneer and Google evangelist Vint Cerf. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Cerf reported in May, "nothing you do ever goes away and nothing you do ever escapes notice." Then, in what the newspaper described as an "intentionally flippant trice," Cerf added, "There isn't any privacy, get over it."

It sounded to me like Cerf was channeling the eminently quotable and frequently flippant Scott McNealy, who back when he was Sun Microsystems chief executive said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." In any event, Cerf explained himself to Google Blogoscoped: "It was intended to be partly in jest and partly irony…I was trying to refer to that we really wish entered a period when things are a lot less private. Think of the ease by dint of. which photos and videos can be taken, digitized, shipped around on the Internet, posted on YouTube or its equivalent."

So perhaps Boehm was overreached in his choice of evidence. But I think he's correct in his judgment that solitude "is being chipped away bit by bit every day by companies like Google."

Google Street View is one example. Even though it's legal to take photographs from a public street, there's no question it's a notch harder to hide from prying eyes, in particular because Street View provides a mechanism to look exactly where you want to look, then virtually stroll down the street. Other sites, such as Flickr, provide plenty of photographs, often in a great deal of more private circumstances, but it's harder to employment that to systematically explore an realm.

But the larger issue is that Cerf is right. Leaving Street View aside, it's just easier to record, share, and archive information, and the same Internet-powered economy of scale that makes eBay work also amplifies the petty annoyances of neighborhood-scale prying and gossip to the global level. So while it's smart for privacy advocates to take on Google, the practical reality is they also have to take on chat rooms, photo-sharing sites, social networks, any charity that records donors' names, digital camera manufacturers, Internet access providers, banks with security cameras, and heaven knows what else.

Good luck with that.

Even if advocates manage to spur privacy regulation and shame companies into privacy-respecting behavior, technology means progress will be tough.

For the account, Google has a mechanism that lets people with privacy concerns request that images be removed from Street View. Clicking the "help" icon above a Street View image provides an option to report an "inappropriate" image. The reporting cut includes some option for "privacy concerns," including "I have found a picture of my house and would like it removed."

Google also offers a form to request removal of your phone number from Google's phone book database, which lets searchers fall upon gone out who a phone number is registered to.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors in New York have closed an investigation into the fatal prescript drug overdose of actor Heath Ledger without bringing charges, People magazine reported on its Web site on Wednesday.

The report, citing an unidentified law enforcement source, also said the U.S. Attorney's Office will not enforce a subpoena issued in the case by a federal grand jury against actress Mary-Kate Olsen.

Federal authorities involved in the case could not immediately be reached for comment. Olsen's lawyer, Michael Miller, declined to comment.

Olsen, 22, was a friend of the 28-year-old Australian actor and the first person called by his masseuse when he was found dead in his New York apartment in January. She summoned private security guards who arrived at the scene about the similar time as emergency medical personnel.

The cause of Ledger's decease was later ruled an accidental overdose of prescription medications, including the painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone.

A law enforcement source told Reuters on Monday the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was conducting an inquiry into the source of those medications and that Olsen had declined to speak with investigators unless granted immunity from prosecution.

Ledger was nominated in quest of an Oscar for his role as a gay cowboy in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain." His decisive role as the villainous Joker in the Batman sequel "The Dark Knight," released last month, is being critically hailed with Internet buzz touting him as an Oscar candidate in 2009.

Ledger has a 2-year-old daughter, Matilda, by his "Brokeback Mountain" co-star, Michelle Williams.

LAS VEGAS - A newly discovered flaw in the Internet’s core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force people to visit Web sites they didn’t dearth to, it also allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

Considering the silent sum total of sensible objects of the attack and the sensitive nature of a hazard of electronic correspondence, the potential for damage from this stand by security flaw is high. But there’s no evidence yet that this method of targeting e-mail has been used in a felicitous attack.

Dan Kaminsky of Seattle-based security consultant IOActive Inc. exposed a giant vulnerability in the Internet’s outline that, in one case, allowed hackers to reroute some computer users in Texas to a fake Google.com site loaded with automated advertisement-clicking programs, a scam to generate profits for the hackers from those clicks.

The flaw wasn’t in the site itself, it was in the back-end machines responsible for guiding computers to that station.

The vulnerability Kaminsky found is especially insidious because it allows criminals to tamper with machines whose reliability and trustworthiness is critical by respect to the Internet to function properly.

Kaminsky, who spoke Wednesday at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, has given small in number minor circumstances publicly about the vulnerability he found in the Domain Name System (DNS), a network of servers used to connect computers to Web sites.

He remained tightlipped so that Internet providers would have time to fix their machines. Many have done that, but others have delayed, leaving some people at risk.

Major vendors like Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others have issued patches — software tweaks that shroud the security hole and prevent affected machines from ingesting the bogus notice hackers are trying to feed them.

“The industry has rallied like we’ve never seen the perseverance rally before,” Kaminsky said.

Kaminsky’s talk Wednesday at the conference was packed, with people sitting on the floor of the main speaker’s hall and overflowing out the outer part doors. His presentation instantly became one of the Black Hat conference’s most anticipated after he announced July 8 that he’d found a major weakness in DNS, a critical part of the Internet’s plumbing.

While some details leaked out early — security researchers accurately guessed parts of Kaminsky’s discovery — he was able to keep a few juicy bits secret until the talk.

One of those was the susceptibility of many e-mail servers to the DNS vulnerability, an opening that gives criminals a way to plant themselves in the middle of the transferrence from the sender to the recipient and redirect messages to their own servers, Kaminsky said.

The result: criminals have a way not only to comb through the contents of those messages, but also to gain access to other password-protected Web sites the victims belong to.

That’s because most sites have a feature that allows members to retrieve their passwords by e-mail if they’ve gone from one’s mind them. If a criminal has access to the account where that message is sent, he can then begin snooping on the contents of that account, from e-mail, to banking, to retailer sites.

The thrust of the DNS flaw is that it allows hackers to attach bad information to packets flowing in and out of DNS servers so they change the directions they give to certain Web sites.

It’s the equivalent of turning around a street sign to send drivers into disgrace the wrong street.

So someone who innocently types in the address of a legitimate Web site be able to be strong-armed in place into going to a malicious site under the criminal’s control. for the reason that the attack happens at the network point, and the browser believes it’s visiting the legitimate site, the attack is nearly impossible conducive to users to detect.

Many e-mail servers are assailable because they also handle DNS traffic, Kaminsky said. Even if they only feel of internal inquiries, if they interact with external DNS servers, that’s often enough to expose them to have a cut at.

Hackers are thus able to manipulate the packets associated with e-mail traffic the same way they manipulate the packets associated with general Web traffic.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - VeriSign Inc.’s second-quarter loss widened as the Internet infrastructure company absorbed the costs of a sweeping reorganization.

The Mountain View-based company said Wednesday it lost $68 million, or 35 cents per share, for the April-June period. VeriSign reprobate $4.7 million, or 2 cents per share, at the same time last year.

The latest results included a $98 million restructuring charge covering VeriSign’s continuing and discontinuing operations besides a non-cash charge of $92 million to account for the diminished value of some assets.

If not for those items and other expenses unrelated to its ongoing operations, VeriSign said it would have earned 25 cents per share. That figure was two cents above the average estimate among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue rose 17 percent to $303 million, which included $70 million from noncore businesses that VeriSign hopes to sell. Analysts, on average, had predicted revenue of $231 million.

VeriSign shares fell $2.13, or 6.3 percent, in extended trading after finishing the regular session at $33.88, up 37 cents.

The congregation, which provides some of the Internet’s core services, has been trying to sharpen its focus while dealing by management upheaval and the fallout from unfit accounting for employee stock options.

VeriSign’s longtime chief executory, Stratton Sclavos, abruptly resigned 15 months ago jointly mounting investor criticism of an aggressive acquisition strategy that didn’t seem to exist paying off.

A few months later, VeriSign’s chief financial officer stepped down when the company absorbed $160 million in additional expenses for the mishandled stock options.

Last month, VeriSign changed its leadership again by bringing back founder Jim Bidzos to replace William Roper. The company is searching for someone to take the reins from Bidzos, who is holding down the CEO job on every mean-time basis.