Recently I started translating Chinese Open Source technology bloggers to get a different perspective on some technologies. For one I was surprised at the differences of perception. There were ideas I had never considered or actually thought about at all. There were also some common themes. My Chinese internal martial arts teacher lead me onto google translate as he said the translations were pretty good. Whereas translating Thai doesn’t work so well for example but Chinese does. I read a few articles and saw the theme of big business interfering with privacy. Normally we would hear in the West criticisms of the government in China whereas one article in particular criticised big business for not respecting user freedoms. For example a large corporation scanned peoples hard drives illegally in China for data mining and the same thing happens in the West as well but in different ways.  

Also a blogger described Open Source tech as a form of suffering. It makes sense as going without the pros of big business consumer systems is hard. In my own mind I believe that Open Source is better and has more personal freedoms for altering or disseminating. Yet the blogger pointed out we are not free from big business mining our data and eroding personal freedoms. Even if you are on an Open Source system you can still suffer from data mining so there is another strong point.