Saturday 11 December 2010
World of Warcraft EU Silvermoon - Last minutes before Cataclysm
Last minutes on EU Silvermoon before WoW: Cataclysm expansion release.
Enjoy!
Thursday 25 November 2010
Commercialization, Googlization and Globalization of The Pirate Bay
This movie touches on the topic of commercialization, googlization and globalization of the infamous torrent-tracking website: The Pirate Bay.
To create this movie I have used The Wayback Machine (WM) as an interface to the Internet archive found at archive.org, Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Ripper found at the Digital Methods Initiative website, and a Firefox extension/addon called GrabThemAll.
Thank You for watching this Video.
YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBNbTDdSsxk
Tuesday 23 November 2010
Samurai Champloo Indoor Wallpainting
This is an old one.. Forgot to drop it when I redesigned my blog.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/user/welpaa#p/a/u/1/bPI-pyw3Fkg
High5 for Charli, Karol n Wełpa.
Rasta.
Monday 22 November 2010
War on Google
Abstract
This paper concerns the issue of googlization of the Internet. It focuses on the study of Google search engines from three countries: Global Google representing Americanization, in opposition to the British and Polish engines. Various theoreticians have proved that google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome has enormous power over the user. This study exposes how and to what extent is Google globalizing local information cultures.
Introduction
The issue of googlization is taking a central spot in nowadays debate about Americanization. Various influencing theoreticians have proved that Google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome often affects how we perceive the world around us. This enormous power gathered by just one company raises many questions, as Google is taking over more and more firms each year.
One could say that since Google has become a corporate giant, the search engine started to convey messages dependent on various factors, making the corporation a globalizing force that drastically affects the Internet as a medium. According to Grimmelman:
Following the notion presented by Grimmelman, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate Google’s local search engines in search of globalization biases. I will conduct the study by analyzing three Google domains (Global, British, Polish), which will be followed by querying all three Google’s with the same phrase in language used by each country. The main target of this paper will be answering the question whether Google is a globalizing machine?
Does each query return global or local sources? How are those sources positioned? To what extent is the British and Polish Google Americanized/globalized? Is any of them glocalized, and if yes, how and to what extent?
Method
In order to describe the sample it is most important to remind that three different googles will be taken under consideration. The British Google and the Polish one will serve as a basis for the analysis in search of Americanization of the search outcome. The international or rather American Google will be seen as a measure for the previous two. This will enable to show how the same query in different cultures, and may give results that are more than ‘linked’ to each other, especially in terms of Americanization.
I have chosen those particular countries for various reasons, coming both from my language skills, as well as from the desire to generate a perfect sample. Choosing Britain and Poland in relation to America, gave me an advantage of having a group that is characterized by both a fully economically evolved country and an evolving one. This gave me a possibility to expose the process of globalization of Google on two different levels. Other important aspects describing the sample group can be found in the language used. Since Britain and United states use English as their native verbal communication, Poland in this case will stand as a counterweight for the exposure of the process described above.
The term that will be used to query the global and two local Googles is ‘war’ (‘wojna’ translated into Polish). I have chosen this particular word for multiple reasons. The first one relates to the universality of the word, as wars have struck humanity since the beginning of mankind. Each war has it’s own history and stories. This will probably remove the international bias of the query, giving each search outcome a chance to produce results typical for each country. The second reason why I have chosen ‘war’ as a perfect word to fit each of the search boxes is the recentness of the topic and its strong connection to journalism. This would give each country a chance to present its own recent view on the issue.
Before conducting the study, I find most important to discuss how should we perceive globalization carried by the search engine.
According to Richard Rogers, googlization is a “political-economy style critique, considering how Google’s free-service-for-profile model may be spreading across industries and cultures” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18). Following this notion, I will search both local Google queries for sites of, one could say, global origins. The idea is that local google search engines will try to boost global or American sites up the query. This related directly to what is described by the same author as Back-end googlization, where he claims that “(…) the power of search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices (source inclusion in the top results) together with the users’ apparent ‘respect’ for the orderings (not looking further). Google’s model also relies on registrational interactivity, where a user’s preference as well as history are registered, stored and employed, increasingly, to serve customized results” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18-19).
Other important aspect of this study focuses on the following questions: What will be defined as Global? What will be defined as local? In this case global will mean sites of American origins, probably listed in the google.com query. While focusing on the definition of local, I perceive a small problem rooted in the language of two googles. As English language will be dominant across the two platforms, defining local British sites will be particularly problematic. In cases where the URL addresses will not prove the origins of a website, I will look at the content of the sites, trying to determine whether it is rooted in American or British culture. The definition of Local will therefore focus on the cultural origins, country’s history and a general national bias transmitted by each site.
Trying to get the results as unbiased as possible, I deleted all the history and cookies from the Firefox browser. While analyzing all three queries, I looked at the first fifty results of each search, but as described by the quoted theoreticians, the most important results should come from the first pages of each search to which the potential viewer is exposed at most.
Results
Due to the simplicity of the study, there were no major complications at all. While analyzing the produced outcome (appendix 1 and 2) the first notable fact is that Wikipedia takes the first two spots for each of the queries. The second point of high influence can be found by focusing on both British and global Google, where in both cases Warhammer Online EU and Warhammer Online US can be found on the first pages of both queries. On the other hand, Polish Google does not include any of these sites in the first fifty results for the query. Similarly to Warhammer, Internet Movie Database and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are also positioned on the first results pages of both queries. Catholic Encyclopedia appeared on the first page of the British Google’s query, and it was repeated on the second page of the global search, situated on the 11th position. This repetition of websites was extremely common for the global and UK’s Google, where 31 out of 50 websites appeared on both lists (appendix 2).
Appendix 3 exposes some interesting facts about American websites taking over other countries’ Google search engines. Google.com has 41 websites categorized as American. The Polish Google has 44 results that can be marked as typically Polish. These two can be of good contrast to the British engine search results, where only 11 sites can be categorized as purely local. Combining the outcomes of appendices 2 and 3, one can also notice that out of the 31 sites that reappeared in the British query, 28 were categorized as American sites.
The last part of the analysis divided the content that appeared in all three queries into categories (appendix 4). This enabled me to state whether the websites that did not reappear in the Polish google, were of similar subject. I have divided the websites according to the following categories: War related (pink), info and search (lime), games, books, music, movies (orange) and News (blue). While looking at the produced table, the most notable point of interest is the domination of info and search websites in the first half of each query. Out of first 25 search results google.co.uk has 7 web pages categorized with lime color, google.pl gives us also 7 responses, and google.com shows 10 websites of the same category. The second most dominant category is games, books, music and movies; where both the global and British Google list 8 related websites each (4 on the first page of each query). The Polish Google exposes only 5 results of this category, but similarly this grouping dominates in the first half of the search. News websites tend to occupy the second half of all three queries. Additionally, the most interesting fact can be seen while looking at the War related sites, where neither the British nor the American Google does include any of those on the first results pages.
Discussion
The conducted study pointed out some interesting facts about the issue of googlization of the Internet. Each of the analyzed countries did prove that there is an influence of the American web on the rest of the world. Even though Polish Google search engine did not expose much Americanization (not counting the Wikipedia taking the first two positions in the search), it exposed small similarities in terms of the structure of search results. Polish Google can be seen as well glocalized, where the content of the query gives an outcome which is very similar in terms of sites categories, but different while looking at the links. Because of this, the difference in the outcome of links can be seen rather as influenced by the language barrier.
Opposing the Polish version of the most popular search engine lays the British Google that produced tremendously different results. The British engine can be seen as infected by American values. This can be seen in the enormous amount of repetition of American sites in the British search, but can be also found while looking at the similar positioning of websites across both English language searches. All this proves that Google is globalizing its local Internet search engines. This may happen slowly and affect the web step by step as in the Polish example, but in cases where there is no language barrier Google.com takes over local webs and imposes American values upon them.
References:
Rogers, R., 2009, "The End of the Virtual", Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA;
Grimmelman, J., 2008/2009. "The Google Dilemma", New York Law School Law Review, 53:939-950
Appendices:
Appendix 1: Search outcome list
Appendix 2: Reappearance List
Appendix 3: Local Websites list
Appendix 4: Categories list
This paper concerns the issue of googlization of the Internet. It focuses on the study of Google search engines from three countries: Global Google representing Americanization, in opposition to the British and Polish engines. Various theoreticians have proved that google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome has enormous power over the user. This study exposes how and to what extent is Google globalizing local information cultures.
Introduction
The issue of googlization is taking a central spot in nowadays debate about Americanization. Various influencing theoreticians have proved that Google’s search is not a universal engine, and that it’s outcome often affects how we perceive the world around us. This enormous power gathered by just one company raises many questions, as Google is taking over more and more firms each year.
“Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines had enormous influence on us all. They can shape what we read, who we listen to, and who get’s heard. Whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 940)
One could say that since Google has become a corporate giant, the search engine started to convey messages dependent on various factors, making the corporation a globalizing force that drastically affects the Internet as a medium. According to Grimmelman:
“Call this problem the Google Dilemma. Google has the ability to shape its search results to prefer some websites over others. Indeed, whatever choice it makes – alphabetical, by link count, by politics, by whatever – will result in some sites being on the first page of results and others not.” (Grimmelman, J (2008/2009: 944-945)
Following the notion presented by Grimmelman, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate Google’s local search engines in search of globalization biases. I will conduct the study by analyzing three Google domains (Global, British, Polish), which will be followed by querying all three Google’s with the same phrase in language used by each country. The main target of this paper will be answering the question whether Google is a globalizing machine?
Does each query return global or local sources? How are those sources positioned? To what extent is the British and Polish Google Americanized/globalized? Is any of them glocalized, and if yes, how and to what extent?
Method
In order to describe the sample it is most important to remind that three different googles will be taken under consideration. The British Google and the Polish one will serve as a basis for the analysis in search of Americanization of the search outcome. The international or rather American Google will be seen as a measure for the previous two. This will enable to show how the same query in different cultures, and may give results that are more than ‘linked’ to each other, especially in terms of Americanization.
I have chosen those particular countries for various reasons, coming both from my language skills, as well as from the desire to generate a perfect sample. Choosing Britain and Poland in relation to America, gave me an advantage of having a group that is characterized by both a fully economically evolved country and an evolving one. This gave me a possibility to expose the process of globalization of Google on two different levels. Other important aspects describing the sample group can be found in the language used. Since Britain and United states use English as their native verbal communication, Poland in this case will stand as a counterweight for the exposure of the process described above.
The term that will be used to query the global and two local Googles is ‘war’ (‘wojna’ translated into Polish). I have chosen this particular word for multiple reasons. The first one relates to the universality of the word, as wars have struck humanity since the beginning of mankind. Each war has it’s own history and stories. This will probably remove the international bias of the query, giving each search outcome a chance to produce results typical for each country. The second reason why I have chosen ‘war’ as a perfect word to fit each of the search boxes is the recentness of the topic and its strong connection to journalism. This would give each country a chance to present its own recent view on the issue.
Before conducting the study, I find most important to discuss how should we perceive globalization carried by the search engine.
According to Richard Rogers, googlization is a “political-economy style critique, considering how Google’s free-service-for-profile model may be spreading across industries and cultures” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18). Following this notion, I will search both local Google queries for sites of, one could say, global origins. The idea is that local google search engines will try to boost global or American sites up the query. This related directly to what is described by the same author as Back-end googlization, where he claims that “(…) the power of search engines lies in the combination of its ranking practices (source inclusion in the top results) together with the users’ apparent ‘respect’ for the orderings (not looking further). Google’s model also relies on registrational interactivity, where a user’s preference as well as history are registered, stored and employed, increasingly, to serve customized results” (Rogers, R. 2009: 18-19).
Other important aspect of this study focuses on the following questions: What will be defined as Global? What will be defined as local? In this case global will mean sites of American origins, probably listed in the google.com query. While focusing on the definition of local, I perceive a small problem rooted in the language of two googles. As English language will be dominant across the two platforms, defining local British sites will be particularly problematic. In cases where the URL addresses will not prove the origins of a website, I will look at the content of the sites, trying to determine whether it is rooted in American or British culture. The definition of Local will therefore focus on the cultural origins, country’s history and a general national bias transmitted by each site.
Trying to get the results as unbiased as possible, I deleted all the history and cookies from the Firefox browser. While analyzing all three queries, I looked at the first fifty results of each search, but as described by the quoted theoreticians, the most important results should come from the first pages of each search to which the potential viewer is exposed at most.
Results
Due to the simplicity of the study, there were no major complications at all. While analyzing the produced outcome (appendix 1 and 2) the first notable fact is that Wikipedia takes the first two spots for each of the queries. The second point of high influence can be found by focusing on both British and global Google, where in both cases Warhammer Online EU and Warhammer Online US can be found on the first pages of both queries. On the other hand, Polish Google does not include any of these sites in the first fifty results for the query. Similarly to Warhammer, Internet Movie Database and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are also positioned on the first results pages of both queries. Catholic Encyclopedia appeared on the first page of the British Google’s query, and it was repeated on the second page of the global search, situated on the 11th position. This repetition of websites was extremely common for the global and UK’s Google, where 31 out of 50 websites appeared on both lists (appendix 2).
Appendix 3 exposes some interesting facts about American websites taking over other countries’ Google search engines. Google.com has 41 websites categorized as American. The Polish Google has 44 results that can be marked as typically Polish. These two can be of good contrast to the British engine search results, where only 11 sites can be categorized as purely local. Combining the outcomes of appendices 2 and 3, one can also notice that out of the 31 sites that reappeared in the British query, 28 were categorized as American sites.
The last part of the analysis divided the content that appeared in all three queries into categories (appendix 4). This enabled me to state whether the websites that did not reappear in the Polish google, were of similar subject. I have divided the websites according to the following categories: War related (pink), info and search (lime), games, books, music, movies (orange) and News (blue). While looking at the produced table, the most notable point of interest is the domination of info and search websites in the first half of each query. Out of first 25 search results google.co.uk has 7 web pages categorized with lime color, google.pl gives us also 7 responses, and google.com shows 10 websites of the same category. The second most dominant category is games, books, music and movies; where both the global and British Google list 8 related websites each (4 on the first page of each query). The Polish Google exposes only 5 results of this category, but similarly this grouping dominates in the first half of the search. News websites tend to occupy the second half of all three queries. Additionally, the most interesting fact can be seen while looking at the War related sites, where neither the British nor the American Google does include any of those on the first results pages.
Discussion
The conducted study pointed out some interesting facts about the issue of googlization of the Internet. Each of the analyzed countries did prove that there is an influence of the American web on the rest of the world. Even though Polish Google search engine did not expose much Americanization (not counting the Wikipedia taking the first two positions in the search), it exposed small similarities in terms of the structure of search results. Polish Google can be seen as well glocalized, where the content of the query gives an outcome which is very similar in terms of sites categories, but different while looking at the links. Because of this, the difference in the outcome of links can be seen rather as influenced by the language barrier.
Opposing the Polish version of the most popular search engine lays the British Google that produced tremendously different results. The British engine can be seen as infected by American values. This can be seen in the enormous amount of repetition of American sites in the British search, but can be also found while looking at the similar positioning of websites across both English language searches. All this proves that Google is globalizing its local Internet search engines. This may happen slowly and affect the web step by step as in the Polish example, but in cases where there is no language barrier Google.com takes over local webs and imposes American values upon them.
References:
Rogers, R., 2009, "The End of the Virtual", Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA;
Grimmelman, J., 2008/2009. "The Google Dilemma", New York Law School Law Review, 53:939-950
Appendices:
Appendix 1: Search outcome list
Appendix 2: Reappearance List
Appendix 3: Local Websites list
Appendix 4: Categories list
In and Out - Censorship report on World of Warcraft Gold Farming Websites in times of Virtual Currency Ban in China
Abstract
This report concerns the issue of Chinese government forbidding virtual items trade and exchange, and their gold farming companies bypassing this law. It deals with Internet censorship in the Republic of China, and focuses on unfolding the described problem by applying it to examples drawn from one of the most immersive virtual worlds. All this is explained by a study conducted on the censorship of websites, and a discussion of findings related to the issue.
Introduction
The emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, opened a completely new branch for economies all around the world. This particular branch of trade via gaming started probably as soon as first virtual items have been crafted. In time, changing real money into virtual currency became even more popular, flowing alongside the intense evolution of the Internet and the MMO gaming industry. Soon after, the range of virtual economy started to cover not only gold and items, but also characters (powerleveling), vehicles (mounts), animal pets (companions), giving an opportunity to ‘boost‘ one’s avatar with in-game achievements, reputation, skills, etc. Richard Heeks from Manchester University points out the importance of certain historical aspects surrounding the rise of virtual economies: First cash payments in multiuser dungeons, and the appearance of ebay.com (Hunter, 2006 and Lewis, 2006 in Heeks, R., 2008).
World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG), produced by Blizzard Entertainment, one of the world’s largest gaming corporations. It consists of more than eleven and a half million players from Europe, America, and Asia, giving the company billions of dollars of income each year.
Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China became an important issue for virtual world explorers since the Chinese government banned virtual goods trade within the borders of its realm. The incident that happened by the end of June 2009 did not generate much attention at the time. Even though the decree of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce may have affected millions of people who make their living through gold farming, minor blog and press releases appeared on the web.
According to the Ministry of Commerce all this is supposed to prevent virtual goods affecting the real economy:
Same author provides with some quantitative data, as he explains that virtual currency trade in China exceeded an amount of several billion yuan in 2008, which is around 146 million dollars, and is meant to be growing by 20% each year. He also quotes Richard Heeks’ study exposing that the virtual trade business employs hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, producing income ranging between two hundred million and one billion dollars (Heeks R.,“Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on Gold Farming“, 2008; in Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).
All this proves that virtual goods economy, surrounded by a governmental ban, having an extremely vast and diverse ecosystem of users, and large amounts of money involved; is in a way a key factor in the debate concerning Chinese Internet censorship. This study is going to prove how does the Chinese government enforce its rules upon such a widespread industry.
Methodology
To conduct the study I have chosen a sample of forty websites from around the world. Because I wanted to include websites that are commonly accessed by the users, all of the domains were chosen on the basis of an outcome of a google search. The first twenty sites were chosen from the list generated by google.com, and the second part of the sample group was chosen from google.cn, excluding the duplicated websites from the previous search. This made me choose the sample from the first 2-3 pages of each of the used regions.
While searching for a sample group I queried both google searches for the sentence “Buy WOW Gold”. I realized that queries like “Buy Gold”, “Buy Virtual Gold”, produce a much poorer outcome of the search. Since World of Warcraft is one of the dominant virtual worlds in which I am particularly interested, adding the word “WOW” improved the validity of the study by making the list related to an exact environment.
I have chosen my sample according to some specific rules. The first and most important one was reliability of the content. While looking at this aspect of the sampled websites, I tried to pick ones that seemed not to be Internet scams or cons. I looked at the system of payment for the virtual goods, and if it was in any way disturbing or suspicious, I abandoned the site marking it as unreliable and I have not included it in the study. I also analyzed the websites by the graphics used: if the design of a site was not related to either the game in which it operated, nor exposing
the link to virtual goods trade, I also left the site behind. Fortunately most of the accessed sites from the first pages of each google search passed my reliability test.
The second aspect was based on the range of the company’s work. This means that all of the chosen sites had to supply virtual gold for at least one game, which in my study was World of Warcraft. It is important to add here that many of the companies responsible for virtual goods trade, deal items on many more platforms than just one game. Furthermore, each of the games or platforms that can be used as a basis for virtual goods trade is based in more than one place in the world. In this case, each game will have multiple servers on which it is placed, and multiple locations around the world. All this made me choose my sample group of websites based on the range of their sale, so each of the websites had to sell virtual gold to at least one game (in my case World of Warcraft), on two continents (Europe and United States) to at least one server. According to my definition, to get included in my sample such a gold supply group had to fulfill the above requirements (To view the complete list of websites from the sample divided between the ones accessed by google.com and google.cn, please see appendix 1).
After creating the sample group I have run it through the Censorship Explorer program which I accessed through the Digital Methods website. This allowed me to check whether any of the sites from the target group were blocked in China, via running it through three different Chinese proxies. I inserted each of the URL addresses into the Harvester, run it twice for each proxy to be sure the analysis is done correctly (addresses of the proxies can be found in appendix 2, 3, 4 and 5). After setting up the program to check whether the sites are blocked or not, I have analyzed the generated HTTP response codes and produced results.
Results:
There were barely any complications while the study was conducted. The Censorship Explorer ran each of the URL addresses correctly: each website scan produced a response code, the country of proxy was China, and there were no time-outs. This happened for all of the four scans.
Still, no matter how simple the study seemed to be, it produced very unexpected results. Each of the HTTP response codes for the first and last scan stated “1.1 200 OK”, which means that hundred percent of the analyzed websites were fully transparent to the viewer.
The only problem that occurred was linked to one of the chosen proxies not responding correctly (Appendix 3). One of the websites did not produce any response code, two gave a connection-failed response, and the rest responded with a server error message. The second scan through the same proxy produced the same server error for the whole sample (Appendix 4). Since I was looking for a client error message, those two scans can easily be discarded due to proxy failure.
Since all of the sites produced positive response codes (Appendix 2 and 5), one can state that Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China does not cover sites that deal virtual goods and gold.
Discussion
Since the findings can be perceived as unusual or unexpected, I find it extremely important to discuss why the Chinese government did not ban the access to goldfarming websites. I believe that there are certain facts that lie behind the occurred phenomenon.
The first one may relate directly to the new Chinese law, and is much similar to what Heeks describes in the article by GamePolitics.com:
Still, this explanation and definition of the author’s ‘Mirror Image’ is not fully clear. The notion carried by Heeks can be seen as opposing to what was said by Claburn in the introductory paragraph of this paper. If this particular law restriction is not about farming, but about the exchange rate that may affect China’s economy, farmers themselves had to find a way around the system. Similarly as described by Claburn in relation to gold farming and various companies‘ attitude towards it, smartly built operating systems may be the factors that drastically affect the fail of the ban on virtual currency trade. According to the author:
In this case, what I find particularly important to add is the thought of Dean Takahashi, which proves that Gold Farms as companies are built on a very smart and careful basis, commonly located outside of China’s boarders. In relation to why this specific law is so hard to enforce, Takahashi points out the factor of technicality:
Still, the most important fact exposed by the study and the target sample analysis is that all of the analyzed companies sell gold outside of China. If all the gold farming Chinese firms are located outside of the boarders, and they sell virtual currency to other countries, it is much probable that the Chinese government cannot do anything about it. This discussion exposes that there is an obvious confusion over the Chinese law regulations, presenting how in-game gathering of virtual resources bypasses a not fully operational restriction.
Nevertheless, some positive aspects of the study can be found while looking at the article by David Barboza in New York Times, where the author quotes an email received from one of the most influencing theoreticians of virtual and MMO environments:
References:
Barboza, David, 30th June 2009, “In China, New Limits on Virtual Currency”, New
York Times;
Claburn, Thomas, 29th June 2009, “China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency”,
www.informationweek.com;
GamePolitics.com, 1st July 2009, “Is Gold Farming Really banned? Confusion Over
China’s New Virtual Currency Rules”;
Heeks, Richard, 2008, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold
Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies
of Online Games“, University of Manchester;
Ministry of Commerce, 29th June 2009, “China bans use of virtual money for trading
in real goods”;
Takahashi, Dean, 30th June 2009, “China’s crackdown on virtual goods transactions
could ripple through the game economy”, GamesBeat;
Other sources:
♦ Internet Censorship Explorer
link: http://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/proxies/
♦ HTTP response codes list
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
Appendices:
♦ Appendix 1: List of sampled websites
List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.cn):
http://www.2moonsdilvip.com/
http://www.beautifulwowgold.com/
http://www.gamegoldme.com/
http://www.wow-powerleveling-wowgold.com/
http://www.goldteamsale.com/
http://www.bye-wowgold.com/
http://www.ugamesale.com/
http://www.mywowgoldsite.com/
http://www.yoyo-gold.com/
http://www.wowlion.com/
http://www.wowgoldfirm.com/
http://www.wowgold4s.com/
http://www.mmoshop.eu/
http://www.wow-goldstore.com/
http://www.wowgoldfed.com/
http://www.gamesworth.com/
http://www.wowgolddig.com/
http://www.wowgoldcow.com/
http://www.mywowgold365.co.uk/
http://www.wowgold-cheapwowgold.com/
List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.com):
http://www.gold4power.com/
http://www.hisgame.com/
http://www.itemgarden.com/
http://www.wow-gold-team.com/
http://www.ugamegold.com/
http://www.game2guide.com/
http://www.zyy.com/
http://www.susanexpress.com/
http://www.wowgold2k.com/
http://www.worldwarcraft-gold.com/
http://www.wowgold-europe.com/
http://www.wow-cheapwowgold.com/
http://www.game4world.com/
http://www.power-level.net/
http://www.helpwow.com/
http://www.guy-game.com/
http://www.gdpchina.com/
http://www.offgamers.com/
http://www.wowgoldbank.nl/
http://www.wowko.com/
♦ Appendix 2: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 118.122.85.215:80
(China)
♦ Appendix 3: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 1
♦ Appendix 4: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 2
♦ Appendix 5: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 220.248.34.26:80
(China)
This report concerns the issue of Chinese government forbidding virtual items trade and exchange, and their gold farming companies bypassing this law. It deals with Internet censorship in the Republic of China, and focuses on unfolding the described problem by applying it to examples drawn from one of the most immersive virtual worlds. All this is explained by a study conducted on the censorship of websites, and a discussion of findings related to the issue.
Introduction
The emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, opened a completely new branch for economies all around the world. This particular branch of trade via gaming started probably as soon as first virtual items have been crafted. In time, changing real money into virtual currency became even more popular, flowing alongside the intense evolution of the Internet and the MMO gaming industry. Soon after, the range of virtual economy started to cover not only gold and items, but also characters (powerleveling), vehicles (mounts), animal pets (companions), giving an opportunity to ‘boost‘ one’s avatar with in-game achievements, reputation, skills, etc. Richard Heeks from Manchester University points out the importance of certain historical aspects surrounding the rise of virtual economies: First cash payments in multiuser dungeons, and the appearance of ebay.com (Hunter, 2006 and Lewis, 2006 in Heeks, R., 2008).
World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG), produced by Blizzard Entertainment, one of the world’s largest gaming corporations. It consists of more than eleven and a half million players from Europe, America, and Asia, giving the company billions of dollars of income each year.
Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China became an important issue for virtual world explorers since the Chinese government banned virtual goods trade within the borders of its realm. The incident that happened by the end of June 2009 did not generate much attention at the time. Even though the decree of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce may have affected millions of people who make their living through gold farming, minor blog and press releases appeared on the web.
According to the Ministry of Commerce all this is supposed to prevent virtual goods affecting the real economy:
"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain
exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and
services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services, the
Ministries said (Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).
Same author provides with some quantitative data, as he explains that virtual currency trade in China exceeded an amount of several billion yuan in 2008, which is around 146 million dollars, and is meant to be growing by 20% each year. He also quotes Richard Heeks’ study exposing that the virtual trade business employs hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, producing income ranging between two hundred million and one billion dollars (Heeks R.,“Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on Gold Farming“, 2008; in Claburn T., Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).
All this proves that virtual goods economy, surrounded by a governmental ban, having an extremely vast and diverse ecosystem of users, and large amounts of money involved; is in a way a key factor in the debate concerning Chinese Internet censorship. This study is going to prove how does the Chinese government enforce its rules upon such a widespread industry.
Methodology
To conduct the study I have chosen a sample of forty websites from around the world. Because I wanted to include websites that are commonly accessed by the users, all of the domains were chosen on the basis of an outcome of a google search. The first twenty sites were chosen from the list generated by google.com, and the second part of the sample group was chosen from google.cn, excluding the duplicated websites from the previous search. This made me choose the sample from the first 2-3 pages of each of the used regions.
While searching for a sample group I queried both google searches for the sentence “Buy WOW Gold”. I realized that queries like “Buy Gold”, “Buy Virtual Gold”, produce a much poorer outcome of the search. Since World of Warcraft is one of the dominant virtual worlds in which I am particularly interested, adding the word “WOW” improved the validity of the study by making the list related to an exact environment.
I have chosen my sample according to some specific rules. The first and most important one was reliability of the content. While looking at this aspect of the sampled websites, I tried to pick ones that seemed not to be Internet scams or cons. I looked at the system of payment for the virtual goods, and if it was in any way disturbing or suspicious, I abandoned the site marking it as unreliable and I have not included it in the study. I also analyzed the websites by the graphics used: if the design of a site was not related to either the game in which it operated, nor exposing
the link to virtual goods trade, I also left the site behind. Fortunately most of the accessed sites from the first pages of each google search passed my reliability test.
The second aspect was based on the range of the company’s work. This means that all of the chosen sites had to supply virtual gold for at least one game, which in my study was World of Warcraft. It is important to add here that many of the companies responsible for virtual goods trade, deal items on many more platforms than just one game. Furthermore, each of the games or platforms that can be used as a basis for virtual goods trade is based in more than one place in the world. In this case, each game will have multiple servers on which it is placed, and multiple locations around the world. All this made me choose my sample group of websites based on the range of their sale, so each of the websites had to sell virtual gold to at least one game (in my case World of Warcraft), on two continents (Europe and United States) to at least one server. According to my definition, to get included in my sample such a gold supply group had to fulfill the above requirements (To view the complete list of websites from the sample divided between the ones accessed by google.com and google.cn, please see appendix 1).
After creating the sample group I have run it through the Censorship Explorer program which I accessed through the Digital Methods website. This allowed me to check whether any of the sites from the target group were blocked in China, via running it through three different Chinese proxies. I inserted each of the URL addresses into the Harvester, run it twice for each proxy to be sure the analysis is done correctly (addresses of the proxies can be found in appendix 2, 3, 4 and 5). After setting up the program to check whether the sites are blocked or not, I have analyzed the generated HTTP response codes and produced results.
Results:
There were barely any complications while the study was conducted. The Censorship Explorer ran each of the URL addresses correctly: each website scan produced a response code, the country of proxy was China, and there were no time-outs. This happened for all of the four scans.
Still, no matter how simple the study seemed to be, it produced very unexpected results. Each of the HTTP response codes for the first and last scan stated “1.1 200 OK”, which means that hundred percent of the analyzed websites were fully transparent to the viewer.
The only problem that occurred was linked to one of the chosen proxies not responding correctly (Appendix 3). One of the websites did not produce any response code, two gave a connection-failed response, and the rest responded with a server error message. The second scan through the same proxy produced the same server error for the whole sample (Appendix 4). Since I was looking for a client error message, those two scans can easily be discarded due to proxy failure.
Since all of the sites produced positive response codes (Appendix 2 and 5), one can state that Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China does not cover sites that deal virtual goods and gold.
Discussion
Since the findings can be perceived as unusual or unexpected, I find it extremely important to discuss why the Chinese government did not ban the access to goldfarming websites. I believe that there are certain facts that lie behind the occurred phenomenon.
The first one may relate directly to the new Chinese law, and is much similar to what Heeks describes in the article by GamePolitics.com:
“This [new Chinese law] therefore is not about what gold farming
clients do: use real money to buy these virtual currencies; it’s the mirror
image. And it’s not about the major trade in gold farming such as
World of Warcraft, which relates to other types of virtual currency. And
it’s not about buying/selling in-game items. And it’s not about the
power-leveling of avatars. Bottom line: it’s not about gold farming.“
(Heeks, R. 2008 in GamePolitics.com)
Still, this explanation and definition of the author’s ‘Mirror Image’ is not fully clear. The notion carried by Heeks can be seen as opposing to what was said by Claburn in the introductory paragraph of this paper. If this particular law restriction is not about farming, but about the exchange rate that may affect China’s economy, farmers themselves had to find a way around the system. Similarly as described by Claburn in relation to gold farming and various companies‘ attitude towards it, smartly built operating systems may be the factors that drastically affect the fail of the ban on virtual currency trade. According to the author:
“Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual
currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies
have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built
virtual commerce into their game infrastructure“ (Claburn T.,
Informationweek.com, 29th June 2009).
In this case, what I find particularly important to add is the thought of Dean Takahashi, which proves that Gold Farms as companies are built on a very smart and careful basis, commonly located outside of China’s boarders. In relation to why this specific law is so hard to enforce, Takahashi points out the factor of technicality:
“The practice of trading virtual goods for real money is easy to make
illegal, but hard to enforce. The gold farmers may not be affected...
because of a technicality. Most of China’s gold farmers, who operate in
sweatshops with dozens of fellow farmers, operate on servers on
foreign soil. The government can only control what goes on with
domestic servers.“ (Takahashi, D. GamesBeat, 30th June 2009)
Still, the most important fact exposed by the study and the target sample analysis is that all of the analyzed companies sell gold outside of China. If all the gold farming Chinese firms are located outside of the boarders, and they sell virtual currency to other countries, it is much probable that the Chinese government cannot do anything about it. This discussion exposes that there is an obvious confusion over the Chinese law regulations, presenting how in-game gathering of virtual resources bypasses a not fully operational restriction.
Nevertheless, some positive aspects of the study can be found while looking at the article by David Barboza in New York Times, where the author quotes an email received from one of the most influencing theoreticians of virtual and MMO environments:
“This action shows that at least one government is concerned about
the way virtual worlds challenge its control of society. (…) As virtual
currencies take over more and more purchasing power, control over
the effective money supply shifts from the central bank to the game
developers.” (Castronova, E., in Barboza, D. 30th June 2009)
References:
Barboza, David, 30th June 2009, “In China, New Limits on Virtual Currency”, New
York Times;
Claburn, Thomas, 29th June 2009, “China Limits Use Of Virtual Currency”,
www.informationweek.com;
GamePolitics.com, 1st July 2009, “Is Gold Farming Really banned? Confusion Over
China’s New Virtual Currency Rules”;
Heeks, Richard, 2008, “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold
Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies
of Online Games“, University of Manchester;
Ministry of Commerce, 29th June 2009, “China bans use of virtual money for trading
in real goods”;
Takahashi, Dean, 30th June 2009, “China’s crackdown on virtual goods transactions
could ripple through the game economy”, GamesBeat;
Other sources:
♦ Internet Censorship Explorer
link: http://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/proxies/
♦ HTTP response codes list
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
Appendices:
♦ Appendix 1: List of sampled websites
List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.cn):
http://www.2moonsdilvip.com/
http://www.beautifulwowgold.com/
http://www.gamegoldme.com/
http://www.wow-powerleveling-wowgold.com/
http://www.goldteamsale.com/
http://www.bye-wowgold.com/
http://www.ugamesale.com/
http://www.mywowgoldsite.com/
http://www.yoyo-gold.com/
http://www.wowlion.com/
http://www.wowgoldfirm.com/
http://www.wowgold4s.com/
http://www.mmoshop.eu/
http://www.wow-goldstore.com/
http://www.wowgoldfed.com/
http://www.gamesworth.com/
http://www.wowgolddig.com/
http://www.wowgoldcow.com/
http://www.mywowgold365.co.uk/
http://www.wowgold-cheapwowgold.com/
List of Gold Farming Companies' websites (retrieved from google.com):
http://www.gold4power.com/
http://www.hisgame.com/
http://www.itemgarden.com/
http://www.wow-gold-team.com/
http://www.ugamegold.com/
http://www.game2guide.com/
http://www.zyy.com/
http://www.susanexpress.com/
http://www.wowgold2k.com/
http://www.worldwarcraft-gold.com/
http://www.wowgold-europe.com/
http://www.wow-cheapwowgold.com/
http://www.game4world.com/
http://www.power-level.net/
http://www.helpwow.com/
http://www.guy-game.com/
http://www.gdpchina.com/
http://www.offgamers.com/
http://www.wowgoldbank.nl/
http://www.wowko.com/
♦ Appendix 2: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 118.122.85.215:80
(China)
♦ Appendix 3: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 1
♦ Appendix 4: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 60.28.81.194:80
(China) – scan 2
♦ Appendix 5: Censorship Explorer outcome for proxy 220.248.34.26:80
(China)
Saturday 6 November 2010
Thursday 4 November 2010
Sunday 10 October 2010
slaythemurlocs.org
Hey! I just made this itsy bitsy T-Shirt graphic in response to savethemurlocs.org
Imagine these guys actually got a contract with Blizzard just for designing a T-Shirt and a Website, which allows them to sell Blizzard Store's plush toys.. All this is followed by virtual goods trade..
Hopefully there are still some hardcore players such as I that know there lies the barricade ;) so I say:
Enjoy!
All work produced in Inkscape ;)
Imagine these guys actually got a contract with Blizzard just for designing a T-Shirt and a Website, which allows them to sell Blizzard Store's plush toys.. All this is followed by virtual goods trade..
Hopefully there are still some hardcore players such as I that know there lies the barricade ;) so I say:
Enjoy!
All work produced in Inkscape ;)
Fat Bart ;)
Check out my Fat Princess auto-portrait ;) Background sampled from the official website. enjoy!
Tuesday 5 October 2010
World of Tweetcraft?
Introduction
Since the development of Internet, humankind has been exposed to various new ways of communication: Starting from peer to peer chat, shifting into electronic mailing and blogging, enabling of large chat rooms hosting hundreds of people, and finally reforming into social networking sites. In time, each of the forms of social expression drastically evolved, advancing both in quality of use and in quantity of accesses – making those easy to handle and affecting still more and more users.
The emergence of MMO gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, gave us a new way of socializing with people from around the globe. Twitter is one of the most popular microblogging websites, and as a social networking system it covers most users in its domain, but this aspect is not the only one that links Massively Multiplayer Online games to social networking platforms.
This short entry will aim to answer the question: Why should we think of communication in virtual reality worlds not in terms of chatting, but perceive it rather as a social networking entity? I will do it by analyzing Twitter and World of Warcraft ingame communication mechanism, exposing similarities in structure and social usage.
Structure of Communication
The way in which both communication platforms are built is one of the main important aspects by which this comparison should be analyzed. The following part will therefore cover similarities between the game’s communication mechanism and Twitter by the terms of structure.
One of the most important points when it comes to the structuring of an online conversation is real time chatting within a large ecosystem. Enabled in both examples, this issue provides some points to the discussion on how to perceive WoW chat system. Similarly as in Twitter, a user of World of Warcraft is notoriously exposed to chat channels that include either familiar/nonfamiliar or friend gamers. The user is always placed in the environment in which he is exposed to both spam and chat with various amounts of other users having diverse relations with the player. Following this notion, chatting in various artificial spaces with various people from different social groups will be first and most obvious point linking MMO chat system to social media sites.
The large number of channels in the game carries the same notion as social media portals. It enables the flow of information such as real time reporting on specific events, collective knowledge, feeling of belonging to particular groups, and other multiple social aspects of such a constant information stream. Similarly as described by Scott, Twitter and WoW users tend to rely on real-time information flow, reporting on events as they are happening:
“Smart editors and reporters update blogs and media web sites in seconds. Consumers post videos and photos on the web anytime where the media can see them. Reporters now rely on Twitter for instantaneous leads from citizen journalists – who are often reporting from the scene as the events unfold.” (Scott, 2010: 52)
WoW gamers that update the channels on events that are happening ‘now’ use a very similar tactic. The events may occur either in the virtual world, such as sieges and raids on allied locations, forcing the spam of Local Defense channel, or real-world happenings such as various world news either game related or IRL oriented.
Other important fact that makes these two examples similar is that people are connected to multiple chat rooms at a time. Similarly as for Twitter, WoW chat system reveals to you vast amounts of short text messages, approaching the user from various channels and evoking the necessity of multitasking. The game channels allow you to communicate with people on various levels. Similarly as on Twitter, a user can send a message either from the personal level of whispering to someone, or approach an entire virtual city with his message. The channels vary on the location of the gamer, which can be matched to the tweeting sites having an option of talking to someone within a certain range. Furthermore, some of the channels may be embedded onto the gamers character, such as the officer chat, which narrows down the amount of chatting people to a few particular players.
More similarities can be easily found, such as the creation of Friends lists, or Block List in both of the platforms. Focusing on the first of them, WoW communicating system enables sending messages to Friends no matter if they are in this particular game. This gives the user the power to contact both his in-game and real friends, even if they are playing a different game of the battle.net platform.
Similar tactic can be found while analyzing the social networking example, and can be compared to the availability of Twitter for mobile phones, where the user can still access his friends in cases of being not in front of the computer screen. All this is followed by the release of World of Warcraft Mobile Armory that gives the user certain features such as communicating in the Guildchat channel via a cellphone.
Both the in-game communication system and Twitter allow creating groups to discuss certain topics. This gives the users power of microblogging on topics of choice. In both examples it can be done by creating/joining a channel or by making another account.
Idea and the Social Level
The second aspect that I find most important to analyze while comparing Twitter and the in-game chat mechanism is the idea that lies behind the actual usage of the platforms. In this part of the essay I will try to compare certain patterns of user behavior, focusing on similarities between the two examples. Cheong and Lee, while discussing Twitter, explain a few of the most common concepts of tweeting:
“Comm wrote about the concept of “mission accomplished” tweets to inform followers of accomplishments or milestones achieved (extending the findings extending the findings on online presence), and picture distribution tweets (extending the concept of URL sharing). O’Reilly and Milstein discussed the need of ambient intimacy with friends and family as a result of presence maintenance on Twitter by answering the “what are you doing?” question. Lastly, McFedries and Comm also highlight a current trend of Twitter usage – ‘live tweeting’ – which is to tweet about events live as they unfold, e.g. conferences, trade shows and exhibitions.” (Cheong, Lee in Alhajj, Memon, 2010: 356)
Similarly as in Twitter, the ‚Milestone‘ aspect can be found in WoW chat system: either as an automatic message telling your friends and guild that you reached a certain level. It can also appear automatically when a player scores an achievement as a similar message appears. Additionally users tend to tell about what they achieved to other players. When it comes to online activity sharing of knowledge and URL, the game communication system is also very active in those fields. This is enabled by the linking system, which makes possible sharing of knowledge about the virtual environment in which the gamer is placed. It covers both URL as well as ingame knowledge such as quests, items, achievements etc. The „what are you doing?“ question is probably one of the major spamming problems in World of Warcraft. Both the general and trade channel are filled with messages such as LFM Onyxia25 1Tank 2Healer 3DPS link gs and achi which are telling what a person is about to do and informing other players observing this particular channel what perspectives do they have in case if they want to join in a group. According to Java, Finin, Song and Tseng, all this is extremely similar to what Twitter users tend to write about:
„From our analysis, we find that the main types of user intentions are: daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. Furthermore, users play different roles of information source, friends or information seeker in different communities“ (Java, Finin, Song, Tseng; 2007: 2)
But there are also other similarities between Twitter’ers and MMO Gamers. One of the most important point connecting the two groups is the development of shortcuts, both on the interface level, as well as in the language of use. While taking a look at the interface, both platforms have some similarities, such as hitting the ‚r‘ key for replying. The raising simplicity can be also found in the language that users of both platforms tend to develop. Shortcuts such as ‚imo‘ and ‚brb‘ are a pretty common theme of expression.
Another point linking the game communication platform to the social networking system is the idea of having a socio-virtual self. Either by having a specific nickname, or in a wider context, creating your virtual self or a virtual image of a group/brand/team. Basically what differs a social network from a chat is that it is based and built around user profiles. While looking at your profile people may assume what your interests and actions are, and what follows: you are not anonymous. Each user has his name, he stands for various ideals, and he has a voice in a community and is willing to share his thoughts with other within the environment.
The point that links Twitter and WoW is the way in which people tend to gather around various environments. Examples can be found in following someone on Twitter and listening to his messages, or even getting to know that person/institution and having a conversation or debate. All this is described by Comm (2010), where the author gives various uses of Twitter, such as creating specific groups:
“Twitter can help us to keep together a team that’s already been established. It can do that by helping scattered members to understand that they are working alongside each other and that thay are not alone. And it can do it by providing an online clubhouse where thay can get together to keep everyone informed.” (Comm, 2010: 155)
Similar mechanism can be found in World of Warcraft, where users tend to gather around various, more powerful, more experienced players. Examples of such a behavior can be seen best in the forming of guilds, where people gather around powerful players to lead them through various game content. Similarly as in the diversity of people being followed on Twitter, WoW groups can also be based on various interests: player vs. player gaming, arena matches, player vs. environment guilds, trading guilds, leveling guilds, achiever guilds, specific raids etc. The list is practically never-ending and dependent on the size of the game itself, so groups of people that are linked with a common interest are nearly as diverse, as the ones formed in the real world.
Summary
Even though Twitter is meant to work within the real world, and WoW communication programme is supposed to enhance the gameplay in a virtual environment, both of the samples tend to reveal similar ways of construction both in terms of the way they are built, as well as in terms of social communication usage. I believe that while analyzing Virtual Worlds we should refer to chatting systems as to in-built social networking platforms, where real time strategies, large ecosystem and the dynamics of an internet conversation have power over the actions of the user. To what extent are we going to be overloaded with spam, news, messages and requests during our daily activities such as work or play?
References:
Reda Alhajj, Nasrullah Memon (2010); “From Sociology to Computing in Social Networks: Theory, Foundations and Applications”; Springer;
Joel Comm (2010); “Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time”, John Wiley and Sons;
Akshay Java, Tim Finin, Xiaodan Song, Belle Tseng (2007); “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, University of Maryland;
David Meerman Scott (2010); “Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now”; John Wiley and Sons;
Friday 1 October 2010
Botting, Plotting and Multiboxing
This week I had some serious contact with bots. The industry sure is creative…
It all started when I was dropping my wiki entry on the net, and then it attacked me:
It happened when I entered the most popular virtual reality: World of Warcraft.
While sorting something out in the city of Stormwind, I saw a giant ‘neon-like’ exposition/performence of characters. It turned out to be an advert of WoW gold-farmer website. It did raise some questions, but to make this situation a bit more engaging I created a short movie which tells the story.
Enjoy!
Monday 27 September 2010
wiki:gruba_ksiezniczka?
I've just finished my first version of an article for the Polish wikipedia ;)
The topic is a PS3 game titled Fat Princess by Titan Studios.
Here's the link: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Princess
Enjoy! :D
The topic is a PS3 game titled Fat Princess by Titan Studios.
Here's the link: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Princess
Enjoy! :D
Friday 17 September 2010
Tuesday 14 September 2010
Eucarbon Packaging Designs
Packaging of Eucarbon, done for Trenka.
link: http://www.trenka.at/index.php?lang=en
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