The Presidential Office has come under fire from netizens for declining to view a clip on the video Web site YouTube attached to a petition sent via e-mail. The presidential office said the “unknown” Web site could cause harm to its computer system.
In an e-mail sent to the Presidential Office earlier this month, an Internet user with the pseudonym “an angry citizen” asked President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to watch a video clip posted on YouTube that shows how excavators dispatched by the Miaoli County Government and escorted by police rode into rice paddies and dug up farmland despite protests from local farmers at the scene.
The Miaoli County Government has taken over more than 28 hectares of land in Dapu Borough (大埔), Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, to make way for an expansion project of the Jhunan Science Park.
“If you still are a man of conscience, please take a look at the attached video link to see how Miaoli County commissioner Liu Cheng-hung [劉政鴻] is destroying farmland,” the user wrote to Ma. “This couldn’t be carried out with your tacit approval, now could it?”
The response by the Presidential Office came as a surprise to “angry citizen” and many netizens.
“Because of frequent and innovative attacks by malicious hackers and viruses, we have a policy to restrict access to unknown Web sites to maintain normal operations and security of our computer systems,” the Presidential Office said in its reply. “Hence, we are unable to browse the Web address that you have provided.”
The angry response from Internet users was immediate.
“The Presidential Office calls YouTube an ‘unknown’ Web site, but the stupid lie is busted by the Presidential Office’s very own Web site” — recently upgraded, at a cost of NT$7 million [US$218,000] — “since there are links to YouTube on it,” blogger “pfge” wrote in a personal entry. “This proves that the government doesn’t care about what the public thinks.”
The Presidential Office uses the YouTube Web site on a regular basis, as it posts the president’s weekly video chat on it.
“I don’t know which genius came up with this response, I don’t know whether to be mad or to laugh,” said Mira Chen, a member of the online social networking service Plurk.com. “So these are the people who are governing this country!”
Presidential Office spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) said that for security purposes, it had been policy since the Democratic Progressive Party was in power not to access links attached in e-mails.
“If the public thinks we should change the policy, we will look more into it before making a decision,” he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS