Global Voices Online

Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site is being blocked in China since June 7th: “It seems that access to our image servers is being blocked for users in much of China. Our technical staff has looked into this at depth and determined this is not a technical issue from our end. We will keep an eye on the situation and update if we get any developments”, said Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield on the help forum.

As Global Voices John Kennedy reported earlier, the reason of banning Flickr may be the photo-report of the Xiamen protest that made its way to flikr.

Hamed Saber, the developer of the Firefox extension Access Flickr! (see his interview with Global Voices) who got engaged in an interesting debate about the Great Firewall in China, is offering his support to the Chinese Flickr Community and a Chinese HowTo of the extension has been added.

Recent Links also in East Asia

Lawyer and blogger raymiyatake expresses his doubts [ja] over the election of Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). First, he says, Amano was supported by only 23 nations out of 35. Second, he points out the difficult situation that the Agency is dealing with, at present, and the “unfairness” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which should be applied also to the five members already recognized as possessing nuclear power. Lastly, he suggests that instead of promoting a “pacific use” of nuclear energy, this should be replaced with clean energy sources (such as the geothermal or the aeolian ones).

This year is Mobile Suit Gundam's 30th birthday.
While a giant statue of the robot stands in Odaiba's park (in the Tokyo bay area), in a theatre of northern Tokyo, blogger/actress Rie Takahashi [ja] and her crew pay tribute to the animated television series in stage play Robot.

Bernard Leong observes that Facebook is almost the dominant social networking platform in Southeast Asia. It has overtaken Friendster in Malaysia and is getting more members in other countries in the region.