Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Guge still gets to back alleys of virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 10, 2006
in Commerce, Government, Search and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Part trashing Google/Guge, part pursed-lips shock, part guide to the backstreets of virtual China, this May 10 "Daily Economic News 每日经济新闻" article spells out how to find drugs, guns, and other illegal things online–and makes the assertion that Guge/Google is not doing a proper filtering job. 

The reporter’s central question: "How can we prevent the Internet from becoming more of a breeding ground and bridge for harmful information?" 

The reporter compared keyword searches of 谷歌(Guge/Google) and "other major search engines."  When he/she typed in keywords "gambling 赌博," "drugs,毒品," "guns 枪支," "fake ID 假证件," and "pornography 色情," on Guge/Google, there were tens of millions of hits.  When entered on the other, unnamed search engines, however, this message came up:  "The keyword you have entered may not conform with the content of relevant laws and regulations." “你键入的关键词可能不符合相关法律法规的内容”.

A few examples of what the reporter found on Guge/Google:

  • "Fake diploma" yielded not only over 100,000 hits, but also automatically offered up such alternative keywords as "creating fake diplomas," "getting a fake ID," and "how to build a fake diploma website."
  • "Buy [the drug] Ecstasy online" got over 200,000 hits.  Most of the active links led to BBS discussion forums.  When the reporter randomly followed some of the links, they led to sites with other semi-illegal substances such as anaesthetics, along with sellers’ cellphone and QQ numbers. 

Guge/Google was given a chance to respond to the findings in the article.  But the reporter was not happy with the vague responses given by a Guge/Google spokeswoman regarding the company’s technical and moral decisions on what a "Civilized Internet" should look like.  Guge/Google has not joined the majority of Internet and content providers in pledging allegiance to civilizing the Chinese web. 

(via Donews)

Web Novel Makes Splash

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 10, 2006
in Art
. 2 Comments

060510_webnovel_1
Teenager drops out of high school. He pursues writing. He enters Sina’s online writing competition. He wins. He receives high praise from the judges. He is to be published by Zhaohua Publishing House.

Is this a one off phenomenon, or is the internet providing alternate gateways for expression (for those who don’t follow the traditional path of school)?

Source: Danwei.

Netease Club Hacked!

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 9, 2006
in Portals
. 2 Comments

网易社区, Netease’s online social space, located at club.163.com has been hacked! See:

060509_netease2

060509_netease

The question (floating around the Chinese web) is, what did they do to provoke this, and who did they do it to?

Via PostShow.

Featured Art Space: Lijiang Studio

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 9, 2006
in Art, Design, Translation and Travel
. 0 Comments

Lijiang_studio2

Get a sense of the thriving art scene in Lijiang, Yunnan Province (like Dali, Lijiang is a home-away-from-home for China’s elite artists, from film-makers and painters to sculptors and writers). 

Lijiang Studio provides living space, working space, and facilitation
for international, Chinese, and local artists in two locations: one
rural location, Lashihai, and one urban location, Kunming, both in
Yunnan Province, China.

Lijiang Studio’s base is at Lashihai, a
rural farming community 20 kilometers from the city of Lijiang, a
UNESCO World Heritage site. The main residency facility is a
traditional Naxi courtyard house, lightly renovated. Lashihai is a
lake, situated at the base of 5596 meter Jade Dragon Snow Mountain,
inside a nature reserve.

The Lijiang Studio aims are:

1) To benefit local people
with cultural intervention that is sensitive to their communities and
traditions, providing a means for them to adapt to the massive influx
of Western, global culture and forces of modernization in ways that
enhance, rather than deplete, their culture.

2) To complement
and foster growth in China’s thriving arts communities, which presently
exist in the outskirts of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and
Guangzhou. To connect Chinese artists with a community rooted in
China’s rural culture, as an alternative to the urban Chinese
experience.

3) To provide international artists with the
opportunity to experience rural Chinese village life, as an alternative
to the intense pressure and marginalized status of the international
"white box" art circuit.

no profit, no choice: sexual content in virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 9, 2006
in Blogs, Gender, Government, Photos, Portals and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

Even though I know that just writing about it here means this post will turn up the next time someone searches for "china porn," this 4/18 Southern Daily article, "Portals Flooded With Sexual Content for Page Views; The Profit-less Can’t Be Choosy," provides some useful insights. 

    Some have alleged that the more sophisticated net users have all gone to blogs, leaving behind newbies…  If one wants to attract them, sexual content seems to be a pretty effective play.

Despite the Chinese government’s current Civilized Internet initiative,

    …many who raise the Web 2.0 flag are also using the opportunistic method of sexual content in order to rapidly increase their pageview traffic, and attract the attention of investors, “..clean it up after you get the money, that’s what a lot of domestic websites are doing at any rate.”…“Pagerank is the root of all evil!”

Aside from the big players who are looking for large foreign investors, of course, there are many more smaller internet companies living "below the poverty line," who earn their revenue from tiny floating ads linking viewers to sex videos, webcams, photos, and chat rooms. 

As for regulations, those deemed "search engines" (such as Qihoo.com) are not subject to the same content regulation as those in the "portal" category.  It’s also technologically difficult, if not impossible, to regulate increasing amounts of Flash, video, podcasts, and live chat.  The only good thing about the current situation, says Podlook founder Gu Shaofeng, "is that most of the people who are on webcams are high level users; but when webcams become a common way to talk, there’ll be no stopping it." 

China’s Independent Internet

Published
by
Mike Liebhold
on May 8, 2006
in Internet governance
. 0 Comments

While preparing for a seminar on the future of China’s Internet hosted by IFTF colleague, Lyn Jeffery leader of IFTF’s Virtual China project,  I took a closer look at the details of China’s decision to set up new Chinese character domain names.  Although the new domains cannot be acurately described as a separate Internet, that in fact is what is developing. One engineer after looking closely said, "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck."

This was not a sudden move. Chinese internet authorities have been planning this for years, and had a market plan in place the day the new domains were announced. The  new domains will be offered by the Chinese Government through an exclusive arrangement with a company called I-DNS, operated by the National University of Singpore, with funding from Verisign, the US monopoly operator of the .com domains. One observer at the Virtual China workshop observed that the new China domains are not a sinister  attempt to assert independence or control, rather a carefully calculated commercial move to ignite a marketplace for chinese character domain names.

Meanwhile some Internet engineers have articulated some serious concerns about the new Chinese domains in new report called the ICANN SSAC report on Alternative Roots [pdf] submitted to ICANN on 4/28/06.   In a recent interview in Australian IT news Report co-author and Melbourne IT chief technology officer Bruce Tonkin said China’s attempts to use the domain name system to restrict access to content was a serious threat.

"In China they are manipulating some of the traffic," Mr Tonkin said. "It’s to do with controlling access, to restricting people to going where they can control."

Repressive governments could use the domain systems to completely redirect users. For example, a user typing in www.yahoo.com could be redirected to a government-approved search engine.

"In China the government can control most of the ISPs, so they could set up an alternate root," Dr Tonkin said. "Within that they could allow only certain websites." 

The Chinese Internet may ultimately become the first separate Internetwork, that while sharing some genes with one parent, the first Internet, also has a separate and different genetic code designed by its national administrators.

a sea of consumers

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 8, 2006
in BBS, Commerce, Photos and Travel
. 3 Comments

Renhai

The May Day vacation has apparently succeeded in spurring Chinese consumers onward and upward. This Sichuan water park has 20,000 revelers.  As one Netease commentator asks:  is it vacation or is it misery?

Link for more photos of May Day vacation crowds.

Feng Shui Phone (from Motorola)

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 7, 2006
in Mobile
. 1 Comment

060507_fsfone

Samsung Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which, according to Unwired View, does the following (and I quote):

  • Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor
    for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a
    compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of
    the house faces.
  • Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
  • GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
  • The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse
    through wireless network to to get the information about the
    surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable
    sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
  • Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
  • AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
  • The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi  values of different parameters.

Via PostShow; info from Unwired View

The Bun Murders Sequel (馒头 Strikes Back!)

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 6, 2006
in Meme
. 2 Comments

The original internet spoof of the grandiose Chinese movie, the Promise (blogged previously), called 《一个馒头引发的血案》 (The Murder Caused by a Bun) has inspired multiple sequels in the past few months.

The first is called 《一个馒头引发的麻烦》 (The Troubles Caused by a Bun) and uses film clips from movies with the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow:

060324_mantou2

Another is called 《当大师遇到馒头》(The Day the Master Meets the Bun).

060325_mantou3

The latest is called 《一根筷子引发的命案》(The Murder Caused by a Chopstick) and features clips from Hero as well as silly/satirical allusions to Bin Laden.

060506_mantou_chopstick

What’s interesting is that the video-meme has lasted so long, the original video-montage spoof was created in late January, and it’s still in the public mind today.

To find the clips, copy and paste the titles into Google/Baidu.

Source: PostShow, Sina

for the love of railroad station architecture

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on May 5, 2006
in BBS, Design, Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

Kunming_station

In the spirit of May Day travels, a dedicated Netease poster has a treasure trove for railroad architecture enthusiasts: dozens of Chinese stations.  The one above is from Kunming, the capital of southwestern Yunnan province.  One of my favorites.

The post has been viewed over 670,000 times since May 1, and has over 1600 comments. 

link