Global Issues

Skype's Chinese version left the surveillance door wide open

Security researchers recently found that IM conversations on the Chinese Skype program were not only filtered, but also recorded on a massive, nonsecure, server. The possibility of surveillance flies in the face of Skype's supposed strong encryption, and has provoked outcry among privacy advocates.

Users of the TOM-Skype platform, marketed in cooperation with a Chinese company, were "regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data [were] uploaded and stored on servers in China," according to the report by Nart Villeneuve. Voice communications may have been catalogged, but researchers reported they did not find recorded … Read more

Chinese social networks block Baidu indexing

User privacy concerns on Chinese social-networking sites have led the biggest players to block indexing by Baidu, China's leading search engine, according to Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.

The blogging site of Sohu.com, China's leading portal, as well as social networking sites including 51.com, Xiaonei, and Hainei have blocked Baidu's spiders from indexing the sites, Marbridge reported. Other search engines may also be blocked.

The reasoning behind this move may reveal a pragmatic commitment to security by obscurity for people who post under their real names and may want to avoid attention from employers, acquaintances, and government … Read more

Asian air pollution could make U.S. summers hotter, but for how long?

So-called "short-lived" gasses and black particle pollution from power plants in Asia and transport in the United States could have a greater influence than previously predicted on temperature changes in North America and elsewhere on Earth, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week. But is the headline the whole story?

While the general press and blog coverage of the report emphasizes Asia as a cause of warming in the United States, scientists also emphasized that better practices in energy-intensive economies with less-than-clean power plants could be an equally large opportunity for stabilizing the climate. … Read more

Noda Nagi, artist who showed cute to be weird, dies at 35

Japanese artist Noda Nagi, known for her ecstatically odd aerobics videos and her charming hybrid stuffed animals known as Hanpanda, died Sunday according to reports.

I had just been thinking of her work, having recently unearthed my Hanpanda (right) and placed it at a key watchful position in my new home. She had a great ability to hijack the "cute" aesthetic that characterizes much Japanese popular artwork and turn it more bizarre while maintaining some charm.

Though I only had the chance to meet her once when I served as a mysterious (and unidentifiable) extra for one of … Read more

Green gambling, but don't let this guy run your numbers

Thomas Friedman visited a wind farm near the East Asian gambling capital, Macao. But his rhetoric outsizes his quantitative skills in setting up another "dichotomy" in a "flat" world.

The column is a dizzying and logically disjointed ramble through some well-worn tropes on China's economy that have developed during the media's concurrent green awakening and Olympic China craze in recent months.

This is not so surprising from a columnist specialists love to lambaste, but this opening left me more confused than usual:

[T]he Chinese engineers showed me their control room, which has a … Read more

Contracts even with unlocked phones: Or, why I bought an iPhone

All year, I've been using an HTC Touch as my telephone. But now, having just moved back to the United States, I found it so hard to get a reasonable deal for service with this unlocked GSM smartphone that I decided there was little reason not to get an iPhone.

This was not an easy decision. I'm about to begin life as a graduate student, so money will be tight. I already had a pretty decent smartphone, which I'd bought in China because it was Windows Mobile and could run Pleco, the undisputed master of mobile Chinese-English … Read more

Journalists, residents getting same Net in Beijing

Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.

That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.

After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.

ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while &… Read more

Are the Olympics a trap?

The Olympics may be an elaborate trap, the Onion reports. Via Danwei. The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?

Can you 'report freely' on Olympics with Net restrictions?

The International Olympic Committee has acknowledged that it acceded to Chinese government demands that some Internet censorship be kept in place during the Olympics, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Nevermind that IOC promised journalists could "report freely" from the games. Still, is this really a problem for reporters?

Long story short: this isn't much of a problem. Journalists arriving in Beijing without regularly being stationed there have already spent however much money to get to China and stay in hotels. They can afford a VPN service, which will completely circumvent the government restrictions--that is, if their … Read more