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Last week Chinese media reported that the government has banned mobile manufacturers from installing Google applications on the mobile devices. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) quickly denied the rumors. The announcement came after reports by a number of major news websites in China, citing an note on the official website of a Shenzhen-based mobile service provider. The authorities said they have never delivered an order to ban the usage of Google logo and applications on mobile terminal products. The online news was not the truth …
Google withdrew its search engine business from China in 2010 after it was the victim of a coordinated cyber attack that hacked into their email service. Those attacks originated in China. According to a so-called exclusive report from The Epoch Times, a media organization from Taiwan, the ex-Chongqing mayor orchestrated the downfall of Google. Bo Xilai, the ex-Chongqing’s mayer, is supposed to be one of the main contenders for promotion in China’s leadership change this year. But he has been sacked for suggesting a fierce political fight behind the scenes. In 2009, Bo approached Baidu’s chairman, willing to promise that Google would be thrust out of China. The ambitious politician needed the local search engine to cooperate with Chongqing officials, and lift the censorship on articles criticizing the country’s leader, Premier and presumptive next Party head … UPDATE: Baidu has approached us and want us to remove this story …
Google announced its Google Drive cloud storage service yesterday and just hours later the service was found to be blocked in China, just like Dropbox and countless other Western web services. While the blocking of the new Google service is not surprising, given that Google not so-good relationship with the Chinese authorities. The situation is giving chances to local players to take advantage of Chinese Internet users’ growing interest in cloud services. Apparently, most of the Chinese people are restricted to use international web services …
A documentary film about censorship in China made by two Chinese citizen journalists, need money to take care of post-production costs, so the people involved are making a fund raising through Kickstarter. The film, entitled ‘High Tech, Low Life’, is a documentary project traces inspiring stories that often get buried by the state censors. The two unique individuals had traveled throughout mainland China documenting the urban struggles of a rapidly developing country. They have overcome the ever-evolving political risks and technical barriers to record 600 hours of value footage. We think this is certainly a project worth supporting, but the two Chinese folks will properly getting themselves into trouble and Kickstarter might get ban for accessing in China … UPDATE: The project has been successfully funded !
A few days ago, many internet user in China had complained that they couldn’t access websites based outside of China (including Apple’s App Store). Simultaneously, Internet users outside China, including in Hong Kong, reported difficulties accessing key Chinese sites, like search engine Baidu and the website of the People’s Bank of China. Though services were more or less restored after a few hours, the disruptions led to a torrent of speculation, with many first suspecting it was caused by the earthquake over at Indonesia, which resulted the damage to undersea cables. But the inconsistency of the outages, and the fact that it seems to have primarily affected traffic going in and out of China, this might be an ‘emergency test’ carried out by the Chinese authorities that would allow it to quickly block access to ALL foreign websites …
So, Facebook bought Instagram for a billion bucks. Right now, Instagram is freely accessible here in China and apparently has a small but growing user base. At the moment, Instagram seems pretty harmless to the Chinese authorities, in fact it’s just a simple photo sharing program which allows users to quickly apply different color tone to their photo. Because Instagram is accessible from China there has been some speculation that it might provide a back-door into the market for Facebook. If Instagram is heavily integrated into Facebook’s core service, more likely the photo-sharing app will still be blocked in China …
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei had set up four live webcams at his home to show his daily life, include one filming him while he sleeps, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of his detention and encourage more transparency from all sides. Last year, Ai was held for three months during a crackdown on dissent and was subsequently fined 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) for alleged tax evasion, which he denies. The live streaming TUREMAN show had been viewed around 5.2 million times in two days, and Chinese authorities have ordered him to shut down the live webcams without any reason …
Hundreds of Chinese government websites were hacked by the international hacking group Anonymous, details like phone numbers and email address were leaked and being published on ‘Anonymous China‘ Twitter account in the late March. The Chinese official has denied their sites were hacked, but apparently the hacking group is more believable.This massive hacks seem to be a new push into China, the group also invited hackers from all over the world to join their force, to fight for justice!
Leading Chinese microblogging platforms Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have temporarily stopped users from posting comments. The two companies announced today that they have temporarily suspended comment function in order to clean up rumors, while authorities have arrested six people for spreading rumors of a military incident in Beijing, following the sacking of the Chongqing’s mayer. 16 other websites have also been shut down, showing the government’s determination to control discussion about the recent political disturbance …
YouTube, the most popular video-sharing web site is now accessible in China. Several sources from SINA Weibo, the nation most influential micro-blogging service, has reported that YouTube is partially accessible without using any VPN service. Chinese internet user can access and search any video from YouTube, including politically sensitive content. But not every video can be played successfully. Could it mean that Google itself–not Google China–is cooperating with Chinese authorities ?
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