Jackie Chan has been greasing up a lot recently, preparing his big slide into some communist arses. Already famous for remarks saying that HK and Taiwan are too free and thus chaotic and that Chinese people need to be controlled and ruled （太自由了就变成香港今天這個樣子，很亂。而且變成台灣這個樣子，也很亂。。。我們中國人需要管的）, he is now taking it to a new level. Especially hilarious is the claim that Chinese citizenship is the hardest to obtain in the world （中國籍是全世界最難進的籍）.
Tag Archive: china
China is notorious for its internet censorship and most people under the influence of the communist regime know no around it. There are countless ways around China’s Great Firewall (also called GFW) but next to Tor, probably the safest route is by establishing a virtual private network or vpn. A vpn basically establishes a encrypted connection to another computer (in this case outside China) and makes it possible to channel all internet traffic through this tunnel.
For example, someone living in Guangzhou could establish a secure tunnel to HK or any other (freer) country in the world and thus access sites such as the Chinese version of the BBC or Amnesty International
While this approach still means that the Chinese state knows that you are encrypting data (and this could arouse suspicion by itself) they will be completely shut off in regards to what exactly it is you are doing.
If you don’t have access to your own VPN infrastructure (which I’m sure most of you don’t), you probably have to pay for it. If this is the case, I suggest Witopia, a cheap and reliable VPN service prover from the US. (and no, I don’t get any benefits from recommending and linking to them from here).
Rebecca MacKinnon from the University of Hong Kong has recently released her research on how companies implement self-censorship.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese blogosphere has already translated her presentation into Chinese.
Everybody knows Twitter. So do you. So do the Chinese. So far, I have already see dozens of Twitter clones. Microblogging, or 叨客 as it is called in Chinese, is obviously in vogue now. Some of them merely copy Twitter’s functionality while others also copy the website’s look and feel – at least the old one that is.
Since Twitter stopped its SMS service August this year, I found myself using its service less and less. I’ve been looking more and more at alternatives. Increasingly, I have also been looking east.
Personally, I quite like jiwai.de. In terms of look and functionality it resembles Jaiku more than it does Twitter. Since I’m also quite a fan of Jaiku, I might actually use it more regularly.
While doing my research on this, I found this very interesting post which gives you a short overview over the top 5 most popular Twitter-like clones in China. Check it out!
Skype seems to be following in the footsteps of Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Cisco – a report released by the Munk Center of the University of Toronto alleging that Skype is lying about the end-to-end security of Skype conversations in China.
Nart Villeneuve, the author of the report, claims that the Skype version distributed in China, also knowen as TOM-Skype monitors the full messages of text chats and text messages sent over the system where at least one of the participants is using the TOM-Skype client.
Most people outside of China aren’t using the TOM-Skype version and therefore aren’t be affected by this. However, if you are communicating with someone inside China who is very likely to be using TOM-Skype, it is possible that your text conversations are being monitored and your personal details stored. Voice chats, it appears, are not affected.
Here are the two main findings of the report:
- The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for keywords, and if present, the resulting data and personal information of the users are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
- The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party
of China. But analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven, instead suggesting that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.
Skype’s president Josh Silverman says that it had previously admitted that Skype was censoring messages in order to comply with Chinese law. They are, however, concerned about TOM’s practice to store the data and that they were addressing the issue. Josh also stresses that this only affect TOM-Skype users.
One of the reasons why I am using Skype is security. Admittedly, it’s not the only reason – I also find it convenient and cheap. But security is definitely very high up on my list. It’s not that I’ve got a lot of top-secret conversations but being passionate and a little bit involved in human rights in China, I KNOW that the security of all parties is of paramount importance. And while I can see Skype’s corporate ambition to operate in China, I can’t help but feel like this is a major breach of my trust. It just always makes me sad when “giving up free speech and the privacy of others” is merely another “cost of business”.
In case you are interested, download the full report
According to the China Internet Information Network (CNNIC), which has released its latest statistics on internet usage in China in June 2008, China’s internet population is now the biggest in the world.
The report states that over 100 million people in China own blogs / individual spaces. A doubling of the numbers since CNNIC’s last report covering the end of 2007 was released. My guess is that mini blogs from social networking websites such as Xiaonei are included in this figure – hence the word individual spaces.
Here’s a quick roundup of a few numbers in the report:
- 84.5% of users consume online music
- 81.5% go online to read news
- 77.2% use instant messaging services such QQ or MSN
- 71% consume online videos
- 62.6% use email
What strikes me as really interesting is that the number of IM users are much higher than the number of email users.
If you want (and read Chinese) you can download the original version of the report in PDF
German artist Julius von Bismarck invented an inverted camera that allows one to modify other people’s images and display messages or picture: the Fulgurator. Here is a quick explanation of how it works:
Using this method, it would be possible to circumvent most ways of censorship in the public and would allow activists to give their message a level of visibility previously denied to them, since the message doesn’t appear except for a fraction of a second when the actual picture is taken. I think this would be ideal for an experiment during the Beijing Olympics! However, for reasons of security, I still wouldn’t advise Chinese nationals to take out this experiment.