drionie

Timeline of Google events in China

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:31:00 +0000

The internet censorship in China has been a topic for a while. Lately google redirected its CN domain to its Hongkong site. let’s take a overall view of its steps in China, maybe you can dig out more.

2002 June China moves to block internet portals. Without warning and explaination, Google.com became inaccessable in China temporarily.

*2003 Nov A internet censoring system called the Great Firewall has been launched by Chinese government. Even though some sites on the blacklist of Chinese governmet still display in the result of google, but access to these sites were disabled.

2004 June Google invested $499 million in Baidu, the Chinese search engine, which shows Google’s interest in this emerging market.

2004 Sep The content against Chinese government were moved off its Chinese searching result by Google for the first time. Google explained this as by technical reasons.

2004 Sep The first office in Greater China region was established in Hongkong.

2005 July Kaifu Lee left Microsoft and joined Google to help founding of Google China. A legal dispute between the two tech giants was caused due to his personal move.

2006 Jan Google.cn was launched in Mainland China. Here is the offical blog post. Google.cn filters sensitive information off its searching result according to Chinese regulations.

2006 Feb A Congressional hearing for four companies including Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, was held for their cooperation in net censorship with Chinese government .

2007 Jan In one year, Google gained 19% of the Chinese market share and became the second on the rank, while 63% for its main competitior Baidu. Since then Google China started cooperation with several Chinese companies to expand its service and products.

2007 April Google admits its sites pinyin input method was not solely built by Google after Chinese company Sohu claims it pirated its software code.

2009 March Because of the video files displaying the situation of the2008 Tibetan Unrest , Youtube was blocked.

2009 June The CCTV program Focus Interview reported that Google.cn carried large amounts of pornographic and vulgar information. Google was accused of spreading obscene content by a Chinese official one day after difficulties for Chinese users to access Google.com and gmail.

2009 Sep The news of resignation of Kaifu Lee was known by public surprisingly.

2009 Oct China author set to sue Google over web book scan.

2010 Jan SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond gave a statement that Google would no longer censor its Chinese search results and might pull out of China via a blog post. Also revealed the cyber attacks towards Google and other American companies.

2010 March Li Yizhong, Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology insisted that Google must obey its laws or “pay the consequences”.

2010 March Google redirected its CN domain to Google.com.hk, which means Google halted its self-censoring in China.

A wish ended up to a rush

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:21:00 +0000

A young female 1st year college student had a post on a wishing wall saying:

My name is 张萌芊(Zhang men qian), a freshwoman. I feel good about myself, but I‘ve been in distress that I can find a boyfriend.
I believe in fate. If you are willing to get to know me, please shout my name downstairs of Building 5# at 12:30-12:50 of Mar 11th. I will watch through the window secretly. And I will meet you up if we match.

Finally it ended up to a rush towards this freshwoman's request. The picture under was the scene of that day.

50 Cent Party

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

五毛党（wu mao dang） 50 Cent Party

Sometimes, translation is an art. By the name of 50 Cent Party, you might think it’s an organization of U.S.A., but they are actually from China. As everyone knows that in China, people have limited access to the internet, some famous websites are blocked, such as YouTube, Facebook ,twitter etc.. But besides the censorship, there is a force working in secret, not known by the majority. They are called 50 Cent Party.

The dollar is the official unit of currency of United States. Each dollar consists of 100 cents. Even though dimes are also used as a subunit, it is used solely as the name of the coin with the value of 10 cents. So only cents are in everyday use as divisions of the dollar.

In China, yuan is the official unit for the RMB. One yuan is divided into 10 角(jiao)or colloquially called 毛 (mao). One 角 (jiao) equals to 10分 (fen).

五毛 = half yuan =5 角(jiao)=50分(fen)

五毛党 refers to paid astroturfing internet commentators operating working for the People’s Republic of China, whose role is posting comments favorable towards the government policies to skew the public opinion on various Internet message boards. They are named after the 50 Chinese cents, or 5 mao, they are paid per such post, other names are red vests, red vanguard and the Five Mao Party. (Wikipedia)
In Jan of this year, there was once a news report on gscn.com.cn saying that When I am writing this post, I try to be objective but I am afraid I can’t. The content blew is my personal view of 50 Cent Party.

Gansu Province was going to recruit a team of 650 commentators to skew the public opinion to the correct direction. The report was quoted by many other websites, but none of the links was available soon. This is considered to be the proof of the existence of the so-called 50 Cent Party.

While Google was going to pull out of China, there seemed to be a very fierce debate about whether it was a good thing to Chinese people in China. No wonder why patritism was used against Google by many.

Trace back to an earlier time, after Facebook got blocked in China, the People’s Daily, which is a daily newspaper of the Chinese official press agency, released that 80 pct of netizens agree China should punish Facebook.

I think it should be as 100 pct of the 50 Cent Party agree China should punish the websites contains materials against Chinese gov.

Most popular words of Chinese netizens [1]

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:55:00 +0000

杯具 (bei ju)Cups of Tragedy/bitter cups

The word 杯具（pronounced as beiju, means cups originally）is used by Chinese netizens quite often last year, especially when something bad happens.

The origin of the saying comes from a scene in a lectural programme of CCTV10, a professor said 悲剧 with an exaggerating facial expression. Soon, a picture with this facial expression and the subtitle 悲剧 on it has been widely spread among the netizens.

Initially, it is very likely that someone on the web typed 悲剧 into 杯具 by mistake. The word 悲剧 truly means tragedy and it has the same pronunciation as 杯具.

For unknown reason, the misspelling is loved by Chinese netizens and becomes more popular to say when the correct word is expected. Finally the word 杯具 has been endowed with the meaning of tragedy, and mixed with its original meaning of cups, turned into a phenomenon.

Now when something bad happens, Chinese netizens will say 杯具。

Tips:
The pinyin input method is widely accepted in China. If you want to type some Chinese charactor by pinyin, the first step is to input its pinyin( its pronunciation), then to select among the options that match it. So a mistake such as 杯具 is able to get its soil to grow and bloom.

Baidu Raises Revenue Forecasts In Wake Of Google's Potential China Exit

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:41:00 +0000

Baidu the leading search engine operator in China, this afternoon reported blow-out financial results for the fourth quarter of 2009. The company's Q4 profit rose 48.2% to 427.9 million yuan (approx. $62.7 million), or $1.80 a share. Revenue rose 40% to 1.26 billion yuan, or about $184.7 million, compared to the same period a year ago.

In the wake of Google's stand against censorship of its search engine in China and its consideration to cease business operations in the country altogether, Baidu – to Wall Street's surprise – raised its sales forecasts for the first quarter of 2010, projecting total revenues ranging from $176 million to $181 million, representing a 48% to 52% year-over-year increase.

In other words, Baidu expects to benefit directly from Google's possible exit from China, although that dispute is far from resolved at this point.

Baidu has performed better than other Chinese Internet stocks this year on expectations that the company will gain sales from Google's customers in China, the world's largest Web market with an estimated 380 million users (according to eMarketer).

The Beijing-based firm holds about 64% of the country's search market share, well ahead of Google.cn, which holds approximately 31%. Google stands to lose a large chunk of that share if it ends up exiting the Chinese market, which is not a made decision yet. The Mountain View, California company threatened to leave China after being hit with cyber attacks that originated from the country.

The reported financial results and the raised forecasts sent Baidu's shares up 8.68% at $473 in after-hours trading. Clearly, investors don't care much about the decision of both Baidu's CTO and COO to quit the company for 'personal reasons'earlier.

China censors Oscar nominations

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:01:00 +0000

China has censored this year's nominations for the Academy Awards, blocking out the name of a documentary about the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai
Published: 6:00AM GMT 04 Feb 2010

The original address of this article

China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province promotional poster

China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, was one of five films nominated for best documentary short.

The movie shows the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, when over 70,000 people died, including 10,000 children, who were killed as their shoddily-built school buildings collapsed around them.

The collapse of the school buildings, killing the only child of many families, continues to be a highly-sensitive issue in Sichuan.

Grieving families have accused government officials of stealing the construction budget of the schools, creating flimsy deathtraps for the children inside. In Dujiangyan, some parents said the concrete of the middle school had been reinforced with bamboo, rather than steel rods.

However, the Chinese government has insisted that there was no wrongdoing leading up to the earthquake.

The documentary follows several groups of parents as their grief turned into protest.

"It was tofu construction," said one interviewee, while another held up a brick to show how easy it was to brush off the "mortar" on one side.

The 40-minute film shows how the parents are stonewalled and ignored by Communist party officials.

It was blocked from being aired in China, and the words "unnatural disaster" have been censored from the Chinese internet.

When the film garnered its Oscar nomination, Chinese media outlets either removed the film from their reports, or omitted the entire category.

There is also speculation that the Oscar ceremony itself may not be aired live in China because of the potential embarrassment if the movie wins.

Instead, an edited version of the ceremony may be screened.

The move comes in the midst of an extremely hardline censorship campaign, which has seen internet cut off entirely in the far Western province of Xinjiang and may yet force Google to abandon its Chinese business.

Xinhua, the official government news agency, reported that 900,000 mobile phones had been blocked in the southern province of Guangdong because they had been used to send text messages which contravened new regulations on obscene and controversial content.

Finally Got sidewiki to get my blogspot updated

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:22:00 +0000

Sidewiki is a very cool way to get blogspot updated, especial for those people who are in China. With out proxy, you can post stuff onto your blog on Blogger. Cool!

in reference to: Blogger: drionie - 整理帖子 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Top 10 hot topics on internet 2009

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:01:00 +0000

When I was planning about the Top 10 words on internet 2009, I found that China Daily is one step ahead. But it doesn't stop me from my writing enthusiam. And I am preparing to propose a poll to do some survey and see what's in their mind.
Anyway I still would like to decide to post the China Daily Top 10 hot topics on internet 2009 here.

1. Could "hide and seek" lead to death?

Spotlight turned on detention center reform after 24-year-old detainee Li Qiaoming was found beaten to death by a fellow inmate in a Yunnan province facility after initial claims he died during a game of hide and seek in February.

Related stories:
Inmate beaten to death in 'hide-and-seek'
Spotlight turned on detention center reform
Ministry: Detention house overhaul on the cards
Prisons still in dire need of reform
Call to put inmates in 'neutral hands'

2. Could self-defense be excessive?

The story of Deng Yujiao, a waitress who resisted the sexual advances of local officials in Badong, Hubei province, and killed one of them, has not ended with her acquittal by a court. It raises an essential, though hypothetical, question: Would the verdict have been the same were it not for the intervention of the sympathetic public?

3. Can you say things online about others that are not true?

Indecent photos and words hoaxed by Yan's ex-lover in a blog falsely proclaimed the woman is HIV positive in bid to get revenge - a case study into the debate about people's rights to privacy in cyberspace.

4. Can a doctor play games while on duty?

A 5-month-old baby died in hospital while the doctor was "stealing vegetables" in an online game and missed the opportunity to save the baby in Nanjing in November. The baby's parents have urged quick action for the reform of health care system to avoid future tragedies.

Related stories:
Baby dies while doctor plays game online
Surfing officials chided

5. Can one say bad things about the government online?

Blogger Wang Shuai was tracked down across provinces and arrested after he posted words against the local government - something about the "illegal conduct" of the government. Is it the proper penalty for slander or is it a violation of a citizen's right to speech? Are people really free to post opinions in online communities?

6. How dangerous could smoking expensive cigarettes be - to your lung and to your career?

China's discipline watchdog launched a joint campaign with the Chinese Association of Tobacco Control (CACT) to ban government officials from purchasing tobacco using public funds in June.

The move came after Internet users uploaded photos of Zhou Jiugeng showing a pack of Nanjing 95 Imperial cigarettes sitting in front of the former director of the real estate management bureau in Nanjing. The cigarettes cost about 150 yuan (about $22) per pack.

7. Do you need a license to practice medicine?

Hospitals have a responsibility to provide opportunities for medical students to practice. But what if a patient is in critical condition?

Disorder and irresponsibility in hospitals worry the public as Xiong Zhuowei, a research fellow with the prestigious Beijing University First Hospital died of pulmonary failure after undergoing spinal surgery at the age of 49 November 3.

Related stories:
Medical interns 'unlicensed'
Husband fights for compensation

Husband's blog records anger at wife's death
Professor bids to determine cause of wife's hospital death

8. Do the rich - and their offsprings - have the right to drive recklessly?

Tan Zhuo, 25, was killed by a speeding Mitsubishi sports car in a downtown Hangzhou crosswalk in May. A forensic report by motor vehicle experts showed the car was traveling between 84 km and 101 km per hour when the accident happened.
The driver of the car, 20-year-old college student Hu Bin even joked with his friends after the accident.
Hu received a three-year jail sentence in July. Tan's parents got 1.13 million yuan ($164,800) compensation for his death, mental suffering and other fees.
Related stories:
Drunk man driving Porsche kills girl
Harsher penalties after teen's fatality
Driver case needs independent probe

9. Do the urban young have a chance for a decent place to live?

The 35-episode TV series has touched a raw nerve in its audience, who sympathize with the characters' moral dilemmas. The hit show depicts a large demographic of urban young dwellers whose dream for an apartment of their own is receding farther and farther away as housing prices skyrocket.

10. Is it a sports game or a scripted play?

While China's football is still struggling to restore fans' confidence, the biggest ever match-fixing incident among China Super League (CSL) clubs was exposed, casting a shadow over the popular but struggling sport in China.

source: ChinaDaily

4 Surprising Google Wave Uses

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:24:00 +0000

4 Surprising Google Wave Uses

Posted using ShareThis

Log on for the first time

noreply@blogger.com (强尼) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:19:00 +0000

To write a blog in English has been a dream for quite a long time. Even though I tried several times but none went well due to many different reasons.
The reason why I get started here is of my great admiration to Google. The GWF limits Chinese people access to the internet. With proxy, we successfully go through the GWF and reach whichever website we want. So to start a blog here also presents my pursuit of freedom.