In a purported effort to cut down on "ID sharing" in Beijing's Internet cafes, the government will require that by the end of 2008, first-time visitors will have their picture taken and ID scanned before being allowed online, according to The Beijing News and the China Media Project.
Users were already required to show identification when they entered, a rule that has been spottily enforced at times but more strictly, by most accounts, since preparations for the Olympics began. David Bandurski at China Media Project writes:
The newspaper quoted Li Fei (李菲), a spokesperson for the Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency, as saying the policy was aimed at preventing "ID sharing" (一证多用). The monitoring platform will allow enforcement officials to target any terminal at any Internet bar in the city to compare the user with registered information.
Perhaps this is indeed aimed at "ID sharing," but another piece that Bandurski quotes, an editorial in the China Youth Daily, sees the new policy as creating the potential for invasion of privacy.
In this monitoring system that renders users "naked," how will the freedom and privacy of citizens using the Internet be protected? The Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency reassures us that these controls end with the enforcement team's monitoring platform and that we "have no need to be concerned about the leaking of personal information."
But aside from worrying that personal information might be leaked to others, we also worry that the freedom of our online communication and the privacy of our conversations will be betrayed by public power.
Under this platform of "monitoring of any terminal at any Internet bar in the city," won't monitoring mean that enforcement officials will have the right or the opportunity to view our chat histories? Can they not read our private correspondence at will? Won't any and all online behavior fall under the eyes of the enforcement officials?
If this is the case, then all Web users really are "entirely naked," if only before a limited number of enforcement personnel.
Read a fuller quote from the editorial in Bandurski's post.
The era of online domination by the Roman alphabet will come one step closer to its end next year when a new top-level domain for China, .中国, is deployed. Xinhua reports that ICANN expects the domain, which uses the two-character modern Chinese word for "China," will be ready in 2009.
The report also notes that people will be able to use Chinese characters for their mailbox name (the part before the @ sign) as well.
In the future, Internet users (will be able to) use their native languages as mailbox names to send and receive e-mail, which means (the) English-dominant (Roman characters only) era which began in 1982 is about to end.
I hope the encodings will be flexible enough to communicate across deployments of Chinese characters. If someone writes a name in simplified characters and then someone whose computer can only type traditional needs to write an e-mail, this could get challenging.
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 conversations.
It wasn't just TOM-Skype users who were affected. Any Skype user who communicated with a TOM-Skype user was vulnerable, according to the report. And it didn't appear that keywords were the only trigger. Other factors, possibly individual usernames, might have been used to catalog data.
Villeneuve has posted a Q&A on his website that outlines some of the most common questions. (h/t Rebecca)
Although TOM-Skype was designed to prevent transmission of some keywords, such as an un-redacted "f*ck," Skype had claimed the filtering happened before the message was encrypted for transmission to the receiver, Villeneuve writes in the Q&A. His findings, if true, would contradict this claim.
Free expression advocates have been sharply critical of eBay, Skype's parent company, for this behavior. Rebecca MacKinnon, a professor at Hong Kong University and an expert on Chinese internet restrictions, writes:
"While Skype claims to have fixed the problem, the fact that TOM-Skype was enabling surveillance and privacy breaches in such a shocking manner for a significant period of time demonstrates that eBay/Skype as a company has not placed enough emphasis on protecting users' rights and interests."
Aside from an outpour from censorship activists, this finding also shows that many messages that were logged without users' knowledge were available to a hacker because the servers storing the information were not secure. The report notes that the servers were probably compromised before what the researchers might consider their "benign attack."
In fact, evidence suggests that the servers used to store captyured data have been compromised in the past and used to host pirated movies and torrents (for peer-to-peer file sharing).
Obviously, people who want to communicate securely in China will need to use other technologies.
[UPDATE: I wrote the below before seeing an update on Danwei noting that the fine was canceled. This only underlines the power of online controversy, especially considering that the cancelation notice says the man was still guilty: they are merely using discretion in this case.]
Police officers who said they were investigating the distribution of "harmful information" from a new business' IP address found a 30-minute adult video on a hard drive and fined the owner 1,900 RMB ($277 USD), according to a reported translated by ESWN.
The crux of the legal claim appears to be the distribution function of BitTorrent, which was how the man accused, Ren Chaoqi, said he obtained the video.
The fine, no small amount for a newlywed with a new small business like Ren Chaoqi, has apparently ignited a controversy on some Chinese-language websites.
According to the article, online opinion is firmly on Ren's side:
According to an Internet survey conducted by Sina.com: 55,259 persons voted and 96.52 (53,251 persons) thought that "this person did not illegal distribute and exhibit pornographic videos and that the negligible impact should not have incurred such as heavy fine." At the Nanyang bar at Baidu, a similar survey showed that 99% were bothered by the police action.
The report isn't clear on what law was used to fine Ren. At first it was under a law designed to punish someone for obtaining illegal revenue. Ren, however, told media that the video was purely for personal viewing.
Later, the citation said the offense was copying illegal material. This is where BitTorrent comes in. Indeed, unless settings are specifcally set up for someone to be a "leech" only, downloading from BitTorrent also includes transmitting.
Ren told a reporter he is waiting for an administrative review that he hopes will lead to a lower fine--or no fine at all.
This curious case, while quirky, exposes interesting workings of internet society, passing of information, and China's legal system. Check out the full article.
Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.
As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:
The last sentence gave me an idea. What are the odds that, literally, somewhere, someone used their finger to, say, remove a fly who was sitting atop one of the routers or switches that make up the Chinese internet blocking infrastructure. And what if that caused a defect in stored data, erased some buffer, anyway just sort of fudged things up in the right way to let loose TypePad for the masses.I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.
Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.
Just a thought.
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 monitors.
But if Sohu blogs aren't indexed, there may be radical effects on the Chinese blogosphere.
Regardless, the attempt at security is partial at best. The data, of course, is still published. Just as Americans have gradually come to terms with the fact that placing something on MySpace, Facebook, or other sites may make it accessible to prospective employers or others, data posted on Chinese portals is accessible to a variety of actors.
Even if privacy controls intended to restrict access to approved users are used, the Chinese government's power to look at data contained on servers within its borders makes government surveillance only slightly more circumscribed.
Further, search engines might simply switch to spider IPs or behaviors that get around the blocks, though this may be unlikely given that leading engines tend to obey "no spiders" signs in robots.txt.
This move may still be good for social-networking sites. But for blogs, a block can be disastrous if it isn't optional.
As those of us who blog know all too well, the success of one's work and the likelihood that anyone reads it is dependent on links. Links, links, and more links. But if someone searching for discussions of a certain topic can't find our work, we're out of luck.
For personal blogs, this is no big deal. I could care less if people index my daily musings on a personal blog. But for people who wish to participate in the vibrant world of online discourse, being obscured from search engines is a game changer.
It's unclear to me at this point whether Sohu's block will remove its blogs from the searchable world. But if it does, prepare to see a deluge of Chinese bloggers switching to different platforms.
Just a short note to point out that Apple, with its recent update to iTunes, has done something we've all been asking for for years: Amazon-style predictive marketing of music.
And that's what it is. I'm ecstatic to see this arrive on my local jukebox software on the MacBook, but I've been lamenting for at least half a decade that if Amazon can predict what books and CDs I want to buy after knowing what I've bought, iTunes should do it too.
I'm not exaggerating about the five years. The iTunes Music Store launched in April of 2003, according to Wikipedia. It didn't take me long to imagine that some day the massive amount of data about my musical preferences contained by my iTunes Music Library could help recommend new music for me.
In the meantime Pandora and others have served this purpose, and it turns out I almost never use those services (though the streaming Pandora to iPhone service is pretty cool). What I've been aching for is something a little more mundane and critical, if you want robust data-driven analysis of my tastes. Which I want. I don't expect you to care about my tastes, but I bet you care about yours.
- iTunes needs to be able to keep data after a reinstall. Once upon a time I had about three years of data on how many times I'd listened to what in an iTunes library. It's still on one of these hard drives around here. But then I got a new computer, or had to reformat something, or had to reconsolidate my music collection. And it was gone. I was zeroed out. That's now happened so many times I don't bother keeping the data anymore. I've built the loss into my music psychology.
- Speaking of reconsolidating iTunes libraries... It's a monumental pain to handle a library larger than can fit on one's laptop drive. External drives are great, but you may not carry them with you, and even if you do, it's hard to have even a pocket drive connected while the computer's balanced on your leg. iTunes needs to allow users to choose which files will be mirrored on the laptop and which will just be waiting home on the external.
- This one's for the non-Mac users. A good friend of mine and I have shared a lot of music. I assure you we obeyed copyright laws at all times. But he has not frequently been a Mac user, and his various Windows and UNIX/Linux-based software do not always play well with an iTunes file structure. iTunes should facilitate my and his music lives by allowing more robust file naming and cataloging options in terms of where and how files are stored.
That's all. We'll be back to China in the morning. For now, it's back to whatever "genius" decided that an Antibalas song is similar to a dance by Kitaro.
The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
GoDaddy, the world's leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners' names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.
If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.
Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:
The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China's Olympic team prior to the Games' opening on August 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names anymore; they were forced to give it to the medalist "as a gift".
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 "the majority of advocacy sites and politically 'sensitive' organizations remain blocked."
It may be nice that these sites have come available, but content is still filtered by keyword, if not encrypted during transmission, and there's no way to know whether this increased availability of Chinese Web sites will outlast the Olympic pageantry.
