Sinobyte: China and technology

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.

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.

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. Especially in the case of these short-lived pollutants.

The particles being discussed are considered short-lived because their effect is shorter than that of CO2. Much shorter. While CO2 is a global warming agent until it is chemically changed into something else or sequestered, these particulates and gases affect temperatures on Earth's surface by either absorbing more heat or reflecting more than regular air, but they only do so for days or weeks at a time. Since the NOAA predictions estimate short-lived pollutants will be responsible for approximately 20 percent of global warming by 2050, this is both a great opportunity for improvement and a reminder that the largest culprits still need to be dealt with.

The key advantage to reducing these pollutants may be that the benefits will be seen immediately and previous emissions are not compounded. At least, once the production of these pollutants reduces, that 20 percent of warming could cease very quickly.

Certainly air pollution created in Asia is a significant factor in the global climate. But in the case of this non-CO2-related report, I find the press accounts unnecessarily and perhaps unfairly paint Asia (and yes, it's "Asia" rather than anything more precise) as a culprit.

Without having read the entire report, the NOAA scientists seem to have been more careful. They note that U.S. transport, i.e. automobiles and perhaps airplanes, as well as power generation a hemisphere away are likely to contribute to hot, dry summers in the United States.

What's key to remember, however, when media reports talk about Asian pollution, is that manufacturing-related pollution is not completely Asia's fault. Much of the manufacturing going on in China and other countries in East and South Asia is for export, and the United States is a top market for many countries. When I went to the store recently and bought a bunch of housewares, many items were made in China, and I have no idea under what environmental conditions they were produced. I share responsibility for related pollution. I likewise don't know the environmental pedigrees of many non-Asian products in this room.

This disconnect between our purchase and the emissions it causes is a challenge even for green consumers far more diligent than myself. For consumer pressure, we'll need more life-cycle data about products at the point of the purchase, and meanwhile we'll have to work on some far-reaching strategies to clean up the global manufacturing system. Meanwhile, here's hoping we can get rid of most of this short-term gunk.

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.

Hanpanda supervises as I furnish my new bedroom.

(Credit: Graham Webster)

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 her works, I'll miss seeing her creations, as I am sure will many others.

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 giant glass window that looks out onto their 21 wind turbines that crown the peaks of a nearby mountain. ...

But as my eye drifted just to the left of that mountain, I saw Macau, with its rising skyline of casino skyscrapers. The Venetian Hotel in Macau alone has some 870 gaming tables and 3,400 slot machines. So, I did a quick calculation and figured that those 21 wind turbines together might power the Venetian's army of one-armed bandits for a few hours of green gambling.

The problem? Read closely. Mr. Friedman did a "calculation" that 21 wind turbines "might" power some slot machines for "a few hours." But how long would the turbines need to be in operation to supply a few hours of gaming? How much electricity does a slot machine use? Is it more if it's one of those LCD ones, or does the spring-loaded wheel type turn out to be more efficient?

It's hard to blame a columnist charged with being interesting and insightful at a length of roughly 800 words twice a week for having some off days, but when you're staking your recent work on a concept of green innovation, and you're the international affairs columnist for The New York Times, I wish it would come out more neatly.

Am I a sucker for linking to this?

Passing of the torch: here are my iPhone 3G and me in the eyes of my retired HTC Touch, now reduced to life as a Chinese dictionary.

(Credit: Graham Webster)

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 dictionaries.

And I was nervous about the iPhone 3G, despite its superior aesthetics and preferable interface, having heard so much about performance problems. For a few reasons, I decided to go with iPhone anyway.

The primary reason is that AT&T and T-Mobile, the main GSM carriers in the United States, did not seem to want to give me a no-contract plan with a good data option. Both wanted a two-year contract just for opening the accounts, according to their Web sites. I had assumed one could just bring in a phone and go month to month.

The U.S. carriers seem to be using a tactic that Beijing-based tech industry consultant Mark Natkin said is the favored strategy of Chinese carriers to retain customers. Rather than lock the phones, which would be easily unlocked in Chinese electronics markets, providers are requiring contracts for decent services. Responding to my speculation on whether China Mobile iPhones will be unlocked, Natkin, who is managing director of Marbridge Consulting, explained:

Rather than locking phones, China's operators have been moving increasingly towards locking customers into a long-term contract that comes with a phone sourced by the operator. In San Francisco, a quick walk down Market Street from the AT&T Wireless store, you can get your mobile phone unlocked for $20 in about 10 minutes. So in China, where the labor is much cheaper, not many phones would stay locked unless the SIM card was fully embedded.

The fact that this tactic seemed to be in action in the U.S. made it only slightly more expensive for me to get an iPhone, so I went for it.

This could foretell a model for Apple to end its devotion to single carriers. If Apple were willing to let multiple mobile companies sell the iPhone and provide service for it in the United States, each company could sell them at a price like the $200 to $300 we see for the 3G and nail us with high-priced data plans. Especially if users wanted to use services like MobileMe's push e-mail feature (supposing it were to work), there could be specific, iPhone-only plans. Why can't this be done with multiple carriers?

This model wouldn't be new. The same phones have been available at multiple carriers for many years. They are sold at below-cost prices and the carriers make up for that with service contracts. What I want to know is:

• Why do we need to lock phones if we can lock users into contracts?

• If my phone is locked to your expensive service, why do you need to nail me with a contract?

Couldn't the industry get along with one or the other coercive tactic?

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.

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 newsroom doesn't have one already. Journalists will just have to learn how to use the Internet under less-than-ideal circumstances.

The long story: for the unaccustomed, the restrictions will be a pain in the neck. Certain things will be blocked in certain places. You'll never know exactly why something was stopped. Not-so-savvy reporters or those with old computers may have trouble using proxies and VPN.

But this doesn't really stop reporters from "reporting freely."

What would stop that is denial of access, denial of free travel, and threats or actual detainment or deportation after publishing something the government doesn't like.

I can say from personal experience that certain towns in the northwestern province of Xinjiang were being treated as off-limits to foreigners and some Chinese from out of town as recently as 10 days ago. We've already seen Beijing police acting violently against reporters from Hong Kong and breaking camera equipment at an Olympics news event.

Reporting freedom will not be complete in Beijing, but Internet censorship is not the reason. When foreign journalists are the target of restrictions, that's not much of a civil liberties problem for Chinese people, who face a restricted internet whether or not a bunch of reporters get a free pass this summer.

Perhaps reporters should get over their own selves and write more about Chinese people.

UPDATE July 31, 2008 17:23 GMT: The AP reports that an official who guaranteed free access to journalists was surprised by the shift:

Gosper said he first learned of China's backtracking on Internet access when Beijing organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide announced Tuesday that journalists would have only "sufficient" -- not unrestricted -- access to the Internet.

Since then, Gosper said he has felt "a bit isolated" within the IOC and was surprised at being left out of the loop.