Internet

Things aren't going so good over at file-sharing wunderkind, BitTorrent.

According to a report on Valleywag Wednesday, BitTorrent is laying off its entire sales and marketing department, 12 people out of the company's entire staff of 55.

"The immediate cause of the layoffs," according to Valleywag, is "a failure to sell the Torrent Entertainment Network, BitTorrent's attempt at an online media store, to Best Buy for a rumored $15 million."

The story goes on to state that a source told Valleywag that the Torrent Entertainment Network sale fell apart due to the FCC … Read more

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 … Read more

The question of why Baidu continues to outperform Google in the world's largest internet user-base has fueled much discussion. I explore business practices and cultural factors that may have fueled this advantage in an article for China International Business this month.

But while Baidu leads now, there's a possibility that Google's strength in the "cloud computing" world may lead to gains in the long run.

Check out the article here.

Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.

"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.

This is a particularly clever solution in … Read more

Sinobyte commenters have raised two good questions about Internet freedom during the Olympics, set for August 8 to 28 in Beijing. I'm going to give the best kind of answer available for each: an educated guess.

I had written about "free Wi-Fi," which hasn't yet really started working, but is slated to be available during the games in some key areas of the city.

Commenter DangerousOffender asks: How "free" will the access be? Will users be able to access the entire internet, or will it be censored? I was referring, of course, to "… Read more

Members of a hepatitis B support group in China, numbering about 300,000, lost their online forum in a Chinese crackdown on civil society. Now some say they may be forced into taking drastic measures, even during the Olympics.

In an unusually prominent threat of collective action in China, Lu Jun, who ran a recently blocked site for carriers of hepatitis B, said some disgruntled members may be planning protests during the Olympics, according to the Financial Times:

Mr. Lu, who heads a rights group that has helped carriers sue companies such as IBM and Foxconn for discrimination, said the … Read more

The system for ordering, paying for, and issuing Beijing Olympic tickets has had many kinks, the latest of which may be the middle name question.

A Wall Street Journal blog reports that people found a Bank of China branch unwilling to issue tickets to some foreigners because the registered name lacked the middle name present on the required passport. Without an exact match, you're nearly out of luck. Just like getting on a plane in China.

Or that's what the report says. It's a blog post based on a single anecdote from an anonymous foreign friend in … Read more

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in an interview with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, said he never anticipated router-level information restrictions and said he's concerned.

"I had never appreciated that governments would see the internet as so important that they would begin to block it at the router level, so I worry about that," Schmidt said.

Schmidt did not name specific countries, but the type of blocking, including that of Google's YouTube, applies directly to China. He also said that Google talks to governments about what they're blocking and tries to convince them that offending … Read more

As of right now in a Beijing bar and restaurant, Anonymouse.org is inaccessible. It returns the "connection reset" message that is a hallmark of most Chinese internet controls.

Anonymouse is one of the most commonly used tools among my friends for accessing websites blocked in China. Its limitations, including inability to load complex web pages, i.e. those using javascript or streaming video, led me to seek out other options, but Anonymouse has been an important tool for many.

One alternative, proxy4china.com, does a better job dealing with complex pages, and is working again after a … Read more