Sinobyte: China and technology

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.

Shanghai blogger Wang Jianshuo points out a less-than-expected reason why riding the bus is faster than driving on his commute: ad hoc protest against traffic enforcement:

Bus drivers don't follow the traffic rule as strictly as other car drivers. They just drive wildly, and policemen tend not to care about them. Why? I saw some cases when the policeman stops the bus, and the whole bunch of people on the bus surrounded the policeman and protest to ask the policeman release the driver.

This comes in addition to a more engineered factor, the bus-only lane on highways. People bending rules both help and hurt bus travel speeds in Wang's post. Above, they prevent bus drivers from being punished for illegal expediency. But meanwhile, as Wang notes, lots of private cars violate the bus only lane. The bright side is that the bus lane still remains fast enough to increase efficiency.

In a rare independent study of China's energy sector, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that the problem with China's coal power generation is not that its power plants lack cleaner technology.

The emissions are definitely higher than they could be, the report found, but the culprit is usually low-quality coal rather than low-tech plants. As an MIT statement explains:

Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade anthracite comes mostly from China's northwest and must travel long distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost.

The researchers gathered their own data instead of relying on Chinese government statistics, which can be unreliable. This may not sound like a big deal, but even large international organizations often, or even primarily, depend on government numbers.

"The kinds of technology currently being adopted in China are not cheap," lead researcher Edward S. Steinfeld said in the statement. "They're not buying junk, and in some cases, the plants are employing state-of-the-art technology."

There could be room for improvement in technology, however. A pilot power plant capable of using carbon-capture technology opened in China in July, and widespread efforts on energy continue. But this MIT report underlines the challenge of cleaning up power generation when the fuel is dirtier than usual.

The full report is available in PDF.

Much has been made of Beijing's decision to keep a lighter version of its Olympics traffic restrictions, not least because whatever the city did to clean the air seemed to have worked in August. But the renewed measures are weaker and the probable effect is unclear.

Alex Pasternack at Treehugger points out that the sustained restrictions, which took effect October 1, will be weaker than during the Games. Only one fifth of cars will be pulled from the road on weekdays, versus half under the Olympics rules.

According to The Beijinger (also via Alex), the city's other restrictions include:

• Restricting the number of car license plates issued for the city every year to 100,000--one fourth of the current rate of new car registration. This may in the long run be the most powerful measure, because it will reduce the extent to which increased wealth leads many people to obtain cars.
• Raising parking prices. If it costs more to park, maybe people will take the...
• Growing public transportation network. Lines five, ten, eight, and the airport express opened in the year leading up to the Olympics. Expansions of existing lines and other new lines are planned in the next two to three years.

But it's hard to tell whether the automobile and transportation efforts were really the core of Beijing's cleaner skies during the Olympics. For one thing, it's useful to remember that before a series of rainstorms, many people didn't feel the skies were particularly clear. Afterward, opinion among those used to standard Beijing air was uniformly laudatory. The rain may have helped clean things up.

It is difficult to assess, too, how important the other measures taken around the Olympics were. Manufacturing was slowed or stopped all over the region. Some of the dirtier power plants were shut. (Some may still be shut, but reports indicate that much of the industry has reopened.)

And significantly, dust from construction, a major fact of life in contemporary Beijing, was halted, because construction was halted. Though the surge of building that led up to the Olympics will probably not be matched in the near future in that city, some construction will restart.

So, to the extent that the sustained restrictions on driving decrease people's emitting behavior, that's great, but only time (and reliable measurements of air quality over time) will give a fair estimate of the effect.

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:

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.

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.

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.