China: QQ for iPhone Updated to version 2.5

Talk about popular things in China! China’s most popular IM protocol is neither MSN / Windows Live Messenger nor AOL Instant Messenger (or MobileMe), but rather — a locally-made chat program called Tencent QQ, or more simply known as “QQ”. Have no idea how popular the thing is? There is a car out there called the QQ. Now we’ve no idea if Tencent (the company behind QQ) actually made it.

But we digress. Chinese Mac site Beijing Mac House has it that QQ for iPhone 2.5 has been released. The equally popular iPhone (from outside the mainland, of course) is what you need to run QQ for iPhone — and the app works great on WAP (CMNET and CMWAP) as well as over wifi. The interface also looks pretty good.

In terms of new updates, QQ for iPhone 2.5 adds support for saving QQ groups, improves chat transcripts, has a new feature for blocking individual group messages, and sports a better interface. Bugs, including those regarding logon, special characters, emoticons and group lists, have also been quashed. Now that we’ve you mouthwatering away digitally, it’s best to let you download it.

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Global Mac News, techblog86

Chinese Net Censors: 300 Million Voices in 1.3 Billion Still “A Small Fraction of People”

This is scary. China Digital Times cites a leaked Internet Supervision Office meeting as showing just how tough those censors are — or appear:

• The official started with a lot of heavy words and, in effect, BS.
• “Online public opinion is only the opinion of a small fraction of people.”
• Even if “300 million netizens all support something, it is still an opinion of the minority (versus 1.3 billion)”.
• The official then went on with this: “netizens are all young and have low incomes, and therefore are not important”.

A “theory of local truth” was then concoted, from which we quote verbatim:

The official invented a “theory of local truth.” He said: [certain phenomenon] may be true if you take a local perspective, but if you take the perspective of the whole, it is not true. For example, riots occur locally, it is true. But if you take the perspective of the whole country, [the society] is stable and peaceful; therefore to say our country has riots is not true.

Another fellow tweeter summarized this perfectly: “The head of the Internet supervision office is a passionate idiot (网管办的一哥就是一个热情洋溢的傻逼)”.

Let’s see — it’s just under two months now from the Big Sixty. And apparently, the events as of late have led to passionate censors fouling in their pants as the Chinese Internet population continues to mushroom. We’d like to hear from him again when the Net population doubles to 600 million, and eventually 700 million.

Maybe the censors would like to go back to primary school to relearn the maths?

Reactions

• “Sounds like the China Internet Supervision Office is being run by former Sen. Ted Stevens.” — @imagethief

Twitter Self-Harmonized?

It seems like it. As this post is going to press, it looks like not just Twitter itself is harmonized, but that third-party clients and access points, including iTweet and Hahlo, have also become — more harmonious. (For those of you just starting out, anything harmonious or harmonized in the Chinese Interwebs means that the site has fallen victim to the Harmonious Society — as in a society that regards these suspect sites as websites non gratia. In layman terms, anything harmonized is blocked in China.)

A chat with some tweeps in the People’s Republic reveal something that can only be called self-harmonization: it looks like, State-side, something’s awry with Twitter. See, not only does Beijing think Twitter is — can we say this — harmonious?

Your blogger-cum-tweeter needs bed time off (and nope, bed tweeting is not part of the program), so here’s hoping that the Twitterverse returns intact tomorrow morning!

What Browser Do The Taiwanese Like The Most?

This seems to be a pretty new poll in the making in the Digital / info tech part on the United Daily News site in Taiwan… but out of just around 1,500 votes cast on the page, it looks like Taiwan is in a race between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Here’s how the fight looks (numbers frozen 22:40 on August 6, 2009):

• Microsoft Internet Explorer: 724 votes
• Mozilla Firefox: 621 votes
• Google Chrome: 198 votes
• Apple Safari: 35 votes
• Opera: 30 votes
• Netscape: 7 votes
• Other browsers: 35 votes

Not a lot of people thinking different it seems…

BBS Folks in China Beware: Your IP Address May Be Recorded

These are, indeed, sensitive times. Twets from @isaac and @roseluqiu tell of horror stories that posters on especially BBS forums will have their IP addresses recorded — by force, as there are no ways to opt out.

Not known is whether or not Twitter is going to be impacted. If this worries you at all, a VPN or other reroutes are your best options.

This recent crackdown in online forums, along with a plan to have real IDs made compulsory for posters by mid-August 2009, seems to be part of a concerted plan to “harmonize” the Chinese Internet in the run-up to the Big Sixty, when the PRC turns 60 in October 2009.

iPhone in China: The Question Is When

A myriad of interesting articles by way of @frankyu, pointing us to iPhonAsia.com:

• An Apple executive team is apparently going to Beijing. Local media repots that Greg Joswiak, Apple VP for iPhone Product Marketing, will, along with a team from Apple, head to Beijing later this week. This could see iPhone talks restarted, as well as meetings with China Unicom and the PRC’s telco authorities. This is not, as the site has pointed out, the first-ever such talks; similar meetings happened earlier this year (in March and April 2009).

• A more recent post, iPhone in China… It ain’t over till it’s over, points to Tim Cook’s careful choice of words — and the oft-quoted timetable: “within a year”. The blog notes that this could mean tomorrow, or 12 months from now! There’s also a nice comparison of the iPhone and China negotiations to a basketball game between the US and China (there’s a pic of Yao Ming there, by the way). It’s not just Apple China, by the way, who wants the iPhone in the Middle Kingdom; even names like Best Buy China and Wal-Mart China are floating out there!

This article is cross-posted on the following textweit Content Sites: Global Mac News, techblog86

China Launches Investigation Into Maps

Yes, that’s right. Maps. The 2.0 part in all this point to online maps. Here’s what’s being sniffed out right now:

• Maps containing sensitive or even military places
• Maps missing Taiwan, Hainan, and other islands “officially” belonging to the PRC
• Maps illegally created by those without the legal licenses
• Maps with the wrong scale (some maps have a maximum allowable scale of 1:50,000)
• Maps with wrong province boundaries

Suffice it to say that maps missing Taiwan, or showing military secrets, will face especially severe punishment — we smell even criminal sanctions. And nope, not even Sina, Netease and gang are exam-exempt. (Source: Beijing Morning Post via Sohu IT)

Is Xiaonei As We Know It Coming To An End?

It’s at this point where we start feeling a bit sorry for Xiaonei — once “detested” and ridiculed as the Chinese carbon copy of Facebook. As we’ve reported a bit earlier on techblog86, Xiaonei as we know it right now might get harmonized — or see a lot of changes underway.

The changes are more visible to new users than to existing users. This is what the page looks if you’re not signed in:

There’s a new addition, however:

…and if you click that, you see this:

No joke. Xiaonei’s becoming Ren Ren Wang (人人网; 人人 means “everyone” in Chinese) — and that could see quite a shift in the Chinese SNS world…

Updates:

• Registered users are seeing changes in the main page while logged in:
  

Harmonious America? US Military Ponders Banning Twitter, Facebook

Web 2.0 must-haves or “security headaches”? They’re the latter in an increasingly sensitive China — being blocked as they are in the PRC — and they could get blocked in America as well. The United States Military is thinking of a block that could envelope itself around Twitter and Facebook as well.

Boing Boing has it that the US military is no less harmonious, so to speak, than its Chinese civilian counterpart. It quotes Defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman as saying that that “the Pentagon may impose a very wide ban on Twitter and Facebook for security reasons”.

Obviously, censoring in the military is at least a bit more reasonable than stopping the citizenry from going to sites that could we — can we say this? — ”reactionary”. But once you start censoring — it’ll take quite an effort to wean away from the practise. Especially if it moves into civilian territory…

Chinese Net Comment Policy on Steroids — Your ID, Please

Shocking news in Chinese as tweeted out by @freemoren from 1984BBS: it so appears that the central propaganda authorities have meted out a requirement that all major portals in China must redo article commenting systems so that ID numbers, addresses and so on become required. Deadline: August 15, 2009.

With October 1, 2009 closing on this soon, it’s little surprise that China’s going through its Big Sixty in super-sensitive mode. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have been down for quite a bit, and now ways around the firewall are a fact of life — no longer just an option.

I (as in @DavidFeng) am actually a supporter of the “real name system”, but even here, I disagree with its almost-immediate implementation — especially just ahead of the Big Sixty. It’s true that we remain ourselves online and are to bear the burden on what we say (hence the support for the “real name system”), but that’s only if the atmosphere becomes less charged. In this super-sensitive environment, this latest propaganda authorities order, obviously, is not a case of too little, too late — but rather too much, too soon. Not the best move they could do.

Updates:

• The Twittersphere is chiming in on this — with a whole lot of irony: 群众的一切都要求实名，官员的一切都是国家机密，好极了 (This is just great: the masses must use real names… meanwhile, everything about the officials become state secrets!)