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Just a year ago this day, the Beijing Olympics got off to a start. Whether it was a bang or a whimper (as in the massively stepped security procedures and almost-impossible-to-get PRC visas) — that we’ll let you decide. But there’s a hashtag that was part of the day: #080808.

Not just that. Everyone China or even remotely Chinese-related had #080808 on their avatars. @thecarol from Taiwan did that. @isaac did it. Everyone in the region went #080808, thanks to @flypig’s idea.

The irony of this is that, in the name of the Big Sixty coming later this year, the #080808 hashtag — along with everything else Twitter-related — appears to have been harmonized. Oh yeah — and also the Internet censorship. You could access sites you couldn’t access otherwise in China a year ago. YouTube or even BBC Chinese? Yours last year.

#Harminator’s this year.

The skies outside today in Beijing appear just as gloomy as it was a year ago. (Obviously, and we’re going off at a slant here — for the best blue skies, come in winter around January or February. Satisfaction guaranteed.)

Talk about Twitter in China these days! First it went down in early June (password here had something to do with Tian’anmen), then it went down right after Urumqi shook with riots. Now Twitter itself has been compromised with denial-of-service attacks, and just lately all passwords have been reset.

Here’s how sorry the situation has gotten as of late:

• In all of this: Twitter (as in the twitter.com site) has been blocked in China.
• Late Thursday: Access to iTweet, Hahlo and some other third-party Twitter sites became cumbersome.
• Early Friday: iTweet, Hahlo pretty much dead by mid-morning.
• Late Friday: PeopleBrowsr looking OK, but still very iffy. Ping.fm does not post all tweets going through.
• Very late Friday: Twitter working again via iTweet and Hahlo.
• Early Saturday: iTweet, Hahlo working again.
• 09:49 Saturday morning: Twitter sends password resets, access to iTweet and Hahlo die again.

We’re pointing a finger at Twitter directly. Politically speaking, if you could save Iran, why not save China?

Thanks to @POPOEVER, @daygan and others for helping your tweeter out through all this.

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

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

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!

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…

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.

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

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)

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:

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