Man, I’d hate to see what I would get fined if they … Poor Ren Chaoqi, you really have to feel for this guy — he got his fifteen minutes of fame for being fined 1900 RMB for having some dirty videos on his computer. The story goes that the police were checking up on someone else’s computer, a friend of Ren’s perhaps, and then decided to check his computer too. The reason that he got fined is that according to the police, having downloaded something on bit torrents means that you were uploading (seeding) as well, which means that you are, in effect, spreading porno far and wide in China, and that’s against the law.

This whole issues has made the Baidu Nanyang BBS into one of the most heavily trafficked in the last few days. And that has to do with the fact that a supposed “internet policeman” called Kuang Re de Feng (狂热的风）[which means something like 'crazy' or 'fanatical' wind] has dived into the fray, answering the questions, comments, criticisms of netizens, igniting something of a flame war.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of people who think that this whole kind of thing is preposterous — not the amount of the fine, just the idea that your privacy can be breached and then, because you have some porn on your computer, that you must be fined even though you’re mostly just using it for late-night stroke material and not trying to promote the next Dirk Diggler.

Here’s what the first commenter said:

狂热的风我想问你几句？你怎么知道任超奇是的片子是BT下载的？我还说是从是HTTP下载了呢？第二点谁给你们的权利可以随便搜查别人电脑的？是不是可以这么讲你们可以半夜跑进别人家搜查下电脑？一无所获后再敲开邻居的门顺便搜查下啊！！谁给你们的权利，适用什么法律啊！！

[translation: Kuang Re De Feng, i want to ask you: how do you know that the videos that Ren downloaded are from BT? What if i say it was from HTTP? And secondly, what gives you the right to search other people's computers? Does this mean that you can just come in the middle of the night and search people's computers? And if you find nothing, are you going to just knock on the neighbors' doors and search their computers while you are at it? Who gave you the right, what kind of law are you using?!"]

china, internet, porn, tech, computers, BT, privacy, law, nanyang, henan

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apple store beijing one to one training

During the Olympics I got to visit the new and only Apple Store in China, a true temple of Apple dedicated to the pantheon of Cupertino immortals. The only thing that sucked about it is that I already have a fancy Macbook and can’t afford to get anything else. On the second floor there is the Genius Bar, and I thought to myself, half-jokingly, how great it would be for me to work there. Well, after clicking on some Chinese iPhoto ads, I got to the Apple China home page and I guess they are, like the other Apple Stores around the world, offering training classes for Apple products and software, which brought the whole idea back into my mind. That is so my dream job. Why don’t they have one in Shanghai?!

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Saw this random post from netease:

揭秘3G iPhone生产线 现场美女照曝光_网易手机社区 via kwout

This is supposedly a picture of a girl working in one of the China factories that produces the iPhone 3G. She seems healthy and disciplined—perhaps she is an alum of the Foxconn ipod city and is grateful to have gotten the hell out of there and moved up in the world. I don’t what company is doing the final assembly on the iPhone—if you look at the All Roads Lead to China blog where I found the following assembly diagram, it seems that Foxconn is the one doing the final assembly in China. Not sure where the truth lies—over a year ago Foxconn denied being Apple’s iPhone maker in China.

iPhone: Made In Shenzhen, Assembled by Foxconn | All Roads Lead To China via kwout

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Lenovo’s Olympic ads – BusinessWeek

I think they use completely different ads here in China. The sumo wrestler/Xpad 300 ad is this one:

Here’s even more bleeding edge avant-garde one for the Z60:

And here’s a Chinese one featuring Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi from way back when:

This Xpad 300 one is rather tepid by comparison:

Here’s another Chinese one that is snazzy but not quite as avant-garde as the newest ones:

Here’s yet another dated, sports-related one from China:

You can tell the Chinese ones and the US ones are quite different in style. I suppose that reflects a change in their marketing strategy, maturation of the brand, and perhaps change in commercial production personnel…anyway, Business Week thinks that these are perhaps too edgy for the Olympics and are better suited for the Superbowl…

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OK, so internet addiction is old hat but I am continually amazed by the stuff that people will do just to get their fix. There are other, perhaps extenuating circumstances: broken homes, parental neglect, problems at school—but some young people in China are really falling through the cracks. Read an article about how an 18 yr old boy lived in an internet cafe for three years; he basically played games until he was too tired to go on and then would sleep. He developed some kind of pelvis infection and things finally caught up to him recently when he tried to get up to go the loo and could not move. They rushed him to the hospital and that’s how his story got picked up by the media. Internet addiction makes people do strange things. A third-year student at a Kunming university spent so much time on the net that he neglected to shower for three days.

A more in-depth story about the “black” net bars that cater to underage consumers with little cash is a bit more shocking. Xiao Xing, a middle school student, became so addicted to the internet that his parents were forced to get rid of the computer. With nowhere to get his fix the boy turned to the illegal net bars that are ensconced within regular apartments. There is obviously no signage: people who know, know where to go. Adults are not allowed in. There are often more than 10 computers stuffed into these apartments. Kids can surf the internet for 2 rmb/hour sans ID card.

When Mr. Chen, Xiao Xing’s father, went looking for his son, he went into one of the first net bars and a saw several computers, but no kids. Then he went to a second one, and again saw a bunch of computers, but no people. He noticed that the monitor lights and mouse lights were blinking. He sensed that these computers had recently been used. He heard a sound and opened a curtain to find several boys hunched and hidden behind it, staring out at him in fear. Xiao Xing wasn’t there. He told them “go home, your parents are going to get worried.”

The reporter managed to interview a kid (it might have been Xiao Xing, on the way home) and discovered that this was standard protocol at the illegal net bars: whenever someone knocks or comes in, the kids have to hide, behind curtains, in the bathroom, on the balcony, etc. People know about the existence of these places, but the strong arm of the law hasn’t done much to clamp down on this phenomenon: at most they took away some of the computers and restricted the number of computers able to access the internet from that apartment—but never were these people arrested or ordered to stop, which is, in my mind, what ought to happen.

One time when asked who all these kids surfing the internet were, the boss lady replied “these are all my relatives…oh and that boy is a friend of theirs.” Shameless. Just shameless.

These places mushrooms, you stamp them out in one place and they pop up somewhere else. All the parents that are trying to curb the excessive net addictions of their kids had best beware. If the heat is on one of the places, the kids can just go to another one nearby.
I really think they ought to just not let the owners of those apartments ever get online again, ever—or limit their connection to one computer.

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Just something I saw in China CSR.com…this thing was on the way from Oakland to China. I guess there are some loopholes in Hong Kong law that allow e-waste to get through, even though it’s technically illegal. Technorati Tags: china, greenpeace, hong kong, oakland, US, e-waste, waste, environment, computers, electronics

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A new, very heads-on MacBook Air rebuttal type ad from Lenovo. The ThinkPad X300 seems like a decent computer, solid state drive and all � but it just costs a lot more, even though we know that if the Macbook were to be fitted with a similar solid state drive the price would end up being higher than what you pay for the Thinkpad. The best thing to do would be to fork over the money for the ThinkPad and then make it a hackintosh!

Technorati Tags: lenovo, macbookair, mac, osx, windows, xp, ultraportable, computers,

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