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Submission + - China's Single's Day Is The World's Biggest Online Shopping Blitz

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: While the Cyber Monday after Thanksgiving is the busiest online shopping day in the U.S., it pals in comparison to China's Single's Day on November 11 (11/11), which started out in the 1990s as a protest to Valentine's Day. Sales on Singles' Day last year for Alibaba Group, China's biggest e-retailer, totaled more than $3.1 billion, doubling the $1.5 billion spent by U.S. consumers on Cyber Monday in 2012. This year, Alibaba's two ecommerce sites, Tmall and Taobao Marketplace, are expecting sales of at least $4.9 billion. The websites across China will be offering 50% discounts on items like boyfriend body pillows and hoodies that read "I am single because I am fat."

Submission + - China Lifts Bans on Facebook/Twitter, Allows Foriegn ISP in Free Trade Zone

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Beijing has made the landmark decision to lift a ban on internet access within the Shanghai Free-trade Zone to foreign websites considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government, including Facebook, Twitter and newspaper website The New York Times. The new free trade zone would also welcome bids from foreign telecommunications companies for licenses to provide internet services within the new special economic zone to compete with the state-own China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom; the big three telcos didn’t raise complaints as they knew it was a decision endorsed by top Chinese leaders including Premier Li Keqiang, who is keen to make the free-trade zone a key proving ground for significant financial and economic reforms, the sources added. The decision to lift of the bans, for now, only applies to the Zone and not else where in China. “In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home. If they can’t get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China,” said one of the government sources who declined to be named due to the highly political sensitive nature of the matter.

Submission + - China Allows More Online Speech but Curbing Actions and Rumors

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: NPR.org reported that Harvard sociologist Gary King has just completed two studies that peer into the Chinese censorship machine — including a field experiment within China that was conducted with extraordinary secrecy. Together, the studies refute popular intuitions about what Chinese censors are after. He found that the censors actually permit "vitriolic criticism" of China's leaders and governmental policies but the censors crack down heavily on any move to get people physically mobilized to act on such criticism. In an example, a Chinese mother protesting a local official leading sympathetic outrage on social media sites, but the action was almost entirely online — and that flurry of posts went uncensored. By contrast, after the Japanese earthquake, there was a run on salt in China, King says, because people believed — wrongly — that eating salt could protect them against disorders linked to radiation. People physically mobilized around the issue, and media posts that cataloged these activities were quickly censored, King said, because the online commentary corresponded to a physical, public presence. In a related development, China's top court issued a ruling on Monday to threaten a 3-year sentence for people posting online rumors viewed by 5,000 internet users or reposted more than 500 times. Though, in the same ruling, the court also clarified that a person reposting false rumor should not be punished (in Chinese) if he or she does not clearly know the information is false, even if real harm is done. That's considered a progress in protecting speech. As the Internet has grown into an easily accessible platform for the Chinese public, an increase in crimes such as defamation and blackmail has occurred online over the past few years, the ruling said. However, the top court's spokesman, Sun Jungong, stressed that Internet users are still encouraged to expose corruption and other violations despite the new rules, adding that as long as web users are not fabricating information to slander others, they will not face criminal charges.

Submission + - Lenovo CEO Shares $3 Million Bonus with Workers 1

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Yang Yuanqing, founder and CEO of Chinese PC maker Lenovo, will share $3.25 million from his bonus with some 10,000 staff in China and 19 other countries. "Most are hourly manufacturing workers," Lenovo spokeswoman Angela Lee said. "As you can imagine, an extra $300 in a manufacturing environment in China does make an impact, especially to employees supporting families." In its annual review last year, Lenovo raised Yang's base pay to $1.2 million and awarded him a $4.2 million discretionary bonus and a $8.9 million long-term incentive award. Yang owns 7.12% of Lenovo's shares, equivalent to about $720 million in stock.

Submission + - US Banned from Exporting Trash to China Are Drowning in Plastic (qz.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Not only we depend on Chinese labor for the imports but we also depend on them to clean up our mess. Being green is getting a lot harder for eco-friendly states in the US, thanks to the country’s dependency on overrun Chinese recycling facilities since the start of China's Green Fence policy this year. Recycling centers in Oregon and Washington recently stopped accepting clear plastic “clamshell” containers used for berries, plastic hospital gowns and plastic bags, while California’s farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year. The Green Fence initiative bans bales of plastic that haven’t been cleaned or thoroughly sorted. That type of recyclable material, which costs more to recycle, often it ends up in China’s landfills, which have become a source of recent unrest in the country’s south. For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build “trash mountains” so high they sometimes bury people alive. For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, it is no longer tenable to accept US waste exports.

Submission + - India Army Mistook Planets for Spy Drones (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: BBC reports that India's army spent six months watching "Chinese spy drones" violating its air space, only to find out they were actually Jupiter and Venus. Between last August and February, Indian troops had already documented 329 sightings of unidentified objects over a lake in the border region next to China. India accused the objects being Chinese spy drones. The incident has even escalated to military build-up and stand-off at border between the two countries. High level talks were held between the two military. The Chinese denied they invaded Indian space and told India to shoot down the objects if they can and the India side replied the objects were too high, according to a Chinese news report (Google translation). At the meantime, residents of the solar system are grad that India does not possess the capability to shoot down such high attitude objects.

Comment Motive? (Score 1) 42

by hackingbear (#44254785) Attached to: Can OpenStack Avoid Fragmentation In China?

Fragmenting an existing standard creates a new standard that can draw in $$$. Everything else, national security, national pride, etc., are just excused to rip public funds. US or China.

and isn't open source meant to encourage such -- can you count how many Linux distributions out there?

Comment Re:What About the Ministry of Censorship? (Score 1) 126

If sina.com (and online news portals sohu.com and netease.com which all carry the same piece) are not major Chinese news sources, I don't know what can be. Further the original sina.com link is contributed by Globe Times which is a subsidiary of People's Daily and is considered more pro-government than its parent. PD's website also carries the same news. And why is the re-posting of BBC article even logically relevant to this discussion of censorship here?

Clearly another victim of Department of Education!

Comment Re:What About the Ministry of Censorship? (Score 1) 126

Surely the Environmental Ministry cannot be as harmful as the Chinese Ministry preventing this quote from being carried in Xinhua, China Daily or any major news source in China?
[...]
Solve your censorship problem and you will solve a lot of your other problems. Just be prepared to see high turnover in your leadership -- something that has been needed for a very long time in China.

Let me guess which ministry you are referring to...

Ah, must be the U.S. Department of Education. Since it obvious doesn't teach you Chinese and consequently causing you unable to
  read this same news in Chinese news and make up false conclusion.

Submission + - China Environment Ministry Calls Itself One of Four Worst Departments in World (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: In a startlingly blunt assessment of his five-year-old ministry, Zhou Shengxian was quoted by state media as saying: "I've heard that there are four major embarrassing departments in the world and that China's ministry of environmental protection is one of them." Mr Zhou, the minister of the department and an economist and veteran Communist Party member, blamed his ministry's malfunctions on "overlapping" remits, which confused the agency's role in handling issues such as carbon emissions and water monitoring. The minister made no mention of the other three most embarrassing departments but Chinese micro-bloggers were quick to weigh in with their suggestions including the navy of China's landlocked neighbour, Mongolia, Taiwan's foreign ministry, and China's petitioning department where officials are tasked with hearing and acting on the grievances of ordinary Chinese but can't handle/solve anything. Perhaps Zhou's department should be applauded for its honesty. What are your list of the other three most embarrassing departments in our world?

Comment Will stop blowing my nose (Score 1) 317

by hackingbear (#43715325) Attached to: Did Internet Sales Tax Backers Bribe Congress? (Video)

Yet Jeff Flake (R-AZ), he received $588,966 $2,800 - a staggering 200x in favor, and voted "NO".

Mark Kirk (R-IL) $1,076,621to $28,200 or some 35x in favor, another "NO" vote.

Dear Donor,

Thank you for your generous checks! As promised, I will not blow my nose (we call it filibustering) during the public performance of our Circus, even though I have an impressively long nose longer than that of Pinocchio's, so that the Donkeys can pass your bill. But I will immediately blame the Donkeys for passing the bill. Don't worry. That won't hurt your bill a bit. I just do it to entice other of my donors to continue to write checks to me.

Thanks again for your generous checks! Keep in touch.

Sincerely,

The Elephants

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 317

by hackingbear (#43714713) Attached to: Did Internet Sales Tax Backers Bribe Congress? (Video)

Yet Jeff Flake (R-AZ), he received $588,966 $2,800 - a staggering 200x in favor, and voted "NO".

Mark Kirk (R-IL) $1,076,621to $28,200 or some 35x in favor, another "NO" vote.

But maybe 200X got them not to start filibuster the bill? If you don't pay enough, the R will filibuster to block it; if you do pay enough, the R will not filibuster but blame the D.

Submission + - China Court Fines Apple for Copyright Violations (zdnet.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court ruled in favor of the authors, and Apple will have to pay them in excess of 730,000 yuan (US$118,000) for the infringement. Apple had not gotten permission before selling their books on the Apple App Store, it noted. These cases were the second batch of lawsuits filed against Apple by the Writers' Right Protection Union, which includes prominent members like prolific blogger and novelist Han Han who have become a pop culture star through his creative and cynical writings criticizing the (Chinese) government.

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