Asia embraces the cloud

Cloud computing storms Asia

But does anyone here really know what that means?

Global Post, June 19, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan — He spoke into the microphone quickly, in a clipped tone, as spectators in a crowded conference hall hung on his words.

His presence here was akin to that of an Olympian god, deigning to descend from the heavens (Silicon Valley) for an inspection tour of Vulcan's workshop: the Far East, where most of the world's gee-whiz tech gadgets — handsets, iPads, e-readers, netbooks — are actually made.

He was here in part to preach the latest gospel from America. He was here to preach The Cloud.

"Cloud computing will drive a massive wave of innovation in personal computing, and Taiwan is going to be at the center of that," said Google vice president for product management Sundar Pichai, speaking with the doubt-free air of a TV evangelist for the high-tech set. "That's why it's very exciting to be here. We need partners in the 'ecosystem', and the pace of innovation here is incredible."

He said his firm has made "big bets on cloud computing," and his tone said he was confident of coming up aces. "The web is going to get much more powerful, and that's the heart of cloud computing."

Yes, a typhoon of "cloud computing" hype has reached Asia. Never mind that few people here (or elsewhere) seem to understand what it means, or that the term is thrown around so carelessly.

Whatever it is, the tech elite here seems to agree it's important — and Taiwanese firms had better get the new religion, fast. Taiwan's government recently announced an ambitious plan to promote "cloud computing." South Korea's did the same late last year.

Broadly speaking, cloud computing refers to the trend of delivering software, storage and other services over the internet. That's a shift from the old PC-and-local network computing model, where documents, software and operating systems live on each individual machine, and firms maintain their own servers and tech staff.

In tech-speak, it's called moving stuff "outside the firewall."

In the brave new cloud computing world of the future, gadgets and devices will increasingly function solely as a connection to the Internet and content delivery platform. Software, storage, even operating systems will run remotely from vast data centers, or server farms.

If that future comes to pass, whoever is good at building and operating those data centers, and the customized servers that run them, stands to thrive.

At the revival-meeting-slash-cloud-computing-forum in Taipei earlier this month, Taiwanese fretted about whether they'd be able to adapt. Western participants tried to reassure them of the Good News: With The Cloud, they'd have more opportunities than ever to make gadgets for the world's eager consumers.

"You have built the finest electronics manufacturing infrastructure the world has ever known," said Tudor Brown, President of ARM Holdings, which makes the processors used in mobile gadgets like the iPhone. "Cloud computing brings opportunities for a much bigger market, as you use that infrastructure to continue to produce these products and ship them around the world."

"Your competitiveness should be increased, not decreased, by the shift to a more flexible cloud computing world," he insisted, after a round of teeth-gnashing from Taiwanese panelists over their self-defeating price wars and other shortcomings.

Like most of the fads out of Silicon Valley, "cloud computing" is a catchphrase with an uncertain shelf-life. But industry observers are surprised at its staying power to date.

"We went through Internet hype and crash a decade ago," said Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research, in a phone interview. "Then we went through a smaller sort of excitement about 'virtualization.' And starting about two years ago, we got 'cloud fever' — and the fever has persisted longer than I thought it would. The amount of hype is kind of silly."

One of the fiercest critics of cloud hype has been Oracle's Larry Ellison, who said in a famous 2008 rant [3], "the computer industry is the only industry that's more fashion-driven than women's fashion ... I have no idea what anyone's talking about, I mean it's really just gibberish ... what the hell is cloud computing?"

Gillett says cloud computing is a mixed bag. Part of it is just using a trendy new phrase for old services -- an old-wine-in-new-bottles job that some call "cloud-washing" (one might also say "bullcloud.") Using Gmail qualifies as cloud computing. So does using Flickr, or any web-based software services.

But part of it is a genuinely new way of thinking about computing that could, over the next decade, change our relations with gadgets and Internet services, he said. Whereas now people buy a gadget — be it a smart-phone or netbook or tablet computer — and then choose what services to access with that device, in the cloud-computing future it may well be the other way around.

"The level of integration between devices and services will increase, and the decision-making sequence will be flipped on its head, from devices to services, both for individuals and companies," said Gillett.

For businesses, Gillett says cloud computing is most promising in areas like web conferencing, data warehousing and business intelligence. Firms are likely to farm out those areas rather than try to maintain expensive in-house capabilities.

So are the Taiwanese convinced? Convinced enough for the government to launch a $720 million campaign about it. Because who knows?

Those Silicon Valley preachers may turn out to be right.

Original site

Internet rehab break-out

Chinese Youths Escape From Internet Addicts' Camp

AOL News

TAIPEI, Taiwan (June 8) -- A group of youngsters hog-tied their counselor and escaped from an Internet addicts' rehab camp in China earlier this month, according to a report in the Yangtze Evening News.

But their taste of freedom lasted only a few hours, until police picked them up after getting a tip-off call from a cabdriver the penniless youths had stiffed.

The story shines a spotlight on the growing "Internet addiction" problem among increasingly wired Chinese young people, and on the many "jie-wang" (quit the Internet) camps that have sprung up in recent years to treat the 21st-century malady.

Cancan Chu, Getty Images

An Internet addict receives an electric shock treatment at Beijing Military Region Central Hospital in 2005. Some of China's Internet addiction programs are run in hospitals; others are fly-by-night operations.

Some of the rehab centers are run out of hospitals with professional staff and support. But many others are fly-by-night operations looking to cash in and employing questionable means, such as administering electric shocks to Web-addled youth.

The Yangtze Evening News, whose story Monday was first highlighted by the website danwei.com, said that China's health ministry banned such extreme shock treatments last year.

The jail-break from the Jiangsu Province rehab camp was planned well in advance, the paper said. Five or six youth practiced for days with a rope. Then, on the night of June 3, they ambushed their counselor, covering him in a blanket and then tying him up. When the counselor screamed, the alarmed youth, fearful of being caught, hit him while simultaneously apologizing to him, the paper reported.

A total of 14 youths, ages 15 to 22, took advantage of the counselor's quandary to make a run for it. Some took cabs to nearby Xuyi County, home of the teens' ringleader. But their well-executed plan fell apart at that point as they had no money to pay the cabdriver.

Eight of the youths were picked up by police wandering the streets, still clad in the military-style camouflage fatigues issued by the camp, the report said. All were returned to the camp, with some facing tearful and ashamed parents. The Yangtze Evening News ran a photo of one youth, his head hung low, facing his crying mother, with the caption, "How am I going to save you, my son?"

Parents had paid 18,000 renminbi (about $2,600) per teen for a six-month stint at the rehab camp. As at many such camps, military-style discipline was employed to try to set kids straight and help them kick their online habits. The escapees had only been at the camp two or three months, but cited bad food, mean counselors and crushing boredom as motivations for their bust-out.

China had 384 million Internet users by the end of last year, with the Internet reaching about 29 percent of the population, according to a white paper released by the Chinese government today.

Psychiatrists differ on whether Internet addiction should be accepted into the medical canon. In a 2009 interview, Dr. Tao Ran, a pioneer in the field in China, said he defined Internet addiction as spending more than six hours per day for three months or more on non work- or study-related Internet use.

He estimated that 4 percent to 6 percent of Chinese Internet users qualified as addicts by that definition. Most of those are youths hooked on shoot-em-up games like Counterstrike (or "Audition" in the case of many girls), or online novels popular in China.

Tao defended rehab camps like the one he runs outside Beijing, saying, "they can help them [teens] build their confidence, become more social, learn to be more respectful and develop group spirit."

Tao said teen Internet addiction was usually just a symptom of underlying problems such as bad parenting, dysfunctional families or personality disorders. For that reason, he insists on treating teens and their parents jointly at his clinic, and administers medication to about 60 percent of his patients.

His patients are mostly Chinese but have also included Internet addicts from the U.S., Japan and Germany. He said his Chinese patients typically withdraw from school and social life, sleep during the daytime and go online at night. "They say they live on American time," Tao said.

Original site

Chinese chase porn star

Porn star prompts Chinese to jump "Great Firewall"

AOL News, April 21, 2010

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- In the past few weeks, thousands of Chinese netizens have successfully jumped the "Great Firewall," China's cyberblockade on sensitive Internet content.

But they're not after democracy, human rights or Taiwan independence websites. No, they're chasing a Japanese porn star.

The porn star in question, Aoi Sola, launched a Twitter site at the end of March. Her Chinese fans went nuts over the news -- but then realized Twitter is blocked in China.

No matter -- they've been distributing software among themselves that allows a user inside China to get around the "Great Firewall." Thousands have piled into Aoi Sola's Twitter site already, in a wave of interest that took the Japanese star by surprise.

"What sparked so much discussion about me by Chinese people? What happened?" she wrote, according to the Dongguan Times. "Please tell me."

The flock to Aoi's Twitter site shows how easy it is for determined Chinese to get around Beijing's cybercontrols. But it also highlights what types of content will actually motivate them to go through the trouble.

"In China you can get anything you want on the Internet, you just have to want to bad enough," said David Wolf, a Beijing-based tech industry expert at Wolf Group Asia.

The Dongguan Times ran photos of the star with an April 13 article headlined "Japanese 'top girl' opens microblog, 15,000 Chinese netizens 'jump the wall' to pay homage." The paper reported that users who needed a helping hand over the Great Firewall could get instructions by e-mailing mytwitterclient@gmail.com.

An e-mail to that mailbox got an automated response with detailed instructions in Chinese on how to access Twitter from inside China, plus links.

China's Great Firewall consists of sophisticated controls to block Chinese users' access to content deemed sensitive by the Beijing government. Such content includes excessive criticism of the central government, promotion of Tibet or Taiwan independence, anything related to the banned religious group Falun Gong and pornography.

Wolf said the most common means of jumping the Great Firewall are with a proxy server, which "masks" a user's location and activity, or with a virtual private network that creates a "private tunnel through the Internet." The latter is used by foreign banks and other firms in China to secure data transmission, he said, but it is not that easy for normal Chinese to get one.

"It's simple for someone with some minimal technical acumen" to scale the Great Firewall, said Wolf. "But that means that it's too difficult for most of China."

Aoi Sola's fans got up to speed quickly. In a post on her blog translated by Danwei.org, a writer purporting to be her gave a shout-out to the wall jumpers. "The 'Twitter incident' has caused reverberations in China and Japan. Speaking truthfully, this was a little unexpected, even for me," Danwei.org's translation read.

"Speaking 'without modesty,' I know that there are some Aoi fans in Asia," she wrote. "But when I directly faced the figures on Twitter, I could hardly hide my surprise. Thanks everybody for tweeting about me."

As of today, Aoi had more than 54,000 followers on Twitter. In one recent "tweet," she writes about an iPad purchase, in Japanese and English ("Listen!! I bought [an] i pad !! yeah! yeah!" she says).

Aoi has responded to the onslaught from the mainland by saying she's trying to learn Chinese and likes the proposal from one love-struck (or perhaps just lust-struck) Chinese for a fan club meet-up in China.

Josephine Ho, coordinator of the Center for the Study of Sexualities at Taiwan's National Central University, said the rush to Aoi's Twitter site reflected tight controls on sexual content in China.

"The reason there's such eagerness is because there's such a strong clampdown on sex and sex-related information, not only in China but also in Taiwan and Hong Kong," said Ho. "Sexual information is hard to get at, and Japan just happens to have a sophisticated porn industry.

"Japanese porn is very popular in all three Chinese-based cultures -- it's humongous, because Japan is very, very productive," she said.

Original site

Rehab for webaholics

In an increasingly wired China, rehab for Internet addicts

A Beijing treatment center for Web-addicted youths includes counseling, group games like laser tag, and physical exercise.

By Jonathan Adams
The Christian Science Monitor
January 6, 2009

Beijing - A 6 a.m. wake-up call. Afternoon drills in military bearing and formations. And a grueling regime of push-ups and leg lifts before the 9:30 p.m. lights-out.

Welcome to rehab for Internet addicts – People's Liberation Army (PLA) style.

Here, on a military base outside Beijing, a progressive Chinese psychologist, Tao Ran, has established a treatment center for a distinctly 21st-century malady.

The center is an experiment in treating "non-material" addictions – others include work-, shop- and sex-aholism – that are booming along with China's rapid modernization, says Dr. Tao.

"The problem is getting worse," says Tao. "[Internet addicts] can't adjust to school and society, so they try to escape their difficulties and avoid problems. They lack self-confidence and often don't have the courage to continue their lives."

China has the world's largest number of Internet users – 290 million and counting, with 70 percent under the age of 30. And a recent survey of Internet use by global market information group TNS found that Chinese spend the highest proportion of their leisure time online – 44 percent – out of users in 16 countries.

Tao estimates that 4 to 6 percent of Chinese netizens, which includes more than 13 percent of Chinese college students, are addicts – a term he defines as anyone who spends more than six hours per day for three months or more on nonwork- or study-related Internet use. That amounts to as many as 17 million net junkies in China. By comparison, about 8 percent of college students in the US are addicted Web users, he estimates.

Last fall, Tao coauthored a controversial diagnostic manual for "Internet Addiction Disorder," and he's now fighting to get the disorder accepted both by Chinese netizens and by health organizations at home and abroad.

Finding games and friends in the real world

Tao's center, which opened in 2004, has become the model for other such centers countrywide, which now number more than 300.

Here, in addition to military-style discipline, some 60-odd patients at his center undergo a three-month regimen of counseling, confidence-building activities, sex education, and in about 60 percent of the cases, medication. The treatment is designed to address underlying family and psychological problems, and boost their self-confidence.

There are a handful of young women here, going "cold turkey" from "Audition" and similar games, where players engage in dance battles, decorate virtual homes, and have virtual husbands and babies. (One female patient had amassed 68 "husbands," says Tao, with a sigh).

But most of the patients are young men, 15 to 21 years old, hooked on multiplayer online games – especially World of Warcraft and Counterstrike.

"They believe the virtual world is beautiful and fair," said Tao. "In the real world, they become depressed, upset, and restless – they are very unhappy."

Jia Chunyang, a teenager from the coastal city Qingdao, is a typical patient. Wearing a military-green jumpsuit and hip black-framed glasses, he explains that Counterstrike is his "drug" of choice. A couple years ago his gaming habit – which he indulged at least five or six hours a day – started to seriously affect his life.

"My relations with friends weren't good; I only communicated with them online," says Jia. "I stole money from my family and skipped school. And the games also affected my personality. If I couldn't play for a while, I would feel upset."

He hit bottom in 2006, when he ran away from home and went on a 15-day Counterstrike bender in an Internet cafe. He took breaks for instant noodles and half-hour catnaps, but otherwise went on an uninterrupted shoot-'em-up spree, as his parents searched for him.

Now, at the rehab center, he says he's feeling much better. He was touched by his parents' willingness to come all the way to Beijing to try to address his problems.

He says the toughest parts of rehab are the evening exercises and military training. But he credits the center with helping him regain control of his life. "It's changed me a lot," says Jia, giving him structure, access to counseling, and new friends. "I feel like we're brothers, sharing this different life together ... sometimes I don't want to leave."

A symptom of deeper problems

Tao emphasizes that "Internet addiction" is a symptom of deeper family and psychological problems. The majority of patients come from broken homes or were emotionally neglected in childhood, he says, which is why he insists on treating young patients together with their parents.

He says more than 20 percent of patients also have psychological problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity or personality disorders, which require more attention.

Still, he says his center gives young men and women and their families a chance to face their demons head-on, and try to kick Internet habits which have interfered with their schooling, work, and personal relationships.

The center is on the cutting edge of Chinese society, in which seeking help for mental illness, family problems, or addiction has traditionally been rejected as a shameful loss of "face."

But Tao says such attitudes are changing as China's modernization poses new social challenges: higher pressures in China's hyper-competitive workplace, breakdown of family ties, higher divorce rates, rapid commercialization, and issues related to new technologies.

In China, he says, Internet addiction is mostly a problem for teens – as opposed to the US, where it affects more adults (in particular, US males addicted to online pornography).

Back at the center, the mother of one patient from Jiangsu Province says her generation was spared what she calls the "mental heroin" of online games and content that hooks kids. "I think this kind of treatment is good," says the mother, who did not want to give her name out of embarrassment over her family's problems. "It combines psychological, medical, educational, military, and physical exercise."

Despite the military-style discipline, the patients also have fun. Tao shows off the mock AK-47 assault rifles and battle gear they use for "laser tag" games. Later, 40 Internet addicts in military-green jumpsuits huddle in a conference room for some team-building exercises, as their "counselors" – PLA soldiers – watch.

As the song "If you're happy and you know it" plays, two web addicts at a time spin around until dizzy, then try to race each other across the room. Later, they line up in pairs to pop pink balloons by hugging each other tightly, amid raucous laughter.

"Every child in this rehab center has a sad or miserable history, because their parents didn't treat them justly," says Tao. "Here, they can build their confidence, become more social, and develop group spirit."

• Zhang Yajun contributed to this article.

Original site

China "invades" Vietnam?

Vietnam protests hawkish Chinese Web postings

Chinese officials have confirmed that plans posted online for an invasion of Vietnam do not reflect Beijing's official position. But the postings are heightening tensions at a time when China seeks to gain control of oil-rich regions in the South China Sea.

By Jonathan Adams
Christian Science Monitor, Terrorism and Security Update
September 10, 2008

The Hanoi government has complained to Beijing about postings on Chinese websites that detail plans for an invasion of Vietnam.

Chinese officials have dismissed the posts as the ramblings of a hypernationalist minority. But the diplomatic flare-up is seen as an indication of rising tensions between the two nations over the potentially oil-rich South China Sea. There, China has been pressuring Western oil firms to cancel joint exploration projects with Vietnam in waters that Beijing also claims.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the invasion plans have been posted on the popular Chinese web portal Sina.com and at least three other websites. Analysts interviewed by the SCMP characterized the posted "invasion plans" as the work of kooks, with little military value.

The supposed plans detail a 31-day invasion, starting with five days of missile strikes from land, sea and air and climaxing in an invasion involving 310,000 troops sweeping into Vietnam from Yunnan, Guangxi and the South China Sea. The electronic jamming of Vietnamese command and communications centers is mentioned, along with the blocking of sea lanes in the South China Sea....

"Vietnam is the strategic hub of the whole of Southeast Asia. Vietnam has to be conquered first if Southeast Asia is to be under [China's] control again," the plans say. "From all perspectives Vietnam is a piece of bone hard to be swallowed."

The SCMP added that Vietnamese officials were baffled that the postings remained online after they registered their complaints, since Beijing can easily block any Web content that has been brought to its attention.

The Straits Times, a Singapore daily, reported that Chinese officials have assured Vietnam that the postings do not reflect Beijing's official position.

The web postings come as China and Vietnam are squaring off over exploration projects in the South China Sea in areas that both claim. In July, Beijing had warned the American oil giant ExxonMobil to scrap an exploration deal with Vietnam, reported the World Tribune. The report suggested that Vietnam had a better case for its claim to potentially oil-rich fields off its coast. But China is flexing its growing political muscle by asserting its claim to nearly the entire South China Sea.

A Hong Kong newspaper says Beijing's diplomats have threatened retaliation if ExxonMobil goes ahead with a preliminary agreement with the Vietnamese state oil firm PetroVietnam. The deal covers exploitation in the South China Sea off Vietnam's south and central coasts, according to the Sunday Morning Post....

The Hong Kong newspaper quoted unidentified sources saying Exxon Mobil was confident of Vietnam's sovereign rights to the blocks it was now seeking to explore. But it is clear that ExxonMobil could not dismiss China's warnings out of hand given the rapidly increasing Chinese market for crude oil and oil products....

Last year, Chinese media targeted an agreement between Vietnam and BP near the Spratlys maintaining that those islands had been an "indisputable part of Chinese territory since ancient times." The Spratlys, like other island groups in the region, are uninhabited rocky outcroppings and coral but are in an area that may contain large oil and gas deposits.

Reuters reported that China and Vietnam are actually cooperating in oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam's north coast. But in waters further south, the two sides are at odds. The territorial dispute in southern waters led British oil giant BP to scotch its plans for exploration there.

Once united by their communist ideology, relations between Vietnam and China cooled in the 1970s, particularly when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978 to oust the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge regime.

Partly in retaliation, China invaded Vietnam a few months later, as detailed by Global Security. The two sides fought a nasty one-month border war that left tens of thousands dead before Beijing retreated. Border clashes continued throughout the 1980s.

That history helps explain Vietnam's sensitivity to public "invasion plans" on Chinese websites, no matter how bogus they might be.

In the past two decades, relations have warmed as both countries moved ahead with pragmatic market reforms, despite several ongoing territorial disputes. In addition to the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea, the countries are also battling for influence over neighboring, resource-rich Laos.

A commentary in the Asia Times argued that Laos is likely to increasingly tilt toward China, despite the landlocked country's historically close ties to Vietnam.

Laos is of increasing strategic importance to both China and Vietnam, two of Asia's fastest growing countries. Vietnam's interests lie primarily in securing its long land border with Laos and developing greater access to markets in Thailand. For China, Laos provides a growing avenue to export products to wider Southeast Asia, particularly from its remote and less-developed, landlocked southwestern regions....

Some analysts here predict that the balance of influence inside the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) could soon shift in Beijing's favor, as senior Lao leaders fade from the political scene and younger, more market-savvy cadre lacking experience in the communist revolutionary period assume positions of power.

Original site

Chinese hackers attack

Chinese hacked computers, U.S. lawmakers say

The alleged attack renews cyberwarfare concerns.

By Jonathan Adams
Christian Science Monitor, June 12, 2008

Two US congressmen have accused hackers from China of breaking into their computer systems and stealing information on political dissidents, raising concerns at a time of growing global concern about cyberwarfare.

The lawmakers warned that other lawmakers, civilians, and military officials should take steps to protect their laptops and other devices against such break-ins, especially while in China.

The Chinese government has denied any involvement in the cyberattacks.

The two congressmen who made the claims are active in promoting human rights, according to Reuters.

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, said his office computers had been compromised in August 2006 and that he was told by the FBI and other officials the source of the attack was inside China.

Rep. Christopher Smith, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his computer had also been attacked from China. The New Jersey Republican has sponsored legislation that would prohibit U.S. companies from cooperating with governments that restrict information about human rights and democracy on the Internet.

Representative Wolf said that other US government officials had pressured him not to go public with the claims, according to the Associated Press. "My own suspicion is I was targeted by China because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record," said Wolf, according to the report.

Wolf urged congressional hearings on the break-in and wants to raise awareness of the threat of hacking from China and elsewhere, reports Bloomberg.

He is calling for a closed briefing where officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can brief House members on technological threats from China and other countries.

"The potential for massive and coordinated cyber attacks against the United States is no longer a futuristic problem,'' Wolf says. "We must prepare ourselves now and develop universal procedures for responding to this threat."

Chris Smith, one of the congressmen targeted in the attacks, told The Washington Post that he believed the hackers may have had Chinese government support.

[The] sophistication of the attacks, in December 2006 and March 2007, and the kind of information involved suggest that the Chinese government might have been behind them.

"The Internet can be used as a terror weapon. It can be used as a disinformation apparatus," Smith said. "And nobody has done that more expertly than the Chinese government."

But a Chinese Embassy official in Washington denied his government was involved in the hacking. That official told The Washington Post that sophisticated hackers in other countries could make their attacks appear to originate from China, regardless of their actual physical location.

ABC News reported that US officials said it's difficult to determine whether hackers from China are backed by the government or operate independently. But it's clear that attacks traced to China-based ISPs (Internet Service Providers, or local hosts) are on the rise.

Computer intrusions from China have dramatically increased in recent years and, according to officials, have included cyber attacks on the Secretary of Defense's e-mail servers in June 2007....

In December 2007, hackers believed to be in China were behind cyber attacks on three of the U.S. National Laboratories, including Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In those attacks, hackers used e-mails with attachments sent to thousands of lab employees.

The latest charges come amid an investigation into whether a US official's computer was compromised during his visit to China last month and concerns over electronic eavesdropping during the upcoming Beijing Olympics, reports the IDG News Service.

In late May, the contents of a U.S. government laptop may have been copied during a visit to China by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, a matter which is still under investigation.

In early May, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback alleged that the Chinese government had asked major hotel chains to censor their Internet traffic during the 2008 Olympic Games, which will be held in Beijing August 8 to 24. Brownback did not name the hotels involved, but condemned China's human rights record.

Experts say China is clearly ramping up its cyberwar capabilities. The Christian Science Monitor reported last fall that China was in the vanguard of states aiming to use cyberwarfare for political ends. It said experts believe that most Chinese hackers are "gray hats" – meaning they are tech-savvy Chinese nationalists who aren't formal agents of the Chinese government.

Today, of an estimated 120 countries working on cyberwarfare, China, seeking great power status, has emerged as a leader.

"The Chinese are the first to use cyberattacks for political and military goals," says James Mulvenon, an expert on China's military and director of the Center for Intelligence and Research in Washington. "Whether it is battlefield preparation or hacking networks connected to the German chancellor, they are the first state actor to jump feet first into 21st-century cyberwarfare technology. This is clearly becoming a more serious and open problem."

A recent National Journal article claimed that according to US security sources, China-based hackers, including those working for the government, may have played a role in two massive blackouts in Florida and the northeast US in recent years.

The magazine said US intelligence officials had linked the People's Liberation Army to the largest-ever blackout in North America, a 2003 outage across 9,300 square miles in the US Northeast that affected some 50 million people.

Tim Bennett, the former president of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a leading trade group, said that U.S. intelligence officials have told him that the PLA in 2003 gained access to a network that controlled electric power systems serving the northeastern United States. The intelligence officials said that forensic analysis had confirmed the source, Bennett said. "They said that, with confidence, it had been traced back to the PLA."

However, some commentators reacted skeptically to that report. Writing for a Wired magazine-hosted blog, Kevin Poulsen called the article "cyberwar hysteria," arguing that an exhaustive 6-month investigation into the 2003 blackout had traced the root cause of that outage to the utility company First Energy's failure to trim trees growing into power lines in Ohio.

Now that we're seeing "overgrown trees" between the same scare quotes conspiracy theorists bracket around "lone gunman" and "moon landing," the cybarmageddon hawks have squarely set foot in the realm of 9/11 truthers. I'm waiting for them to blame Chinese hackers for "Hurricane" Katrina.

Original site

Click for sky lantern

Taiwan Lantern Festival causes concern for environmentalists

By Jonathan Adams
International Herald Tribune, Feb. 20, 2008

PINGSI, Taiwan: On a bridge here one night this week, Candice Lee and Lynn Liu, both 22, giggled as they lit an oil-soaked wad of folded paper at the bottom of a meter-high lantern. Like a hot-air balloon, the illuminated lantern rose from their outstretched hands up into the darkness.

Written in ink on the lantern was a plea to the gods for romantic intervention: "We've been good girls - please send us men."

Every year during the Lantern Festival, thousands of people in Taiwan light such lanterns and send them skyward with prayers - a folk ritual dating back centuries that has counterparts on the mainland, as well as in Japan, Vietnam and Thailand.

In Taiwan, the festival reaches a climax here Thursday, the 15th day of the first month in the lunar calendar. Some 40,000 to 50,000 people are expected to crowd this former coal-mining community in northeastern Taiwan - the island's "sky lantern" capital - to take part in a mass celebration that will sow the night sky with thousands of incandescent lamps.

If Taiwan's environmentalists had their way, though, at least some of those people would stay home. As an incentive, Taiwan's Environmental Protection Administration this year introduced its "virtual sky lantern" Web site, where people can release a digital lantern rather than a real one.

The goal is to blunt what the EPA says is the environmental harm of the festival.

Every year the debris from thousands of burned-out lanterns litters the Taiwan countryside. Some even ignite fires: In 2006, according to press reports, a sky lantern set a field on fire next to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, sending up huge clouds of smoke and forcing officials to temporarily shut a runway.

The virtual lantern campaign is just the latest front in the battle between the island's environmentalists and other activists, on one side, and adherents of traditional folk, Taoist and Buddhist practices on the other.

"Some people say sky lanterns make too much garbage and damage our environment," said Andy Hsiu, of the Taipei County travel and tourism bureau, which promotes the annual festival. "But others think it's not a big problem. They'd rather protect our tradition."

Environmental and other forms of activism gained steam in Taiwan after martial law was lifted in 1987 and the island democratized. Now, Taiwan is trying to strike a balance between activists' demands and respect for cultural traditions that date back centuries. In the process, it is exploring creative compromises like the online sky lantern site, rather than banning traditional practices outright.


Take "ghost money." Like other ethnic Chinese across Asia, Taiwan families, businesses and temples regularly burn paper "ghost" money in ancestor worship and other rituals. During major festivals like the Tomb-Sweeping Day or during Ghost Month (the seventh month of the lunar calendar), smoke from burning paper chokes Taiwan streets.

But environmentalists say the smoke is more than a nuisance; it is a pollutant and health hazard. In 2005, the Consumers' Foundation, a private group, published a study that showed that burning ghost money releases benzene and other carcinogenic chemicals. The study found benzene levels as high as 0.8 parts per million from ghost money burned in an enclosed space. Taiwan's EPA says that all benzene emissions are harmful. Factories can be fined for emitting more than 0.5 parts per million.

City environmental bureaus have taken the lead in trying to curb paper money-burning. Several cities maintain Web sites where users can "virtually" burn ghost money. For several years now Taipei and other cities have offered to collect and burn paper money for residents in environmentally friendlier mass incinerators.

These substitutes appear to be catching on. According to the EPA, ghost money collected by such services has risen from 160 metric tons in 2003 to 4,200 metric tons last year.

"These traditional practices can't be prohibited or stopped all at once," said Harvey Houng, a senior researcher in the EPA's waste management department. "But the alternatives are gradually winning converts from the public."

Even some temples are joining the environmentalist wave.

Last year, the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist group conducted its first-ever "virtual" repentance ritual, in which digitalized images of paper money being burned were shown on a huge screen at its main monastery north of Taipei.

"A lot of Buddhist groups criticized us because it wasn't traditional," said Susan Chen, of Dharma Drum Mountain's international affairs division. "But it's very environmentally friendly."


Animal welfare advocates have a more difficult fight on their hands with the "divine pig" practice. In this tradition of Taiwan's Hakka Chinese ethnic group, pigs are fed to gigantic proportions and then slaughtered to honor ancestral spirits. In recent years, this has turned into a contest to see who can raise the most massive swine.

One winner of a recent contest in Dasi Township, Taoyuan County, weighed in at a whopping 864 kilograms, or 1,900 pounds (pictured above).

Starting in 2004, Buddhists and animal rights advocates began publicly opposing the practice. Some temples have since bowed to the pressure by offering pigs made of rice or other materials. But they are meeting stiff resistance from divine pig-raisers.

"I don't think the 'divine pig' contests will stop in the near future," said Sechin Yeong-shyang Chien, a professor of philosophy and animal ethics at Taipei's Academia Sinica who has spoken out against the practice. "But I think the protests will do some good in raising people's awareness of the issue," he said, adding: "They can realize that there are alternatives."

"People can use vegetarian pigs made from rice to show their piety or worship their gods," he said. "They don't have to put pigs through this cruel process."

Sky lanterns may be another case in which old habits die hard. Lu Cheng-chung, an official at the Pingsi local district office, pointed out there was a strong economic incentive for the practice to continue.

"A lot of people here depend on the sky lantern business to make a living," Lu said.

He and Taipei County officials defended the practice, insisting it was environmentally friendly. Some lantern-selling shops buy back downed lanterns, giving locals a financial incentive to retrieve them. And Lu said more than 100 firefighters would be standing by at the mass lantern-lighting Thursday to put out any accidental blazes.

Down the street, at the lantern shop he has run since 1989, Lin Yi-pei insisted that his lanterns were safe and nonpolluting. He said he sold 2,000 to 3,000 lanterns every festival season at 100 New Taiwan dollars, or $3.15, each. He dismissed the EPA's "virtual" lantern Web site as the work of killjoys.

"Who wants to just click on a computer?" Lin said. "It's not the same, the feeling is different."

Back at the bridge, Candice Lee had her own verdict on the Web site option.

"Boring," she said.

"Very boring," added her friend Lynn Liu.

As their lantern shrank to a distant ember above their heads, they said they would be unlikely to try a virtual substitute.

They will certainly come back again to send up another lantern, Lee said, "if we don't find boyfriends by this time next year."

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Roam (un)free

Xu Hui (left, photo by Mark Leong), screenshot courtesy HiPiHi

China's answer to Second Life is in the works, but faces censors and other hurdles its American rival never will.

Jonathan Adams, Newsweek International, July 30, 2007

Zhao Gang surveys his nearly empty virtual world, and finds it to be good. Zhao is head of the tech team that built HiPiHi—China's answer to Second Life. With the virtual world's basic landscape complete, one of Zhao's jobs these days is to wander HiPiHi, schooling roughly 10,000 ethnic Chinese from the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore who have been specially invited into the test phase to help work out the kinks. The "residents," as they're called, roam, swim and fly around the new world. Zhao approaches two avatars for a chat. Face to face with the virtual world's Master Builder, they have an urgent question: "Can you tell us how to change our clothes?"

Thus begins the education of China's 137 million (and counting) Netizens into the ways of 3-D virtual worlds. With a launch planned for the end of the year, HiPiHi appears to be on track to becoming the first homegrown Chinese competitor to Second Life, the virtual world that's all the rage in the United States. HiPiHi's 38-year-old CEO and founder, Xu Hui, has ambitious goals: he plans to sign up 100,000 users in the first three months. Then he wants to branch out through partnerships with U.S., Japanese and other foreign firms to establish discrete virtual "continents." Ultimately, he sees a handful of virtual worlds, including HiPiHi and Second Life, linked up in one vast universe. "We're on the same road to a dream—virtual worlds are just beginning," says Xu.

Grand talk, to be sure. But the road to Xu's utopia is likely to be bumpy. Part of Second Life's appeal has been its vibrant political debate (witness the heated on-line activity during the French presidential campaign, and numerous anti-Bush placards). By contrast, HiPiHi will have to toe Beijing's authoritarian line, which forbids excessive anti-government criticism, public support for Taiwanese or Tibetan independence and any mention of the banned Falun Gong religious group.

To enforce those limits, China has one of the world's most sophisticated Internet-monitoring systems, and enlists tens of thousands of snoops to stamp out "incorrect" speech. HiPiHi will be subject to all the same prying eyes, as well as strict government rules on smut. "There will need to be some HiPiHi nannies—it can't permit a lot of the things that Second Life permits," says David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based consultancy. "It will be Second Life with Chinese characteristics."

What's more, any virtual commerce that arises in HiPiHi will be subject to Beijing's unpredictable and at times heavy-handed policymaking. HiPiHi hopes to introduce virtual currency like Second Life's Linden dollars so residents can buy and sell virtual goods. But it's unclear whether Beijing will allow that. Earlier this year the government cracked down on the abuse of QQ coins, a virtual currency that's part of Chinese Internet giant Tencent's popular online services. Speculators were trading QQ coins for real Chinese renminbi, gamblers were using them to skirt government restrictions and sex-chat workers were reportedly accepting the coins as payment. Early this year the government stepped in, banning the trade of virtual currency for real money and warning Tencent and others to crack down on abuse. "The dispute demonstrated that the Chinese government can't ignore its control of currency systems in virtual worlds," says Han Jingkui, a Qingdao-based Internet analyst.

HiPiHi will also face technological and demographic challenges. Outside major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, most users still log on at Internet cafés that don't have the cutting-edge computers needed for a satisfying virtual-world experience. And Chinese users—mostly young males used to action-packed games like World of Warcraft—may not take to HiPiHi's do-it-yourself world. "The virtual-life model hasn't been tested in China yet, and it will be a challenge for operators to get a large number of users in the beginning," says Liu Bin, a Beijing-based analyst with tech and Internet consultancy BDA. "I think this is a major problem."

A wholesome virtual world, on the other hand, might appeal to Chinese women and parents. Ironically, China's rigid controls on Internet content could actually help differentiate HiPiHi in the global market as a kinder, more family-friendly version of Second Life. It has other strong suits. Xu is a successful, well-connected businessman who was rated one of China's top 10 Internet entrepreneurs by the Chinese media in 1999. He's assembled a crack, 60-strong team of virtual engineers, political economists and marketers, and claims to have attracted interest from top-tier players in Japan and the United States. (Xu won't say who.)

The firm is winning points for its sharp special effects and building tools, which are more user-friendly than those in Second Life. "HiPiHi has decided that your average 'Zhou' in China would probably have issues with Second Life's interface, and is looking to better it," says Wolf.

Much depends on what type of user HiPiHi attracts. Netizens looking for raunchy sex will be disappointed—HiPiHi's avatars can't even strip nude. But Xu says there's still a chance for romance; indeed, it's already blossoming. One resident, "Wen Xi," the avatar of a woman from Hangzhou, apparently has several love interests—and she's built a hip, bamboo-lined virtual bungalow for entertaining pals. She's just the type of creative resident Xu and his investors hope will populate HiPiHi—but pioneers like her are scarce. Xu and Zhao have built a world. Now they can only wait to see if the Chinese will come.

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The Internet Trembles

A quake that snapped cables wiring Asia has exposed the fragility of the Net
Jonathan Adams
Newsweek International, January 29, 2007

In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern lowered a grappling hook by rope down to the frigid Atlantic Ocean floor far below. Its quarry: a line that had snapped the previous year during one of the first attempts to lay a transatlantic cable connecting the United States with Europe. One hundred and forty years later, repair ships are performing the same task, using essentially the same methods, in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. They're trying to snag at least six cables that were damaged in a massive Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The mangled cables are out of reach of remotely controlled submersibles often used in such work. By the latest estimates, the task won't be finished until at least mid-February.

While the earliest transatlantic lines bore messages in Morse code, the cables near Taiwan carried 90 percent of East Asia's voice and Internet traffic. A month after the earthquake, services in the region were still not back to their full capacity. The disruption to data traffic underscores how much the virtual world still depends on the low-tech network of physical cables, wires and microwave transmitters that gird the globe—and how vulnerable services migrating to the Internet can be. "We put all our eggs in a small number of baskets," said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in Brisbane. "And this was the worst possible case of cable snap."

To be sure, the damaged lines aren't affecting most users now, aside from slow connection speeds and a few inaccessible sites. But for a few days after the quake, international phone-service outages and e-mail delays of several hours or more were widespread throughout East and Southeast Asia. Telecom operators quickly rerouted traffic away from the damaged area, beaming voice over satellites and sending e-mails scurrying along alternate routes. Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom said in some cases Internet data sent from Taiwan to Hong Kong, only some 650 kilometers away, were going through routers in the United States. And Singapore Telecom said its U.S.-bound traffic was taking a detour Down Under—through an undersea cable west of Australia, across Australia from Perth to Sydney and through a southern link across the Pacific—or going west via Europe.

Rerouting alone does not necessarily slow Internet traffic much, experts say, as "packets" of data leap across the globe down the path of least resistance. But Internet service providers and telecoms can send only so much through the pipes at once—particularly if they're all using the same detours. So data back up at the servers run by the sender's ISP, like a traffic jam on a high-way on-ramp, waiting for its turn to fly through the global network. Moreover, satellites aren't a good alternative for Internet data: they can carry only one thousandth the capacity of a typical underseas cable, says Huston. Which is why Hong Kong ISPs were still operating at only 80 percent capacity three weeks after the earthquake, and telecoms in Taiwan and Singapore said that their bandwidth capacity remained below normal.

The disruption was far worse for consumers of "real time" data—online stock quotes, voice calls made over the Internet through services like Skype, and multiplayer online games that chew up bandwidth and require quick responses from fellow "warriors" on the other side of the globe. The Internet was not originally designed for such uses, in which even minor delays or interruptions can sharply degrade service quality. "These are now consumer technologies that users expect will work," said Paul Wilson, APNIC's director general. "If they don't, people will get a lot more stroppy than they used to."

The outage challenges assumptions about the fully wired world to come, in which Internet devices will jabber to each other without the need for human input. It may not be a disaster if your cell phone can't get through to your car, muses Hong Kong Internet pioneer Pindar Wong, but what if your pacemaker gets cut off from your doctor's computer across the Pacific? It's not clear how devices, rather than generally tolerant human beings, would deal with delays and outages. "This was a wake-up call," says Wong. "Are we building on solid foundations, or are we building on quicksand?" Asian telecoms say they'll boost satellite capacity and buy more cables to make their infrastructure more robust. But analysts are skeptical that they'll make the needed investments. Without them, the Internet of tomorrow is likely to remain vulnerable to the next quake.

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Cable Repair Delayed

Repair of damaged cables in Asia to take longer than expected

Jonathan Adams

International Herald Tribune, January 16, 2007

Internet services across East Asia are still not functioning at full capacity three weeks after an earthquake near Taiwan damaged critical communication cables, and the authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong said final repairs on the lines would be delayed by at least a month.

Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, part of a consortium that owns four of the eight undersea cables that were cut during the earthquake on Dec. 26, said Tuesday that bad weather and rough seas had hampered repair efforts.

The damage was also more extensive than initially thought, the company said, with its cables severed in at least 10 places.

The company now estimates that the first cable will not be repaired until early next week, with the three others fixed by the end of the month. The Hong Kong Telecommunications Authority said in a statement Monday that repairs on all the damaged cables would not be completed until the middle of February, weather conditions permitting. The original estimate for final repairs was mid-January.

The earthquake, just off the southern coast of Taiwan, snapped cables carrying 90 percent of voice and data traffic in East and Southeast Asia. Contractors for the cable consortium, which also includes SingTel, the dominant provider in Singapore, are still struggling to fix the cables, some of which lie 3.3 kilometers, or 2 miles, beneath the ocean surface.

SingTel, Chunghwa and PCCW in Hong Kong said that they were able to quickly reroute nearly all traffic away from the damaged cables. But the alternative routes are circuitous, sometimes degrading the quality of voice traffic and slowing Internet speeds.

Chunghwa stressed that despite the repair delays, most services were back to normal. Hong Kong Internet services are operating at about 80 percent of normal efficiency.

Hong Kong users report that Internet performance, especially when accessing or downloading material from Web sites based in North America, remains sluggish during peak periods.

But while most services continue uninterrupted, the digital breakdown has prompted new thinking on how to strengthen the region's contacts with the rest of the world. "In order to deal with future disasters, we're going to set up several contingency plans," Chunghwa Telecom said. The firm says it will add extra satellite capacity for its voice communications, buy or lease additional cables as a backup for Internet traffic, and propose a joint "backup mechanism" for countries in the region.

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Wireless Utopia?

Taipei is leading the way in going wireless -- and in wireless hype
Jonathan Adams
Newsweek International, March 6, 2006

Taipei is dreaming big: it wants to be the world's first completely wireless metropolis. Other cities boast a patchwork of hotspots at hotels, coffee shops and colleges, and tiny towns in the United States and elsewhere have already been blanketed with anywhere, anytime Wi-Fi. But the Taiwanese capital (population: 2.6 million) is on track to become the first major world city to attain geek nirvana. Its ambitious Wifly project will stretch a single wireless network over the city's 272 square kilometers. Beginning in 2003, the city has so far installed 2,400 access points in the central part of town. If all goes well, by the end of June, 5,000 access points will provide a seamless network available outdoors and in, covering some 90 percent of Taipei. In a year, that number is expected to double to 10,000.

Taipei won't stay at the top for long. Philadelphia, San Francisco and a 3,800-square-kilometer patch of Silicon Valley have Wi-Fi projects in the works. So do Bangalore and cities in the U.K., Sweden, Germany and Spain.

Beyond bragging rights, what do these cities expect to gain by blanketing their environs with Wi-Fi networks? Proponents point to a bevy of new services. Sheng Chang, vice president of Q-Ware, which is spending $93 million on Taipei's network, says customers can now move around the city but stay connected to one network, with one password—rather than have to hop between hotspots on different networks. For $12 a month, a Taipei resident can tote a laptop computer to the park and watch cable TV. Or he can print documents and photos while riding the subway or chowing at a noodle stand. "We're going to change people's lives in Taipei city," says Chang.

Wi-Fi has some tough competition. Cell phones already do a pretty good job of keeping people connected, and the latest 3G models boast a range of multimedia bells and whistles. Reliable broadband is widely used already in Taipei (by more than 60 percent of the population), and few people will want to chuck that for a wireless service that's still patchy in places. Sam Lucero, senior analyst of wireless connectivity research at ABI Research, questions whether the benefits of Wi-Fi will be enough to get people to use it. "How often are you wandering around outside needing Wi-Fi access?" he says. "Typically, if you need it, you're going to be in a place that has a hotspot anyway."

The real beneficiaries may not be the average citizen so much as municipalities, says Lucero. For instance, San Mateo, California's police have access to Wi-Fi on laptops in their squad cars and on PDAs on their bicycles and motorcycles. They can remotely gain access to databases and distribute photos of suspects via the network to every other cop on the grid. Police and fire inspectors in Granbury, Texas, can pull up a detailed 3-D map of all the properties and hydrants in the county.

There's no reason such systems couldn't be adopted by cities. In Taipei, police are now experimenting with using the networks to stay in touch with headquarters, rather than keeping paper-and-pen logs, Chang says. The city has also hooked up traffic-monitoring devices to Wifly, so they can transmit traffic-flow data to a central database. Taipei wants to use Wifly to make all kinds of city services more convenient to residents. "It's much more of an incremental impact on people's lives than a paradigm shift such as the introduction of e-mail," Lucero says. Citywide Wi-Fi may not quite live up to its hype, but it's pretty cool all the same.

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