PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Just a quick note to point out a good talk on the whole Google/China mess from people who know. From New America, a good chat and debate featuring Rebecca MacKinnon, Evgeny Morozov and Tim Wu. I’ve put the Youtube video below, but if you’re in China you’ll obviously need to use a proxy or VPN.

Alternatively you can check out the mp3. I’ve also uploaded it to drop.io if you’d like to stream it here instead:

Save File: China-Google-newamericaDOTnet.mp3

Some of you may remember my post from January 08 about how you could send text messages from your phone to Fanfou.com and then feed them to Twitter. Well now that Fanfou is no more, that’s obviously not going to work. But thanks to John Pasden over on Sinosplice there’s an ever better option:

With that option [Fanfou] closed to me, I decided to check out the other big Chinese microblogging service I was familiar with, Zuosa (??). I really liked Zuosa, where I found a lot of advanced features that even Twitter has held back on. Then I went into settings, where I saw the familiar Twitter “t” next to the ?????? (”Sync to microblogs”) section.

When I clicked on that section, and then on the Twitter “t,” I got this message:
??????????????? zuosa->buboo.tw->twitter ?????

Translation:
We’re sorry, this service is not available. You can go through zuosa -> buboo.tw -> twitter to accomplish the sync!

So I set up an account on Buboo.tw (ah, traditional characters!), easily synced that with Twitter, then synced my Zuosa account with Buboo. And hey… it works.

Very very cool. Awesome workaround John. Incidentally, Sinosplice is one of the first China blogs that I ever discovered and it’s never any surprise to see a gem like this. Go check it out if you haven’t already.

Bus 44 is an amazing short film (it’s only 10 minutes long) that I hadn’t seen before I stumbled onto it over at China Smack. It wsa actually made back in 2001, but seems to be getting a bit of recent attention after making the rounds on Chinese video sites.

Here it is on 6.cn, which should be fine to view in China as well as here in Japan where I am (strangely “youku is not available in my region”). I’ve provided more links below the video player.

Bus 44 Youtube (or try via proxy)
on youku
on 6.cn
on sina

Symantec has whipped up a pretty enlightening video showing how the now infamous Ghostnet Chinese malware that made news last month actually works. (For more background on that story, check out Ryan’s CNet post)

This video is pretty amazing, and towards the end you can see some footage that they have of the malware doing it’s thing, opening the webcams of many Chinese users and actually looking at them as they sit at their computers.

via nartv.org

I was just reading that youtube is blocked again in China. Someone on Shanghaiist pointed to a commenter on Danwei who pointed to recently posted videos of the US-China Navy confrontation on youtube. Here’s a playlist of those videos, for anyone who wants to check them out. If you’re in China, you can try this link.

playlist permalink

I have a new addition to my blogroll.

As many of you know (I assume somebody is still reading out there), I moved to Japan a few months back. And while I’ve eagerly jumped head-first into the Japan tech scene, I’m still keeping an eye fixed on China as well.

I was shocked to see the CCTV fire the other night, which was certainly not a good way to end a year that has already has it’s fill of tragedy for China.

That said, part of me was also fascinated to see how information was gathered, re-packaged, and sent out to the world. Last night I wrote a guest piece for inventor spot on that very topic, if any of you would like to check it out:

Up in Flames: The Path of Digital News out of China

And if you’d like to follow along with all the writing I’m doing these days (I’m a little all over the place recently) feel free to follow via my bran’ spankin’ new catch-all RSS feed.

Photo source: Shanghaiist