According to the BBC, overseas hackers have been disrupting Chinese websites for the past month. At stake in this online battle? The independence of Tibet and other politically sensible topics that have brought China to the center of media attention.

One the latest targets of the cyber-attacks has been ”Red Heart”, a website movement in which 7 million Chinese MSN users added a patriotic red heart to their usernames. The hackers posted the Tibet independence flag on 5sai.com, the site that initiated the movement. The hacking also came with the usual ”denial of service” (DoS). The attackers’ IP addresses were in some cases attributed to Europe - although one should keep in mind that it is notoriously difficult to determine with a high level of precision who is behind a cyber-attack. As the Olympics come closer and tension does not seem to decrease it looks like, for once, it is time to look West.

Spontaneous patriotic campaigns by Internet users are not unheard of, even in China. The (mistaken?) bombing of the Belgrade embassy by the US air force had prompted a number of serious hackings of american governmental websites - including the homepage of the U.S. embassy in Beijing and U.S. Department of Interior. It is however one of the first large-scale hacktivist movement against Chinese sites. It looks like the Games have already started on the Internet.

Chinese authorities are investigating commercial text messages that were sent to more than 200 million mobile phone users (40% of all subscribers) through the networks of China Mobile and China Unicom.

The spamming has angered Chinese consumers. Already dubbed “Text-Message Gate”, the incident has even drawn public apologies from one major advertiser and China Mobile. It has also gotten the attention of the Ministry of Information Industry. Both the government and mobile operators are now working together to clarify regulations on identification and blocking of spam messages - the latter have launched hotlines of their own for users to report spam messages.

Will it be enough? Not as long there is no legal base in China for arbitrary trading of personal information!

Consumer price index (CPI), housing, and health care are some of the themes that attracted most public attention in China’s latest experiment of mobile democracy.  Chinese mobile users have been able to communicate with some political representatives during the annual parliament session using a program called Fetion - a low-price mobile phone interactive service introduced by China Mobile.

Even better! “Ask the Premier” - a joint-project between Xinhuanet.com (the official Chinese news agency) and China Mobile made available to more than 100 million mobile phone users - has collected over 250,000 short messages. In the words of the project’s initiators “Chinese mobile users are thus encouraged to orderly participate in politics”. In the meantime, NGOs all over the world are jumping on the “Olympic opportunity” to portray China as a repressive State where freedom of speech is scorned and democracy a distant dream. In fact, a recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that today’s China doesn’t suffer a lack of opinions or ideas, but the channels for the people to express them.

Maybe the historical inclusion of “safeguarding the people’s right to expression” in the report to the Party Congress is a sign of changing times!

It all started with the beating to death of a man filming a fight between villagers and local officials in China. The ensuing wave of protest from Chinese bloggers has forced authorities to arrest four people and call an investigation into 100 others.

Sounds like grass-root justice? In fact, such determined social ”activism” is still quite uncommon in China (the government spares no effort when it comes to repress unsupportive digital voice). Surprisingly, many people who previously had little interest in politics become active in resisting Internet controls. And the phenomenon doesn’t seem to stop there. Chinese netizens now start complaining when the government blocks Flickr and other popular entertainment sites. One of them even sued a branch of China Telecom for contract violation because of the service provider’s unacknowledged restrictions on Web content. 

So, why are Chinese users becoming more daring? Is it because they have the feeling of having achieved a critical mass (210 million users at the end of 2007) or because the number of simultaneous “battles” (blogs, online videos, instant messaging, etc.) that the Chinese Net censors have to wage opens enough room for dissent?

P.S.: China Internet Network Information Center (a government-run agency surveying Internet users) is predicting that the amount of new blog accounts will drop (!) in the first half year of 2008. Anyone wants to take a bet?

If something is to be remembered from the World Economic Forum 2008 edition it is probably the very candid comment made by the Wang Jianzhou, the CEO of the world’s largest mobile phone operator.

“We know who you are, but also where you are” was actually meant to convince the audience that China Mobile could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing. Instead it turned into worries about the risk of passing over private information to  Chinese authorities: with more than 370 million subscribers, China Mobile has a real-time ear and eye on 25% of the country’s citizens.

The outcry of congressman Markey (chairman of the US House of Representatives subcommittee on telecommunications) was even more surprising since most national security agencies have so-called signals intelligence collection and analysis networks (like Echelon or Onyx). That said most countries are supposed to have checks and controls in place to make sure that only court orders allow the government to check phone records.

Maybe time has come to look into more details at how the mobile phone is becoming a threat to privacy in all countries!

P.S.: It is quite revealing that the two operators invited to the World Economic Forum’s discussion on “The Future of Mobile Technology” were China Mobile and SK Telecom

For those who have not flown into Shanghai in recent years, the Maglev is a magnetically levitating train linking Pudong airport to the city’s financial center. Initially developed by Siemens, it is one of the few commercially operating magnetic train in the world - it has yet to provide financial viability.

In addition to being a technological showcase, Maglev is becoming a political experiment. In 2007 relocation plans for thousands of residents was announced in order to extend the track to the other side of Shanghai. The new middle class, a crucial constituency in the country’s future political development, have shown signs of a willingness to take political action when the government’s top-down infrastructure plans have threatened their economic interests.

Since organized demonstrations tend be politically sensitive, residents (mostly white-collars) along the planned line have gathered on Shanghai’s People’s Square to express their opinion using the method of “taking collective walks”. Proof that the topic disturbs: the Internet police has banned it from the Chinese cyberspace.

A month ago the mother of Chen, who lived in a village in Anzhuang, Feicheng, Shandong Province died. As a filial son, Chen bought a Nokia to bury with her. He made sure the phone was charged, and he installed the phone chip his mother had used while she was alive. This symbolized that he could contact his mother in heaven any time he wished.

A few days ago, Chen accidentally dialed his mother’s phone number, which was still stored in his own mobile phone. He heard a busy signal. Thinking he had mis-dialed, he called again, and the line was still busy. Chen broke out into a cold sweat. He made an inquiry at the mobile company the following day. And found that the mobile phone had racked up a month’s worth of charges after his mother had died.

After they made a report to the Anzhuang station of the Feicheng PSB, an investigation started. The phone’s call record showed that a certain Mr. Sun, a 62-year-old villager, was the prime suspect in the case. In the face of iron-clad evidence, Sun bowed his head and admitted his guilt. He confessed to digging up the grave, stealing the mobile phone and making use of it.

Source: Qilu Evening News

For a country struggling with how to tackle the Internet, the latest plans from Beijing-based technology firm, China Recreation District (CRD), seem rather surprising: it plans to launch the “largest project on virtual worlds” in China, with support from the government.

Scheduled to launch right before the Olympics, the project aims to provide infrastructure for a virtual economy in which businesses worldwide are able to trade. This grandiose schemes is relying on the backing from 200 content producers, including China Mobile, Everbright Bank. A rather unsual partner, the Chinese government, is expected to facilitate business and consumer adoption.

In addition to Second Life and other well-established virtual worlds, CRD will have to compete with the local HiPiHi and uWorld. Not sure that their alliance with the government will turn out be such a competitive advantage.

Remember all that fuss about Britains’s identity card or London’s congestion charge?

The southern China city of Shenzhen managed to bundle both issues together by installing more than 20,000 police surveillance cameras (New York has 3,000…) that automatically recognise the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

If that wasn’t enough, 12 million people will by issued residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips, holding their name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of the “one child” policy. In theory, the scheme should be deployed across all large cities throughout the country for the 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency there. Unsurprisingly, there is currently no law protecting personal data and individuals have no right to access their personal files such as banking and credit records.

Time to worry? Not quite. An enhanced ID card chip program (Golden Shield) has been around for a decade but the basic version of the scan-able card hasn’t been launched anywhere. A medical record plan from 2000, under which community-based clinics were surveying everyone in the community about health conditions and environmental hazards in homes (to build a massive national database predicting diseases) had the same fate.

The good news is that China, amid rising anger at how easily people’s private details are falling into the hands of advertisers, is planning to introduce its first law on protecting personal data.

With more than 30 million registered bloggers by the end of June 2006 and more than 100 million Chinese Internet users visiting blogs regularly, government officials have become increasingly worried about the spreading of ‘unhealthy and defamatory information’. The state broadcast authorities also imposed new regulations on performing artists and Internet users to ensure the promotion of only a ‘healthy socialist culture.’

Have no fear. They have been joined in their governance efforts by more than ten major Chinese blog service providers who agreed to sign the ’self-discipline code for blog services’ drawn up by the Internet Society of China (ISC). Together with Jingjing and Chacha (two avatars from the Shenzhen policy network) and 30,000 state security personnel in 700 cities, they are monitoring websites, chat rooms and private e-mail messages to ensure law and order in China. Soon, the Beijing police will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user’s browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content.
 
If that wasn’t enough, website blocking and filtering (graciously provided by Western companies) coupled with assistance from citizens (via online reporting centers) have helped establish a powerful propaganda presence online.

All-in-all, the Party still seems to possess enormous resources for social control, in particular in preventing online public opinion leading to collective action in real space. Beware though. Barbarians are at the gate. Every day an underground economy anonymous proxy server addresses comes alive, connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. Several organizations (Peacefire, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Picidae) offer circumventing solutions which range from software to ‘adoption campaigns’’ by making the hosting of Chinese blogs a distributed and collaborative process. In addition, Chinese bloggers are taking bold steps too:

P.S.: Last week, a Chinese couple tried to name baby “@”…