As Danwei noted, the initial fine of RMB1900 was lifted and he was given a stern warning after considerable hubbub (or is hubba-hubba?) on the internet in China.

I’m interested in how the PSB knew he had a pornographic video on his computer. From what I can make out from the story links provided (via the google translate) the police took the PC in question, explaining that they were investigating the illegal dissemination of pornography. They came back two days later and caused Mr. Ren (the owner of the PC and admitted downloader) considerable embarrassment with the administrative fine.

Was Mr. Ren seeding the video via a P2P program and they tracked his IP address? Did they track client connections from the download site? Did they track outgoing connections from his IP address?

Maybe they just got, er, lucky while searching his computer for other reasons.

It’s clear that China attempts to control politically and socially objectionable material on the internet via the supply side; i.e. through the great firewall for external content and regulation for internal content.

But it’s a lot less clear what, if any, efforts are being made to control politically and socially objectionable material from the demand side. Technically it’s not too challenging, it just requires a massive amount of storage and a database to organize data and search through it.

Companies such as phorm work with ISPs in Europe providing exactly this kind of information, but for targeted advertising and marketing. Similar tools could be used in China to hold people responsible for what they see on the internet.

I have no idea what tools may or may not be in place, but this story got me wondering.

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China Mobile is expected to offer Apple’s iPhone on the mainland but the 3G and Wi-fi network functions will be disabled as Beijing has not yet approved handsets with these features, according to Daiwa Institute of Research.

…Daiwa analyst Calvin Huang yesterday said Taiwan Hon Hai Precision Industry, which is responsible for assembling iPhone products for Apple, is waiting for verification from the mainland to ship the phone without 3G and Wi-fi internet functions.

Wi-fi enables users to connect to a wireless internet network.

IPhone also has a built-in 3G function based on Europe’s WCDMA standard.

“It could be easier for Apple to disable several features in the phone to gain access to the mainland market, rather than to have a whole new product,” said Mr Wong.

From a technical standpoint, it’s getting TD-SCDMA chips in the iPhone that really matters. It wouldn’t serve Apple or China Mobile to offer the new iPhone without 3G. Visiting the online Apple store over a GSM connection is rather pointless.

The silly prohibition against WiFi is a relic of telecoms paranoia over VOIP. Maybe if they ship with the chip disabled it will give those iPhone crackers at the computer malls something to do.

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News reports emanating from the 2008 IP Address Resource Seminar held by the China Internet Network Information Center stated that because the current IPv4 addresses were limited and 80% of the final allocation IP addresses had been used, new Chinese netizens may not be able to gain normal access to the Internet by 2010.

However, a representative in charge of Chongqing’s radio and TV broadband services told local media that while it is true that IPv4 address availability is diminishing, it will not lead to an impossibility of gaining Internet access for China’s new netizens. Internet resources are not like natural resources which are non-renewable — they are man’s creation and man has the power to create more IP addresses. Man has dominion over the lowly IP address, and the shortage can be resolved with current technologies.

Er, man can also create network address translation (NAT). That’s the interim solution for this until some plan for IPv6 transition can be cobbled together. IP addresses aren’t non-renewable, but they are finite and China is clearly running out. You can’t make up IP addresses and assign them, it violates the address allocation scheme that is fundamental to the internet.

Still, I’ll walk taller today knowing I’m superior to the lowly IP address. Unless mighty Zeus hurls a thunderbolt at me for hubris.

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Summer Solstice was a joint venture (as it were) between the FBI and the PSB to catch two men who were the distributors of counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec software. The case was a success and the men are now standing trial in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

What’s interesting about the story is an apparent change in the rules of evidence for these kinds of trials and the culpability of the manufacturers.

The first part of the article contrasts the case of an expat who sold DVDs via eBay in the US during 2004 and the 2007 case of pirate software distributors messrs Ma and Che. The standards of evidence seem to have shifted since the first case. Caijing:

…In previous domestic piracy cases, only seized pirated discs were treated as important evidence in court, allowing convicts to receive punishments that were lighter than they would have gotten if more CDs were entered as evidence.

…Zhang (CMiC: the defense attorney in both cases) said when there is sufficient evidence linked to a case, such as a case of drug trafficking, a suspect can be convicted even without material evidence. But there have been few precedents for this use of evidence in copyright cases.

For Operation Summer Solstice, although the counterfeit software has an estimated retail value of US$ 500 million, only a dozen discs were found in Ma’s home.

From what I can gather, it would seem that documentary evidence is being used in the case in lieu of material evidence. I’m not really sure what significance this has for overall Chinese jurisprudence, but as presented it’s a much more effective means of prosecution in these kinds of cases.

For prosecuting the distributor, that is. Caijing reporters Chenzhong Xiaolu and Ming Shuliang continue:

Also noteworthy about the latest cases is that only those involved in intermediate sales operations were indicted while key players – pirated products producers – were not touched.

Manufacturers of Ma’s products included Guangdong Weiya, where defendant Zhang Xiaoqing worked, and Shenzhen Ka Cheung Yuen Industrial Co. However, according to the court, Zhang was charged with “aiding production,” while the company was not even mentioned. In the Shenzhen case, pirated disc maker Shenzhen M3 Technology also was not charged.

The Web site of Guangdong Weiya claims the company oversees the Guangdong Provincial Publishing Group, a state-owned, high-tech enterprise with an annual production capacity of 80 million CDs, 6 million DVDs and 15,000 master discs. Zhang Xiaoqing said in court that the company is one of the country’s largest domestic disc manufacturers.

Shenzhen Ka Cheung is a subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Koda Group, which is registered by the Shenzhen Administration Bureau for Industry and Commerce.

Why were these companies involved in the piracy ring? According to Zhang Xiaoqing’s court statement, the suspects forged manufacturer certificates and documents, such as letters of authorization. However, were these companies totally in the dark about the illegal activity?

Some insiders say most of the pirated product lines in Guangdong Province, where Shenzhen is located, were cracked long ago, leaving only legal companies. In Ma’s case, it was found than an original production line at Shenzhen Ka Cheung was used for pirated products.

The defendant, Mr. Ma, is facing up to seven years in jail. One of Guangdong Weiya’s employees is in the dock on a lesser charge of aiding production. And the companies who actually made the disks? They’re not part of the case and, as Caijing notes, “…market demand and high profits for pirated products will fuel the business.”

It looks like Summer Solstice was not quite anti-piracy bacchanal it was celebrated as.

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Microsoft said it had slashed the price for Office last year Home and Student Edition to 199 yuan (HK$227) from 699 yuan. The promotion, which started on Monday, will last through next week’s National Week holiday.

The price cut is designed to make Microsoft’s products in the mainland more affordable and more promotions are likely in future, said Jim Lin, the company’s public relations manager in Beijing.

“With this price, we believe more customers can enjoy authorised software products,” he said.

RMB200 is still a lot more than RMB7, or having your corner computer store throw it for free. While this may be seen as an acknowledgment of the reality of pricing in the face of software piracy in China, there may be another another reason.

Rumors are not dead yet that Microsoft will be taken to court under China’s anti-monopoly law. A hefty price cut with the promise of endless sales promotions may help against accusations that Microsoft’s dominant market position allows it to price with impunity.

Then again, people may begin to wonder why they didn’t allow Chinese consumers to enjoy authorized software products years ago with a realistic market price. The key question, that I can’t answer yet, is whether this is driven by market competition or fear of market regulation.

Meantime, happy shopping!

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The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China’s IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.

…Li says that a new IPv6 network address, which is a basic network resource without these limitations, has been developed in America, but this kind of IP address is only used among educational websites in China. To use the IPv6 network address, network operators need to spend a lot of time and money on equipment updating.

CNNIC now has started hosting seminars to remind the operators to apply for the remaining IP addresses as soon as possible for a storage in addition to call for a preparation for the providing of IPv6 addresses to netizens.

There has been doom and gloom about the lack of IPv4 addresses for years, but China’s flabbergasting internet growth has made the problem acute. Addresses assigned to China are running out as more servers go live and commercial and home internet connectivity rapidly increases. The (unidentified) rate of growth doesn’t even address what I think will be the next connectivity boom in China: mobile devices.

As tempting as it is may be to declare this the end times and hole up in some digital Decameron, the IP apocalypse really isn’t upon us. ISPs can fiddle around with network address translation (NAT) to support internet access (although it would be problematic for serving internet content). This would slow, but not stop, address allocation.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s governmental futurologists-cum-arm-twisters, have already made IPv6 a priority. China already has a university network, the telecoms companies have deployed their own versions for internal use, and the Olympics ran an IPv6 network. Indeed, any networkable device or computer on the market today will support IPv6. The technology is in place and works.

But the big problem is in switching over to IPv6 from IPv4. There’s just no way to do it in one fell swoop. And even if it were possible to switch over easily, there’s the small problem of the rest of the world. There are no public, commercial, IPv6 networks out there. China would need to build a IPv6-to-IPV4 to support connectivity to the rest of the internet.

The address allocation issue is fundamentally a technical issue that everyone on the internet will have to deal with at some point. The speed with which China has embraced the internet and the size of its internet population makes the same problem much more severe.

It will be interesting to see how the government decides to address the problem. A good start would be to require new, large private networks (in the sense they are managed by a particular organization - particularly mobile) to use IPv6. IPv4 gateways can be used to connect to the legacy internet. Assuming the addressing is done right (not too tricky), the address-to-name DNS services are correctly configured for the private and public networks (tricky), and the data routing designed to support a future knitting together of the networks (fiendishly tricky), some form of coexistence should be functional.

Functional, but not necessarily robust. And there still remains the rest of the internet and its various government administrators. The NDRC can’t crack the whip over them.

Oh, and all this will (according to CNNIC) happen just in time for the Shanghai Expo.

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China Mobile, the world’s No. 1 carrier by subscribers, will launch the iPhone to tap demand for mobile e-mails.

“The iPhone will come to China as early as next year,” was all Fan would said.

Mr. Fan works in China Mobile’s “corporate client division” and made this small aside during what seems to have been a boring interview about bundling services on Blackberries for corporate customers.

Just a snoozer of a story for anyone tracking the iPhone’s China debut.

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POLICE in Shandong Province have caught three men allegedly responsible for a citywide Internet breakdown in Weifang in July, according to xinhuanet.com.

…The report did not say when the breakdown occurred but said in July police received an alert from the Weifang Branch of the China Netcom Group, which serves about 90 percent of the internet users in the city. The company complained that hackers had been attacking its network continuously, causing a two-day breakdown.

More than 400,000 internet users were affected. The city’s government departments, hospitals and schools were affected, the report said.

A special task force was set up and officers went to Beijing, Tianjin and other provinces before they finally arrested the three men and confiscated laptops and computers.

Two of the men were managers of a local logistics company who had hired the third man to attack the Website of a rival logistics company.

However that company’s Website was set up in the core computer room of the Weifang branch of China Netcom Group and the hacker’s attack brought the entire city’s network down.

Sounds like a distributed denial of service attack. That the branch office of China Netcom was unable to filter out the attacks (either based on the target or on the traffic) or identify the source IP addresses and contact the relevant ISP(s) is a pretty damning performance. That they host websites at the core of their network rather than a server farm network is even worse.

Oh, and the next time someone goes out and hires a hacker to attack a rival’s website, they might want to make sure the hacker doesn’t bring the whole local network down. The idiots who put the contract out probably lost their access as well - not to mention all their customers’ access.

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First it was fund houses, then brokerages. Now, the cyber world is the target of a Beijing clampdown amid fears that pessimistic comments and bitter complaints about the mainland’s slumping stock markets may lead to social disunity.

Major financial websites on the mainland have been verbally informed by the propaganda department to sift out negative and sensitive commentaries, reports and headlines about the hard-hit markets, according to three online editors.

The internet censorship is another sign that mainland regulators have lost their grip on the plunging market and are desperate to avoid provoking public ire about the government’s inertia.

The pessimistic comments and bitter complaints don’t lead market sentiment, they reflect it.

Have a nice day and don’t forget to re-arrange the deck chairs on the way down.

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A 24-year-old Internet user, surnamed Lu, was sentenced to eight months in prison on Tuesday for uploading a pornographic video to Beijing-based online video site Youku.com on March 5, reports Nanfang Daily. The video was broadcast 25,274 times, added to 19 space pages and gained 83 positive and 39 negative votes before it was removed from the web, said the report. The Guangdong Chancheng District People’s Court decided the case. Youku.com received a broadcasting license from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television on July 3.

Despite allowing naughty bits to be seen 25,000-odd times, Youku seems to have successfully navigated the the online video regulatory minefield. They never were shut down like 56.com or shut themselves down in an introspective moral panic like Tudou.

They wangled their online video license in July, just after picking up US$30 million in their second financing round.

It’s unclear if this means that the authorities will hold the users, rather than the site, responsible for future video seediness. I wonder what this means for the 83 filth-loving, positive voters?

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