A collection of stories tagged 'chinese' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:19:54 EST Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel. Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space and lifting it into the 'commanding heights' of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. ... A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defence contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. 'China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,' says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues." The full study addresses these issues and others relating to the US-China relationship (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26316 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/zhVROub0q2E/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:05:04 EST Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26278 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/QAYug8rEam8/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:05:17 EST Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26262 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/QAYug8rEam8/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:09 EST Chinese-born physicist Shu Quan-Sheng Monday pleaded guilty before a US court to violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting American military space know-how to China. The 68-year-old naturalized US citizen, pictured here on his company profile, admitted handing over the design of fueling systems between 2003 and 2007. Also, in 2003 he illegally exported a document with the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Information, Technical Proposal and Budgetary Officer — Design, Supply, Engineering, Fabrication, Testing & Commissioning of 100m3 Liquid Hydrogen Tank and Various Special Cryogenic Pumps, Valves, Filters and Instruments.' This contained the design of liquid hydrogen tanks for space launch vehicles. He also admitted to a third charge of bribing Chinese officials to the tune of some 189,300 dollars for a French space technology firm." Here's the FBI press release regarding Shu's plea.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26232 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/7wANvRv8VWg/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:05:09 EST The New York Times reports that China has "agreed to loosen restrictions on foreign news and information providers inside the country, settling a trade dispute with the United States, the European Union and Canada." Formerly, all such news sources required licensing through China's official Xinhua News Agency. Note that the focus seems to be on financial reporting and information, rather than all forms of news reporting.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26153 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9pB4u3_tYqg/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:05:01 EST The thousands of Web sites infected by a new widespread SQL injection attack during the past few days aren't necessarily in the clear after they remove the malicious code from their sites. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have witnessed the attackers quickly reinfecting those same sites all over again. Meanwhile, researchers at SecureWorks have infiltrated the Chinese underground in an attempt to procure a copy of the stealthy new automated tool being used in the attacks."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26126 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/w5Ljuy_sT20/article.pl Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:05:11 EST Three years after the first clinic dedicated to Internet addiction opened in Beijing, Chinese doctors have now officially defined it as an ailment. Those afflicted with this ailment spend six or more hours a day online and exhibit at least one of the following symptoms: difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to be online, irritation, and mental or physical distress. Do you meet the criteria? You're in good company: About 10 percent of China's 253 million Internet users exhibit some form of addiction to the medium, and 70 percent of those people are young men, an official Xinhua News Agency report said."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26084 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/5MTNZyMbpGo/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:05:22 EST China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently however, several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26054 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WMvA8Fh_IVM/article.pl Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:05:03 EST Cross Halo with an exercise bike, and you get Expresso Fitness' S3, which lets you blow away dragons by squeezing handlebar-mounted triggers as you pedal hard through the Chinese countryside. Portfolio notes that a new generation of Wii-like workouts is hitting gyms and homes, with companies like GameRunner incorporating treadmills into First Person Shooters and Kickstart offering mini steppers and cycles for popular game systems."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25934 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/YrXg1X724gk/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:05:02 EST A lengthy article published in Culture Mandala details how China is using cyber warfare (PDF) as an asymmetric means to obtain technology transfer and market dominance. Case studies of Estonia, Georgia, and Project Chanology point towards a new auxiliary arm of traditional warfare. Political hackers and common Web 2.0 users, referred to as useful idiots (PDF), are being manipulated through PSYOPS and propaganda to enhance government agendas."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25929 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/EDXWwOEccLE/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:05:12 EST From the Download.com article: "It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25868 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hmbqFbV7MaY/article.pl Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:05:02 EDT Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global a code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion." Anyone want to know what this means for China & Australia? I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25861 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MmbqSCrfFIw/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:06:30 EDT With the release of Android's source code, we may see iPhone and Nokia clone phones of Chinese origin capable of running Google Android. These phones, often available for less than $200 without a contract, are available on DealExtreme and elsewhere. But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game? According to Google's Dave Bort, 'One of our goals would be, just to get Android all over the place' [YouTube link]."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25855 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qzWsc_ABYsg/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:06:07 EDT With the release of Android's source code, we may see iPhone and Nokia clone phones of Chinese origin capable of running Google Android. These phones, often available for less than $200 without a contract, are available on DealExtreme and elsewhere. But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game? According to Google's Dave Bort [YouTube link], 'One of our goals would be, just to get Android all over the place.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25840 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qzWsc_ABYsg/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:05:02 EDT Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed a global a code of conduct promising to offer better protection for online free speech and against official intrusion." Anyone want to know what this means for China & Australia? I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25836 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MmbqSCrfFIw/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:05:04 EDT Technology Review is running an in-depth story about the way cellphone banking is transforming the lives of many poor people in India. By enabling them to manage a legitimate bank account and finance micro-loans, cellphones are a major force of social and economic change. It's perhaps not surprising, given that despite widespread poverty, India has the world's fastest-growing cellphone market and the second largest number of cellphone users (after China). The article mentions one Indian start-up, mChek, that is thriving as a result. There's also an excellent video report."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25765 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/sVrYscz8MrI/article.pl Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:05:03 EDT arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25684 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/k9HyhT3_eNw/article.pl Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:05:10 EDT Not only is the Great Firewall of China back up and running, but now if you visit an Internet cafe, your photo will be taken and your identity card scanned. And the friendly officers of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce make those details, entered into a city-wide database, available at any other cafe. So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25595 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/3EWyWZOTLNY/article.pl Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:05:01 EDT An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down. Finances of members in the US are being frozen using the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 while the FBI is pursuing criminal charges. The group sent spam advertising male enhancement herbs and other items using a botnet estimated at 35,000 computers, and able to send 10 billion emails per day. The Federal Trade Commission monitored the group's finances and found that they had cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25532 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/voAToBmco-c/article.pl Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:05:11 EDT JagsLive sends in a Fox News report on large-scale and possibly ongoing security breaches at the World Bank. "The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month. In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an 'unprecedented crisis.' In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25408 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/APQwu3yv2QA/article.pl Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:05:02 EDT Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical code recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical code recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25294 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MQrYFsI9h0s/article.pl Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:05:01 EDT An anonymous reader alerts us to a two-week-old story that hasn't gotten much traction in the press to date. A Japanese newspaper and the AP report that China plans to demand source code from hardware manufacturers, and ban the sale of products from companies that don't comply. China is calling this an "obligatory accreditation system for IT security products." The plan is to go into effect next May, according to sources. "Products expected to be subject to the system are those equipped with secret coding, such as [a] contactless smart card system developed by Sony Corp., digital copiers, and computer servers. The Chinese government said it needs the source code to prevent computer viruses taking advantage of software vulnerabilities and to shut out hackers. However, this explanation is unlikely to satisfy concerns that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies. There also are fears that Chinese intelligence services could exploit such confidential information by making it easier to break codes used in... digital devices."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25290 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MJSHlhTR3_o/article.pl Sun, 05 Oct 2008 06:05:01 EDT Human-rights activists have discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives Internet text conversations sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay. Researchers say the system monitors a list of politically charged words that includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, the Chinese Communist Party and also words like democracy, earthquake and milk powder. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of these words and records personal information about the customers who send the messages. Researchers say their discovery contradicts a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 that 'full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people's privacy.' The Chinese government is not alone in its Internet surveillance efforts. In 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was monitoring large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of an eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. 'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,' says Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. 'It's "X-Files" without the aliens.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25218 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NA1TDFRxquE/article.pl Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:05:05 EDT Human-rights activists have discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives Internet text conversations sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay. Researchers say the system monitors a list of politically charged words that includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, the Chinese Communist Party and also words like democracy, earthquake and milk powder. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of these words and records personal information about the customers who send the messages. Researchers say their discovery contradicts a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 that 'full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people's privacy.' The Chinese government is not alone in its Internet surveillance efforts. In 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was monitoring large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of an eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. 'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,' says Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. 'It's "X-Files" without the aliens.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25214 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NA1TDFRxquE/article.pl Thu, 02 Oct 2008 13:05:01 EDT The recent news that China will run out of IPv4 addresses in a few years points to slow adoption of IPv6 in some developed countries. Now it turns out that the largest number of networks displaying new IPv6 address blocks are registered through AfriNIC, which services networks in Africa and the Indian Ocean. While AfriNIC has a smaller installed base than other regions, many countries in Africa are showing rapid growth in terms of online connectivity."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25205 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HAENzw2JJX8/article.pl Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:05:17 EDT