The status of Chinese domain names… not ready.

For example, www.新浪.com (sina) leads to a not found error at http://www.xn--efvx5o.com/.

A more interesting example is www.搜狗.com (sogou), which redirects to http://www.epai.com/yima/domain/domain.htm, which redirects to http://999.5333.com/, which redirects to a generic domain not in use portal http://www.chunu.com…

Continue readingThe status of Chinese domain names

Danwei reports that Blogspot and Blog City have been unblocked in Beijing. (Reader Andy Yates reports that they are also accessible from Xiamen.)

This follows the unblocking of Google.com that occured about two months back.

Hong Kong leads the way again in their latest anti-piracy effort: the Youth Ambassador Against Internet Piracy Scheme, “under which 200,000 youngsters aged between nine and 25 would become ‘gold fingers’ on the lookout for potential BitTorrent seeds of copyright works, including movies and music.” (SCMP)

Catching a thief is a contribution to society. Yet the words “teenage…

Continue readingThe HK Youth Ambassadors Against Internet Piracy

While preparing for a seminar on the future of China’s Internet hosted by IFTF colleague, Lyn Jeffery leader of IFTF’s Virtual China project,  I took a closer look at the details of China’s decision to set up new Chinese character domain names.  Although the new domains cannot be acurately described as a separate Internet, that in fact is what is developing. One engineer after looking…

Continue readingChina’s Independent Internet

Date: 3/29/06
Place: Law School of Renmin University
Event: The official ceremony for the establishment of Creative Commons in China.
Guest of Honor: Lawrence Lessig
Question: Will someone tell me why there is an iPod ad on the screen?

To celebrate this event, iMagine, a record label in Hong Kong, has…

Continue readingCreative Commons: China Edition

CDT points to an International Herald Tribune article on recent comments by Chinese government official Hu Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, a government-sanctioned public-private
group founded five years ago to promote the Internet in China. According to the article:

Fighting Internet crime, which Hu defined broadly to include acts
counter to the interests of the…

Continue readingmultiple meanings of IPv6 in China

Yesterday, Danwei reported that three of China’s popular fringe blogs (Massage Milk, Milk Pig & Pro State in Flames) had mysteriously disappeared bearing mysterious messages such as:

Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.

Yet today,…

Continue readingThe Staged Demise of Fringe Blogs?

From China Tech News:

In response to foreign media reports that China might
create its own top-level domain names to create its own intranet, a
spokesperson from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)
clarifies that China will not create its own root servers.

The representative says the misunderstanding was caused by…

Continue readingOne Internet

Rebecca MacKinnon points to a detailed exploration by Steven Murdoch (Researcher in the Security Group
of the University of Cambridge) of how the new Chinese TLDs (top level domain names) are being activated.  Murdoch finds that while this may not technically be an attempt to establish an alternate Internet since there is no new root server,

…

Continue readingseparate bodies of content