Tag: CHINA

Hu Chuang may have passed away, but his geeky legacy will live on. After the 26-year-old Chinese man died in the course of sending e-mails to his friends, his family decided to honor him with a tombstone carved in the shape of a computer monitor, which displays his dates of birth and death. Stonemasons also crafted a keyboard, mouse and camera, which sit alongside a photograph of the deceased ...

Thousands of iTunes accounts have been stolen, and are now for sale in China. According to the BBC, up to 50,000 fraudulent accounts are being sold on taobao.com, a Chinese version of eBay, at prices ranging from 1 yuan ($0.15) to 200 yuan ($30). Many listings for the accounts guarantee that buyers will enjoy unlimited downloads, including "software, games, movies, music and so on." Free ...

After having already banned Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the Chinese government has now decided to outlaw Skype, as well. The move, announced in the People's Daily, means that all Internet phone services will now be considered illegal within the country, except for those offered by two state-operated telecom companies -- China Unicom and China Telecom. In 2007, Skype launched a joint venture ...

Mark Zuckerberg is in China this week, and he's already met with the CEO of the country's largest search engine, Baidu. Zuck's intentions, though, are unclear. Facebook hasn't yet tapped into the nation's huge social networking market. Speculations that Facebook may bend to the government's censorship requirements are premature, though, as the company would likely face a serious backlash. ...

Web surfers in China can finally use their very own version of Twitter -- as long as they use it to sing the praises of Mao. The new service, called 'Red Microblog,' is essentially a Twitter-like platform, devoted to Communist propaganda. According to the Telegraph, the site officially rolled out yesterday, and is run by a local propaganda department in the city of Chongqing. The typical news ...

Acting on an impulse familiar to many young people these days, Dai Haifei, a 24-year-old architect in Beijing, said to hell with high rents, and built himself a house. The six-foot-tall, solar-powered, egg-shaped abode is made of bamboo, wood and grass seed, and fits easily on a sidewalk. "The seeds will grow in the natural environment and it's cold-proof," Dai told China Daily. He then added ...

Wikileaks is used to drawing the ire of governments and companies the world around, and that fact makes it that much more difficult to finger the party responsible for an alleged denial of service attack against the whistle-blower site. On Sunday, as the controversial site was preparing to release a massive collection of diplomatic cables, its servers were hit with a DDoS attack. The tactic, ...

Share An eminent, yet unnamed, gaming god sat down for a session of unprecedented magnitude last week. The man supposedly dropped $15,000 to park his recliner underneath "the world's second largest LED screen." (He must have auctioned off a colossal stockpile of geeky, collectible figurines.) Housed a Beijing pedestrian mall, The Place, the screen measured over 80,000 square feet. The mysterious, ...

China might not openly celebrate certain forms of technological freedom, but the nation certainly knows how to throw a free-wheeling, frivolous tech fiesta. This week, China's Zhejiang Province hosted a monumental robot contest, which pitted 115 different teams and their diverse crews of 'bots against one another. The teams represented 50 different schools, and the budding engineers reportedly ...

Another Chinese Twitter user has fallen prey to the nation's stringent stance against free speech. Last month, Cheng Jianping re-tweeted a message from her fiance that referenced a recent territorial dispute between China and Japan. The original tweet satirically implored freedom-fighters to "immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion," but -- in her retweet -- Jianping ...

For about 18 minutes on April 8th, 2010, China proved just how easy it would be to hijack the Web. The country redirected 15-percent of global Internet traffic through its servers, affecting both commercial sites and government agencies. A report being published by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission says that sites for NASA, the Senate, all four branches of the military and ...

China just knocked the U.S. down a notch by unveiling the Tianhe-1A, the world's fastest supercomputer. Chugging along at just over 2.5 petaflops, the supercomputer outpaces the former title holder, the Cray Jaguar, which can plow through calculations at 2.3 petaflops. The Tianhe-1A is powered by 14,336 Intel CPUs and 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs, which should make for one hell of a gaming rig. ...

The Chinese government's offensive against supporters of political dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo apparently knows no bounds. After having already placed Liu's wife and friends on house arrest, the government has now turned its attention to Twitter. According to the Guardian, freelance designer Mou Yanxi was reportedly targeted by Chinese police after posting a tweet about ...

We all feel a certain degree of attachment to our phones, but most people probably wouldn't be willing to stick their arms down a public toilet to retrieve their submerged cells. This anonymous guy from China, however, is apparently not "most people." After dropping his phone in a toilet (not as rare an event as you'd think) in China's Jiangsu province, the man decided to go fishing for it with ...

According to a new study from research firm TNS, Japanese social networkers are the loneliest people on Earth. As the BBC reports, the study found that the average Japanese Web surfer has just 29 online friends -- the lowest average among the 46 countries under examination, well behind even China's average of 68 friends. At the other end of the spectrum, Malaysian online consumers have the most ...