This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

BEIJING — China has shut down another 50 websites for containing porn and lewd content, bringing the total number of blocked ones to 91 since last Thursday.

Authorities have vowed to beef up crackdown efforts in the following days and urged law-breakers to voluntarily turn themselves in to local public security departments.

The sites closed on Saturday such as www.789b.com and www.678tp.cn have become inaccessible by Sunday.

They violated the top legislature’s regulations and other laws regarding public distribution of sexual images, said a statement issued by the Special Operation Office for Crackdown on online Porn and Lewd Content.

The month-long campaign to purify the Internet was launched last Monday by the State Council’s Information Office, Public Security and Culture ministries as well as four other government agencies.

Public distribution of pornography is illegal in China. Last Friday, the office announced the shut-down of 41 such illegal websites.

Previously, it had named and shamed 33 websites, including search engine Google and Baidu and Microsoft’s MSN China, for posting lewd content or offering links to pornographic sites.

There were more than 50 million bloggers in China by the end of November 2008, a growth of some 6.38 percent from the end of November 2007, said Gao Lulin, deputy head of the Internet Society of China on Tuesday.

The number of bloggers, or blog authors, which are personal online journals intended for public consumption, was 47 million at the end of November 2007.

The increasing number of bloggers was because more and more Chinese want to express their own views about local and international events through the Internet, Gao said.

The Internet Society of China, devoted to tracking development of the Internet in China, said the country recorded its first blog in August 2002. Now there are more than 100 million blogs. The society is a non-government institution sponsored by 70 organs, including Internet service providers, network access carriers and research institutes. It did not reveal how it tracked the number of blogs or bloggers.

Currently, there are more than 290 million netizens in China, ranking the country first in the world in terms of its online population.

Gao said, netizens in China were not only a group interested in virtual space, but also an important force in real life. They can even influence government policy-making.

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The cyber hunters who roam China’s online space could soon become the hunted themselves. The Chinese legislature is deliberating a new law to curb the excesses of a growing trend here — the awkwardly-named “human flesh search engine”.

The first case of cyber hunting in China is believed to be in 2001, when a netizen posted a photo of a girl online, claiming that she was his girlfriend. Other netizens found out that the beauty was computer giant Microsoft’s model Chen Ziyao and exposed the lie.

The government wants to crack down on those Internet users who hunt down individuals online and expose details of their personal lives. The draft law says the cyber hunters and the website service providers will be held responsible if they violate the privacy of others. And if victims ask for their personal information to be deleted, the online portals must comply.

This comes after a recent successful lawsuit by a victim against a cyber hunter and an online portal — signifying that the netizens who style themselves as some kind of cyber vigilantes could soon find themselves falling foul of the law.

In a landmark case a fortnight ago, a Beijing court ruled that Wang Fei’s reputation had been damaged by a cyber manhunt. He lost his job and was harassed by strangers after his infidelity to his late wife, who committed suicide, was splashed online. His parents’ home was vandalised and his photos, addresses and phone numbers had been made public.

The court ordered Zhang Leyi — a university classmate of Wang’s wife who posted her diaries online and encouraged the manhunt — and the Internet host to pay Wang 5,000 yuan (RM2,500) and 3,000 yuan, respectively.

This case, which has been dubbed “The Death Blog”, was China’s first known lawsuit against online vigilantism.

Professor Xiao Qiang, who is the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley, believes the case and the proposed new law, would have a positive impact on protecting citizens’ privacy.

Du Peiyuan, who is in charge of social issues at the popular Mop.com, agrees. He told The Straits Times his website would be more stringent with the posts there. But neither him nor Prof Xiao believes that the new law would end the “human flesh search” phenomenon.

“This kind of ‘distributive investigative behaviour’ will continue as long as the Internet is a public, interactive social space, participated in by a great number of netizens,” said Xiao.

That number is growing. Government figures show the number of netizens in China as at November last year was 290 million — ranked first in the world. There are more than 2.1 million websites and more than 100 million blogs in China. This translates into a potent force, capable of bringing down not just common folk, but government officials too.

In the last month alone, a Nanjing official was sacked after photos posted online showed him wearing a Vacheron Constantin Swiss watch — which retails at about 100,000 yuan — and smoking luxury brand cigarettes. Six local government officials from central Hunan province were also given

the boot after pictures of them dozing off at an official meeting were circulated on the Internet.

Some commentators are calling the trend a sort of “grassroots democracy”.

But while Beijing-based analyst Russell Leigh Moses agrees that these search engines “show how much passion and purpose bubble below the surface in China”, he adds that unbridled involvement by the masses can easily result in tragedy.

“The proposed law is a small step for those who want more of a role for citizens here but also wish to restrain them from mass, unsupervised action.” — Straits Times Singapore

China has announced a list of websites criticized for “low and vulgar practices on the Internet” as part of the latest Net Nanny campaign.

China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (中国互联网违法和不良信息举报中心), under the Internet Society of China, has announced a list of websites which contain “large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths.”

Each website listed is annotated with either a remark that the website had been given a notice, but didn’t take effective action to clean up its content, or that it did not quickly delete newly added vulgar and low content.

Google and Baidu were both censured for not taking effective action, while all the other websites on the list did not quickly delete offensive content.

This campaign is very similar to countless content cleansing campaigns over the past few years. It does not signify much except that the Net Nanny is making sure everyone knows who is boss before the Chinese New Year starts.

1. Google’s ‘web page search’ and ‘image search.’ The results show many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

2. Baidu’s forums and spaces contain large numbers of low and vulgar photographs, and some sections have obscene and pornographic content. The ‘webpage search’ within ‘Baidu search’ yields results that contain many links to obscene and pornographic websites.

3. Sina’s photo album and blog columns.

4. Sohu’s photo albums, blog columns, and Internet forums’ images section.

5. Tengxun’s Sousou (search) images, photo album columns, and personal spaces.

6. Netease’s photo album column.

7. Chinaren community’s ‘Tietie Tutu (images).’

8.Zhongsou’s community section.

9. Mop’s images ‘pretty girls’ (漂亮 MM) section.

Now the Chinese domain is growing fastly in China. As the Chinese domain can provide a more efficient communicaton and can expand company’s businesses through the Internet. And statistics from the CNNIC (China Internet Network In Information Center) show that as of the end of last year, the number of Chinese Internet users was over 253 million. However, more than 1 billion Chinese people have no access to the Internet at all. By the first half of next year, Chinese will follow English as the language of the universal domain labeling system.

However, what will be the specific changes created by the upcoming Chinese domain names? For the universal international domain name system (“. com”, “. net” and “. org”), it will add new Chinese domain names before the top-level domain label – such as “Chinese name . com”.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be in charge of the registration and administration for these domain names.

For China’s domain name system (“.cn”), there will be three kind of new Chinese domain names:

First, it will change the top-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “.Zhongguo (means China)”.

Second, it will change the second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name. cn”.

Finally, it will change both the top-level and second-level domain names with Chinese characters – such as “Chinese name.Zhongguo”.

CNNIC will be responsible for its registration and administration.

So far, China’s government specifies four Chinese character domain names as the first candidates which are “.Zhongguo (means China)”, “.Gongsi (means company)”, “.Wangluo (means Internet) and “.CN”, which is the original domain name in China’s domain name system.

By the first half of 2009, when the Chinese domain names are involved in the international top-level domain name system, Chinese literate people around the world will also be able to surf the Internet with all these new Chinese domain names.

And once they successfully register a Chinese domain name, customers will own an email account with the same Chinese name.

According to the news, China internet giant Sina will buy assets from  China’s largest publicly traded advertising company Focus Media.  Sina will acquire Focus Media’s business in office buildings, elevators and supermarkets. The deal may be worth over $1.3 billion, and the deal have been approved by the board directors of the two parties.

This is a step which Sina make to expand its business beyond the internet. The deal may give Sina a  big advantage during the finacial crisis.

Personally, i don’t think there will be big slowdown of the online advertizing, even during the finalcial crisis. The onlile business during the crisis will still be the winner, especially for China, the potencial market of the internet is still under explore.

Beijing will establish wireless network within 3 years. People both in urban and rural of Beijing reginal area can use the wireless network.

In order to provide service to the Olympic Games, Beijing began  the trial operation for the “wireless city” in July. The signal covering area include second ring road, three ring road, CBD shoping district, Financial Street, Zhongguocun district and Wangjing economic and technological development district, covering a total area of 100 square kilometers. Accoring to the plan, Beijing will become the largest wireless network city in China. However, many users reflect the “Wireless Beijing” is not “unlimited”, covering many areas of wireless networks are still a large blind spot.

According to the person in charge, Beijing will gradually expand the wireless coverage area. It is reported that many experiment units are under processing for the “wireless city” plan. In addition, almost half of Beijing’s institutions  have been completed wireless networks, indoor and outdoor wireless access point has exceeded 3,000, of which Tsinghua University campus wireless network wireless access point up to 500.

In China, most of the people know the website-hao123.com. It is a Chinese website directory site. After Baidu bought this site( another 265.com was bought by google), lots of people are duplicating the website derectory.

For some instance, hao123 changed the habit of the people to log on the internet. But too many similar website will be wasterful. And i have not found a good website directory which can communicate between different countries. So i want to make a english website directory for the foreiger who want to know the informaiton about China，like media website, blog, business website, study, learen Chinese, etc. I have registers the domain beijinglinks.org, and if it can provide helpness for the forengers who are interested in China, i will be very happy.

There are lots of diffulties for me, as i am a green hand for make website. But i want to have a try.

It seems that Microsoft has been pushed to the edge by the wide-spread piracy of Windows XP in China.

The company is now issuing what it calls the Windows Genuine Advantage Program, which tries to persuade users to changing to genuine copies with hourly desk top blackouts and permanent pop-up notifications.

The move has affected millions of users. And major Chinese Internet forums are flooded with angry sentiments.

A Beijing lawyer has taken the issue the furthest. Dong Zhengwei has lodged a complaint with the Ministry of Public Security, accusing Microsoft of invading personal computers without user permission.

He’s calling on authorities to assign criminal responsibility for this and halt what he calls an “illegal move.”

But according to the law, there’s nothing wrong with fighting piracy. And Microsoft is tough on the issue.

Lin Congwu, manager of client products, Microsoft China, said, “Pirating software is absolutely wrong. There’s no excuse for it.”

Chinese law stipulates that a party will be considered guilty of illegal intrusion if it disrupts the normal functioning of computers by altering their operating systems.

According the report of CNNIC, China now have the most netizen in the world. The total netizen number is 253,000,000. So the Chinese net market is a big market and have more peotential development.