China’s web and tech industry got slightly larger, richer, more innovative, and more global during 2014, but there were still plenty of low points, calamities, and facepalm moments.
Here are 10 of the worst, starting in sorta chronological order:
1. Bitcoin clampdown continues
China’s clampdown on Bitcoin started in late 2013 and continued well into the start of this year. By March, the People’s Bank of China had ordered banks and all third-party payment services to stop dealing with anyone in the bitcoin business. That effectively de-funded all bitcoin trading websites as they would no longer have bank accounts.
Shortly after, China’s bitcoin exchanges were issued with formal notices stating that their bank accounts must be closed by April 15. One exchange in the country announced on April 10 that it had been contacted by its bank and told to remove all funds prior to the deadline or else the assets would be frozen.
2. China silences bloggers on WeChat
In March, Tencent followed orders from authorities to purge several prominent bloggers from their WeChat official accounts.
This followed on from a broad clampdown on rumors and bloggers on Weibo in 2013, showing that WeChat was now the main focus for censors as it became China’s main social app, used for sharing news as much as private messages between friends.
3. China totally blocks Google
China’s Great Firewall has been silently strangling Google’s search engine since 2010, when the search engine giant shuttered its censor-compliant Google.cn and redirected mainland Chinese users to the uncensored Google Hong Kong site.
During that time, Google’s market share collapsed in the country as the Google search engine took a minute or more to load due to this surreptitious slowdown. By June of this year, the strangulation stopped as the nation’s system of web censorship flat-out blocked Google – and pretty much every other Google service, right down to Google Translate.
They all remain blocked.
4. Net Nanny goes mental in July
But Net Nanny wasn’t finished yet. China’s web censors flicked more switches in July, blocking access to Microsoft’s OneDrive and Yahoo’s Flickr and then one day later adding messaging app Line to the blocklist. KakaoTalk was blocked later as well.
5. Aaaaaaand more things get blocked in September
Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo started September by getting blocked in China. At least it’s in esteemed company. Only foreign search engines that have Chinese servers, such as Bing and Yahoo, work in China – but neither Yahoo nor Bing are particularly popular. Brown-nosing doesn’t guarantee success.
Later in the month, Hong Kong erupted in protests as youngsters demanded something that mainland China doesn’t want them to have – representative democracy – and the Great Firewall blocked Instagram to ensure that images of the protests didn’t make it into the country.
WeChat soon joined in the action, applying some censorious tech to ensure that photos of the Hong Kong protests are not visible to WeChat users in mainland China.
At this point, Net Nanny congratulated herself on already blocking OneDrive and Flickr and celebrated with an early morning gin and tonic.
6. Startup bubble warnings
Let’s take a light-hearted break from all that censorship with… er… warnings of a calamitous, ruinous startup bubble.
In September, David Zhang, a prominent investor and co-founder of Matrix Partners China, sent an open letter to his portfolio companies cautioning of an imminent cooldown in China’s venture capital scene. The warning echoed cries of an imminent bubble in the West from Marc Andreessen and Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley.
Zhang advises startups that need funding in the near future to grab it while they can before the investment bonanza ends.
7. Foreign TV shows facing clampdown
China’s least favorite regulator, SAPPRFT, which oversees film, TV, and print media, issued a notice in September that the country’s booming video streaming sites need to get licenses to stream overseas TV series.
Without the requisite license, a site would be forced to remove its content – bought legitimately from copyright holders – from the web. That would result in the effective banning of some foreign TV series in China, leaving viewers to go back to the old days of pirating their favorite shows.
This doesn’t come into effect until April 1 2015 (no joking), but this still counts as a low point this year.
8. iCloud attacks
Just days after the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in China in October, anti-censorship watchdog GreatFire.org reported that the country’s authorities were staging a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on Apple’s cloud storage service, iCloud.
“This attack is about gleaning usernames and passwords from Apple customers in China,” said the GreatFire source. “If the authorities have your username and password, they have access to your data, regardless of encryption.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook held talks in Beijing a few days after the attack with Vice Premier Ma Kai, in which they discussed “user data protection.” Apple didn’t apportion any blame for the hack attempts.
9. Even more stuff censored in November
Can China’s locked-down internet get any worse? Yes. Yes, it can. In November, the Great Firewall blocked web access to thousands of websites using the EdgeCast content delivery network (CDN).
According to the team at GreatFire.org, the target of this broad attack was actually something very specific – to take down GreatFire’s mirror sites, which are copies of blocked sites including Google Search.
But that resulted in a great deal of “collateral damage” to non-sensitive sites such as The Atlantic, Firefox’s add-ons site, and Speedtest.net.
10. China hosted the World Internet Conference
One day after that, China hosted the World Internet Conference. Yes, China, which blocks thousands of websites and dozens of social media apps, played host to the World Internet Conference.
The event featured a number of leading tech execs from overseas, such as Facebook’s Vaughan Smith, who stood around avoiding talking about inconvenient things like censorship and how Facebook is blocked in China.
Wait… Was this a high point or a low point? Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. Sorry. I need a drink.
11. Smartphones stagnate
On a more serious note, it’s worth noting that 2014 was the year that China’s smartphone uptake stagnated as the already mature market finds little room for further growth.
The latest figures from IDC show that smartphone shipments in India grew 82 percent in the past 12-month period, while China saw growth of just 10.8 percent.
While China is still the most important market due to its size, it’s no longer the most exciting market – that’s now India.
12. China bans puns, gives Jon Stewart a fantastic segment
The folks from SAPPRFT are at it again. The Chinese censorship organ issued new regulations governing the use of language in China’s television shows and advertisements, forbidding internet slang terms, which often take the form of puns.
No longer can TV shows or ads, to use SAPPRFT’s words, “wantonly change or use expressions to create a divide with [traditional] culture and linguistic chaos.” *Does Jon Stewart voice*: CHAOS, I TELL YOU.
OK, I’ll shut up. Here’s Jon Stewart himself:
This post 12 low points in China’s tech news in 2014 appeared first on Tech in Asia.
12 low points in China’s tech news in 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment