Sinobytes

Opera accused of censorship, betrayal by Chinese users

Nov 22, 2009 15:06

Opera, the maker of Web browsers such as the popular "Opera Mini" for Java-based mobile phones, has been accused of betraying its users in China, by apparently caving in to top-level demands to stop allowing China-based users to use the international version of the Opera Mini browser.

This stems from a unique feature of Opera Mini, where the traffic is sent via Opera's own servers, for the speed and convenience of its users, most of whom use the slowest GPRS mobile connection. But in China, the pleasant side effect of that rerouting has been that Opera Mini is effectively allowing users in China to easily circumvent the so-called Great Firewall of government-implemented Web filtering. Thus, Chinese users, up until yesterday, were merrily logging into Facebook--which has been blocked here pretty much all year--on their mobile phones using Opera Mini. Not any more.
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Microsoft hit with software sales ban in China

Nov 19, 2009 16:59

Microsoft is in hot water in China this week, after a court ruled that it infringed a Chinese company's intellectual property by including certain fonts in its operating systems.

The ruling by the Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court means Microsoft has been ordered not to sell some of its operating systems in mainland China, for the time being. The case centers on Chinese text fonts, such as those in the image above--made by Zhongyi Electronics, Ltd. (its company Web site is here).
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Dell smartphone officially announced: Headed to China (and Brazil)

Nov 15, 2009 20:04

As I previewed a couple of months ago, Dell's first ever smartphone is a badly kept secret, and so this week there weren't too many gasps of surprise when the US company announced that its "Mini 3" smartphone will launch soon.

And by "soon", I mean "Dell didn't bother to say when exactly". But it did clarify, in its official announcement, that the Android-powered Mini 3 will be available only in China and Brazil, initially. Specs will differ in each market, as will the look and configuration of the Android OS; and so, it's clear that Dell is looking to tailor the phone very carefully for each country and telco, in contrast to the more sweeping iPhone launch.
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Testing five VPNs that'll get you back on YouTube, Facebook in China

Nov 11, 2009 20:59

Living and working in China may bring many cultural pleasures, but trying to use the Internet here is a daily headache. It's not just nearly every English-language social-networking and video-sharing site that's affected by being blocked; blank squares and rectangles on virtually every Web site are a mocking reminder that some video or photo has been hit by the "Great Firewall". You're not getting the full Internet. At best, you're just getting the heavily edited safe bits. It's like a lukewarm coffee, a half-nibbled donut.
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Chinese Netizens struggling to access free VPNs

Nov 8, 2009 15:37

A lot of Chinese Netizens, missing the Web sites that have been blocked during 2009--and remain blocked right now--such as YouTube, Facebook and Blogspot blogs, have been scrambling to find free VPNs, and struggling to stay connected to them.

It's become a grim cat-and-mouse game between censorious authorities (using their so-called Great Firewall), who'd rather not have their citizens talking freely with people across the world, and open-minded and forward-thinking Net users who just want the freedom to use those sites. It's safe to say that most of these Chinese Netizens are wanting to use those sites for entirely leisure-based and honest purposes, which betray the fact that censorship is so often based on a lack of trust.
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