The Internet has always been good for people who want to blow off steam. Its appealing combination of anonymity and instant gratification have long made it a receptacle angst and hostility, as anyone who runs a blog with a lively comment section knows. The Chinese are great fans of forums and bulletin board-style sites, which are particularly conducive to id-channeling behavior, official exhortations to "文明办网" (use the Net civilly) notwithstanding. Periodically there is a fluster of official anxiety over whether it is proper for people to engage in such angry discourse online.

To which I would reply, it's better than engaging in it on the subway. But nobody is asking me. Nevertheless I was interested this morning to stumble upon a Xinhua article fretting over a complaint-driven Web site called "China Hate Wall" (中国恨墙).Read more »

I stumbled across a short article in ChinaTechNews today which noted that four different Chinese regulators are currently hammering out a new regulatory framework for video uploads in China:

Led by China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), several ministries in China, including the Ministry of Information Industry, Ministry of Culture and General Administration of Press and Publication, are working on a new regulation for the management of online video frequency service.

A representative from SARFT has told local media that research regarding the new regulation has been completed and a report has been submitted to the higher authority for approval. SARFT hopes that the final regulation will be rolled out around the end of this year or the beginning of next year. However, the detailed schedule cannot be settled right now as there are many different parties involved.

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It was celebration time in China a month ago when a longstanding block on Wikipedia was finally lifted. Yes, there had always been ways around it, such as proxy servers, Gollum and various shameless scraping sites. But it was convenient to be able to hit the real thing again without having to resort to time-consuming workarounds. It was also exciting for users of Wikipedia's Chinese language site who, as Andrew Lih reported just four days ago, started signing up in much larger numbers once the block was lifted. Unfortunately, our renewed Wiki-bliss didn't last long. Today, nanny has dropped the hammer on Wikipedia again, and we're back to using workarounds.Read more »

Microsoft (or Apple) may want to get on the horn to the folks at Xinhua, who apparently haven't got their digital music player models entirely sorted out. An article on Microsoft's licensing deal with Universal music for the Zune music player included this photo of "black and white Zune digital music players" (below the jump):Read more »

On the heels of last week's Internet Governance Forum in Athens, an event that yielded some memorable statements, I thought it might be worth pondering a situation infested with unroosted chickens: Google's recent purchase of goliath Internet video-sharing site YouTube. Google has had its share of PR trouble from China in the past year. This hasn't come from inside China, where Google's main problem has been how to win market share from rampaging Baidu, but from the US and Europe where critics have lambasted it for knuckling under the Chinese censorship regime. Could the purchase of YouTube upset Google's delicate balancing act between activists and the Chinese Government?Read more »