China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that Chinese supercomputer producer announced that China has once again built the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of performing 33.86 quadrillion operations per second, surpassing the U.S. Titan supercomputer.

The Tianhe-2 has a peak performance speed of 54.9 quadrillion operations per second, according to the National University of Defense Technology, which built the computer, Xinhua news agency reports.

The computer’s predecessor, the Tianhe-1A, was the world’s fastest supercomputer from November 2010 to June 2011, when it was surpassed by Japan’s K computer.

China Watch Blog has learnt that the former CIA employee who leaked top-secret information about US surveillance claims that China’s mainland and Hong Kong have long been surveillance targets of the US spy programs.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post newspaper, former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden claims the US has long been attacking a Hong Kong university that routes all Internet traffic in and out of the southern Chinese city.

Snowden said the National Security Agency’s 61,000 hacking targets around the world include hundreds in Hong Kong and China’s mainland, the paper reported. It said Snowden had presented documents to support those claims, but it did not describe the documents and said it could not verify them.

Snowden’s comments were his first since the 29-year-old American revealed himself as the source of a major leak of top-secret information on US surveillance programs. He flew to Hong Kong from Hawaii before revealing himself, and the SCMP said he was staying out of sight amid speculation the US may seek his extradition.

Snowden, who worked for the CIA and later as a contractor for the NSA, has revealed details about US spy programs that sweep up millions of Americans’ phone records, e-mails and Internet data in the hunt for terrorists. American law enforcement officials are building a case against him but have yet to bring charges.

The newspaper cited Snowden as saying the NSA had been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and China’s mainland since 2009, citing documents he showed the paper. It didn’t provide further details about the documents.

He said that among the targets was the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which hosts the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, the main hub for the city’s Internet traffic.

Set up in 1995, it allows all data between local servers to be routed locally instead of having to pass through exchanges in other countries, including the United States.

“We hack network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that gives us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” Snowden told the SCMP.

According to Snowden’s documents, other NSA hacking targets included Hong Kong public officials, students and businesspeople, as well as targets on the mainland, though they did not include Chinese military systems, the paper said, without giving details.

A large number of mainland businesses, including state-owned ones, have offices in Hong Kong. The People’s Liberation Army has a base in Hong Kong and the central government and foreign affairs department have offices there.

The university is also home to the Satellite Remote Sensing Receiving Station, which captures data and imagery used to monitor the environment and natural disasters in a 2,500-kilometer radius around Hong Kong, an area that includes most of the Chinese mainland and Southeast Asia.

The university said in a statement that “every effort is made to protect” the exchange, which is monitored around the clock to defend against threats. “The university has not detected any form of hacking to the network, which has been running normally,” it said.

China Watch Blog has learnt that a New York federal judge long accused of bias against Ecuadorian rainforest residents over a $19B pollution case is continuing to allow Chevron to “systematically harass” two victims of its toxic pollution and their long-time New York lawyer, according to new motions filed in recent days.

The lawyer, Steven R. Donziger, asked Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to grant a three-month stay to prevent the case from degenerating into a “mockery” where unrepresented defendants are fighting hundreds of Chevron lawyers and are barred by the court from mounting a basic defense using evidence of Chevron’s pollution and corrupt acts in Ecuador.

“This is an extraordinary situation where the evidence suggests that a federal judge is allowing a major oil company to crush its critics by denying them a defense and overwhelming them with abusive legal tactics to drive up their costs, making it virtually impossible for them to obtain counsel,” said Donziger.

“Judge Kaplan is now allowing Chevron to pursue litigation over litigation over litigation,” said Donziger. “It’s unprecedented and offensive.”

In the motion seeking the stay, Donziger outlined for Judge Kaplan how he is now litigating alone (pro se) against at least 114 lawyers from Chevron’s lead outside firm in a case with millions of pages of discovery documents, a privilege log that is 15,000 pages long, and close to 1,200 docket entries. Chevron also disclosed that it has well over 100 private investigators working on the case, some of who have conducted secret surveillance of the plaintiffs and their lawyers to intimidate them, said Donziger.

Despite the request for a stay, Judge Kaplan is allowing 14 depositions in three weeks, with the first starting tomorrow and the last – of Chevron’s CEO, John Watson – scheduled for June 27.

China Watch Blog reports that a Chinese city’s plan to fine mothers who have a child out of wedlock has sparked criticism that the policy is discriminatory and could lead to an increase in abandoned babies.

One expert said Monday that it was the first time that out-of-wedlock children had been expressly singled out for penalty by one of China’s municipalities, which have flexibility in how they enforce China’s population-control policies.

It also came just days after the rescue of a young unmarried mother’s newborn from a sewer pipe in eastern China prompted discussion over the stigma that single mothers face, AP reports.

“If the policy is approved, there could be more `sewer babies,’ because when mothers can’t afford the cost, they might think about throwing their babies away,” said Chen Yaya, a gender equality researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Said another expert, the city’s policy was unfair in that it would only punish the mother while the father will get away without any penalties. “Blaming the woman and not the man, who has an equal responsibility to the child born out of wedlock shows the city is led by male chauvinists.”

On Friday, the government of Wuhan city in central Hubei published online a draft updated family planning policy which it says is aimed at keeping the city’s birth rate at a low level.

The policy says that “the parties” should pay the fee in cases of births that are out of wedlock or when one side knowingly has a child with someone who has a spouse. It has been interpreted in state media as mainly targeting unmarried mothers and women who have affairs with married men. The public has a week to comment on it.

“It looks like the policy is targeted just at women from my understanding,” Chen said.
She said unmarried mothers already faced discrimination, including being barred from receiving maternity benefits from the government.

Unmarried mothers also face stigma because premarital sex traditionally has been frowned upon. In the case of the baby found in the sewer in Zhejiang province on May 25, his mother told police she got pregnant after a brief affair, couldn’t afford an abortion, hid her pregnancy from family and neighbors and had concerns about whether she would be able to raise the child.

Police also said she told them the baby slipped into the sewer accidentally shortly after its birth — an account they later said they accepted.

Wuhan’s proposed rule would be the first time that bearing a child when unmarried has been spelled out as a separate offense, said Yuan Xin, a professor of population studies at Renmin University.

“In fact, a lot of family planning regulations have included unmarried childbearing under illegal childbearing. They were just not specified as a separate term as is the case this time with Wuhan,” he said.

“We need to distinguish between the legal and moral aspects” and define what a family is nowadays, said Yuan. “Let’s say I am single, and I want to have a child. Is that wrong? No, it’s not, so is it considered a family? Having a baby with a married man, is that considered a family? All these details need to be specified.”

Babies resulting from an unmarried relationship or an affair with someone who is already married will provoke a “social compensation fee,” an official at the family planning committee of Wuhan city in central Hubei province said Monday. He refused to give his name, as is common with Chinese officials.

Social compensation fees are levied on people who break China’s strict family planning policy, which restricts many urban couples to one child. The fee depends on the province and the whim of the local family planning bureau, and the children are denied education and health benefits.

Hubei province, in which Wuhan is located, sets its social compensation fee as three times the average annual disposable income.

China Watch Blog reports that three men have been sentenced to jail by a Polish court for stealing a vehicle that was being used to transport corpses.

According to Odd News, the three were found guilty of stealing the vehicle from a suburb in Berlin, Germany in October. The 12 bodies, in their coffins, were discovered, a week later, in a wooded area near Poznan, Poland.

The three men, aged between 23 and 27, contested the verdict, saying that they had been hired to transport cars across the border without knowing they were moving stolen vehicles. They received between two and four years in prison each.

The verdicts all related to the auto theft and were in line with the sentencing request made by prosecutors. There were no charges related to disturbing bodies.

Additionally, each man has been ordered to compensate the funeral home with 16,000 zloty ($6,096). They have a week to appeal.

The disappearance of the corpse-filled vehicle hit headlines in both Germany and Poland last year, as relatives of the deceased worried about the final disposition of their loves ones’ remains. The search stretched to the Lithuanian border.

A search was still on for the alleged ringleader of the group. Another accomplice, who pleaded guilty, was already serving an 11-month sentence.

China Watch Blog has learnt that An emergency door of Sriwijaya Air flight number SJ 039 broke off as passengers were boarding at Raja Haji Fisabilillah airport in Tanjungpinang, Riau Islands, on Tuesday, the Jakarta Post reported.

The aircraft, scheduled to depart for Soekarno-Hatta airport, Jakarta, at 7 a.m. local time, had to delay take off until the damaged door was replaced.

“Shortly after I took my seat, an emergency exit door in the right side of the aircraft suddenly detached and the emergency chute also opened,” one of the passengers told Antara news agency.

Tanjungpinang-branch Sriwijaya Air manager Gusmansyah said the aircraft was actually in good condition.

“If the emergency equipment does not function, an aircraft is not allowed to fly,” said Gusmansyah.

China Watch Blog has learnt that IDTechEx, Cambridge, UK says that electric vehicles, planes and boats go more electronic.

According to Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman, IDTechEx, the day is coming when electric vehicles (EVs) land, water and airborne are as much as 80% electronics and electrics if we include the power components. It is even true of hybrids as they shed piton engines and employ ever smaller range extenders, the fuel cell option being fully electric.

There are two reasons for much less mechanics and more electrics and electronics. Firstly, it is how you improve a mechanical part or system. An example of this is the energy harvesting shock absorbers that replace existing ones or are an upgrade with a drop-in electric module from Levant Power. As they have shown, redirecting a little of the 12 kW or so generated by these in a bus or truck can provide much improved electrically active suspension. Levant Power is introducing the world’s most advanced fully active, recuperative suspension systems for autos and trucks. Its GenShock technology virtually eliminates all perception of bumps in the road while enabling unprecedented handling.

Another example of improving an existing part, by less hardware and more electrification, is the switched reluctance motor from Nidec and others where the rotor has no winding or expensive magnets that can demagnetise when hot. However the motor control needs twice the amount of silicon power circuitry that is needed for conventional synchronous traction motors.

Circuitry for extra functions

The second form of rapidly expanding circuitry is for new capability, from telematics to managing one hundred times the number of sensors that exist in a conventional vehicle, including taking the temperature of every cell in the lithium-ion traction battery now coming in for almost all applications. Another addition, multiple energy harvesting, is being considered part of the basic toolkit of the vehicle designer. Choose several ways of generating “free” electricity variously from vibration, rotation, vertical or forward movement, temperature difference and light, to take just a few examples. More benchmarking needs to take place. In a marina, the parked boats have little wind turbines and wide area photovoltaics charging batteries, so why not the same with parked pure-electric cars?

Variants on regenerative braking

Energy harvesting in EVs starts with variants on regenerative braking. No longer will some of the energy be dumped into power resistors to be wasted because the battery cannot cope with the full surge of returned energy. Better lithium-ion batteries, sometimes protected by supercapacitors across them or replaced by supercapacitors or supercabatteries, mean all the energy is recaptured. The same approach is being applied in regenerative sailing and mooring of boats in tidestreams – the propeller goes backwards. The aerial equivalent has arrived in regeneratively soaring sailplanes and the new small electric aircraft with one or two fully integrated propeller drives regenerating on descent and landing, very much the latest topic at the recent 7th CAFE Electric Aircraft Symposium in Santa Rosa, California.

Benchmarking best practice across different EVs

All this underlines the need to benchmark best practice in electric vehicles for land, water and air. Hybrid buses have often replaced lithium-ion batteries with supercapacitors before it happened in a few cars. The integration of circuitry into motors has also tended to happen at the heavy end first but in-wheel motors are successful in e-bikes as well as large vehicles, cars coming later. Multiple energy harvesting is commonplace with marine vehicles. No battery management system (BMS) can fully protect a vehicle from trouble in the large lithium-ion battery; best practice can be seen in buses, military and some other applications, however not in the Boeing Dreamliner or Chinese taxis. For instance, Lithium Balance has a good reputation supplying the BMS in the sit-on electric floor cleaners of Tennant Corporation and others without problems. However, the BMS and over it the vehicle management system electronics are becoming more complex, for reasons including further improvements to safety and squeezing out extra range and duration of the vehicle.

Circuitry rapidly replacing mechanical parts

One result of this rapid move to circuitry in place of mechanical parts is a shortage of designers and suppliers of these systems. Later, we get the structural components being developed at Imperial College London (supercapacitor load-bearing components and smart skin), at Warwick University UK (3D printing including circuits) and elsewhere, replacing dumb mechanical components but calling for new design skills in short supply. Add to that printed electronics – the term includes electrics and combinations as with the overhead cluster of the new Ford Fusion electric car. For more information attend, Printed Electronics Asia (www.PrintedElectronicsAsia.com) 9-10 July and Printed Electronics USA (www.PrintedElectronicsUSA.com) 20-21 November. Also, see www.IDTechEx.com and read www.PrintedElectronicsWorld.com for more.

Shortage of circuit designers and suppliers

The European Union INTRASME project is assisting small and medium enterprises in Europe to participate in the electric vehicle supply chain for land, water and air. An early result from its interviews and analysis is to reveal a dearth of designers and manufacturers of the latest, more complex, motor controllers. It has also established that, although there are few opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses to make mainstream cars successfully, there are huge opportunities in most other types of electric vehicle. In meeting its brief, the project has been particularly looking at the burgeoning electric aircraft business. Here the small businesses FlyNano of Finland (flying jet ski – pure-electric) and Equator Aircraft of Norway (amphibious leisure and work plane – hybrid electric) are instances of small companies that have successfully flown a prototype and are commercialising it with adequate funding. So where are the market statistics and forecasts for all these categories of electric vehicle?

New EV categories become important

Such is the pace of advance in electric vehicles, new categories become important every year, deserving the attention of those making other vehicles or their components and systems. IDTechEx provides forecasts and analysis of all electric vehicles for land, water and air and now we share some of the new results in the master report, “Hybrid & Pure Electric Vehicles for Land, Water & Air 2013-2023: Forecasts, Technologies, Players” (www.IDTechEx.com/ev).

Cars but not as we know them

This year it is the turn for car-like vehicles not homologated as cars to become a separately forecasted category because of a lift-off in sales. They are called MicroEVs but in Europe they are homologated as Quadricycles. Previously they were forecasted by IDTechEx within a more general category but now they have their own figures split out for numbers, unit value and market value over the next ten years because their sales are increasing rapidly in China, India and the Philippines; 100,000 of the e-trike taxi version are being bought by the Philippine government. Three million will be sold in 2023 because they are much lower in cost than mainstream cars, they escape the crash testing and most other requirements and are made simpler; most are three-wheelers.

Pure-electric cars are a special case

Mainstream hybrid and pure-electric cars are, of course, important and they are closely covered by IDTechEx, but they are something of a special case. Being massively loss-making, forecasting sales of hybrid and pure-electric mainstream cars is largely a matter of forecasting very uncertain levels of industrial, government and other financial support. They are the largest sector by value but industrial/commercial EVs are very close behind at $93 billion in 2023 and they are already profitable for most manufacturers. IDTechEx forecasts slow progress with pure-electric cars until near the end of the decade, when they will have range and price acceptable to most prospective purchasers thanks to many small advances, not just the projected two- to three-times improvement in traction battery cost/performance, which, on its own, would be inadequate. Sales may take-off from a mere 300,000 in 2020 to 2 million in 2023, even causing a decline in sales of hybrid cars but no-one can be absolutely sure about timing, only sure that it will be the smaller ones that succeed first in volume. As Dr Pietro Perlo of IFEVS has pointed out, these will be lower cost than internal combustion versions, mimicking the situation with e-bikes, power chairs and 3- or 4-wheel scooters for the disabled, golf cars and other small pure-electric vehicles today.

One thing is certain – the improvements and enhancements will mainly concern the electrics and electronics in hybrid and pure-electric vehicles for land, water and air. They are already responsible for the primary cost and performance. Those making these will prosper. On the other hand, those making mechanical parts will have a hard time. The supply chain has yet to reflect this new reality.

New research reports from IDTechEx

The IDTechEx report “Hybrid & Pure Electric Vehicles for Land, Water & Air 2013-2023: Forecasts, Technologies, Players” (www.IDTechEx.com/ev) provides detailed analysis of all these aspects, including ten year forecasts. If you are looking to understand the big picture, the opportunities and the problems you can address then this report is a must.

Assessing specifically the opportunity for power electronics, the new IDTechEx report “Power Electronics for Electric Vehicles 2013-2023: Forecasts, Technologies, Players” (www.IDTechEx.com/power) provides coverage of key power components for hybrid and pure-electric vehicles on land, water and air.

Researched by multilingual IDTechEx consultants based in four countries and three continents, these reports build on ten years of knowledge of the industry.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Indonesia’s railway company has decided to scrap women-only trains less than a year after they were introduced.

State railway company PT Kereta Api Indonesia launched seven brightly painted trains in October to provide safety and comfort for women following reports of sexual harassment in mixed-gender commuter cars linking Jakarta to outlying areas.

But the trains are largely empty outside rush hour while regular ones are always packed, company spokeswoman Eva Chairunnisa said.

“To increase capacity, we decided to convert the women-only trains into regular ones,” Chairunnisa said.

“The ladies’ trains are full during rush hour, but regular trains are even more packed,” she added.

The spokeswoman said the company planned to add 180 more cars this year and that trains for women only might be introduced again when capacity allowed.

Lack of space has forced many commuters to ride on the rooftops of trains, exposing them to dangers including falling and electrocution.

The railway company has tried various tricks to deter roof riding, including spraying them with paint and hanging concrete balls above train tracks, but they were largely unsuccessful.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Prolexic, the global leader in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection services, announced that it has issued a number of recommendations that organizations can use to validate their DDoS defenses, as well as protection services they receive from mitigation providers.

“Making sure a provider can actually deliver on the level of service it promises is a critical step that many organizations overlook,” said Stuart Scholly, president at Prolexic. “Mitigation failure is such a common problem that the majority of Prolexic clients came to us after the DDoS protection they had in place did not work.”

Prolexic recommends that organizations work closely with their DDoS mitigation provider(s) to complete a professional, planned provisioning and service validation. The only way to be sure that DDoS protection will be effective is through proactive validation against different types of attack scenarios.

Prolexic recommends the following best practices for DDoS mitigation service testing and validation:

· With the DDoS mitigation service active, verify that all applications are performing properly.

· Verify that all routing and DNS is working.

· In partnership with your mitigation service provider, generate a few gigabits of controlled traffic to validate the alerting, activation and mitigation features of the service.

· Test small levels of traffic without scrubbing and without any DDoS protection to validate that your on-premise monitoring systems are functioning correctly. This action will also help you identify the stress points on your network.

· Conduct baseline testing and calibrate systems to remediate any network vulnerabilities.

· Schedule validation tests on a regular basis (yearly or quarterly) with your DDoS mitigation service provider to validate that the service configuration is still working correctly – and eliminate the risk of network element failures due to DDoS. If network issues arise during testing, your service provider may need to make modifications based on recent changes to your network, such as modified firewall rules, firmware updates and router reconfiguration.

“Based on the test results, Prolexic also recommends developing a mitigation playbook as part of an incident response plan,” said Scholly. “This helps ensure that everyone in the organization knows what to do and what to expect if an attack strikes.”

Additional DDoS service validation recommendations and guidance on how to develop a DDoS mitigation playbook can be found in Prolexic’s latest white paper, “Planning for and Validating a DDoS Defense,” which can be downloaded for a limited time from www.prolexic.com/planning.

China Watch Blog reports that Hong Kong’s economy grew 2.8% in real terms year-on-year in the first quarter, Government Economist Helen Chan announces.

On a seasonally adjusted quarter-to-quarter comparison, real GDP expanded by 0.2%.