China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that three months from now, Yahoo will shut down its Chinese email service, meaning that millions of users here will have to prepare for an alternative. But that in fact is a very small number as the American conglomerate only holds less than 2 percent of the market share in China against tough local competition.
Wang Yan, 28, has been using her Yahoo account for more than 10 years. It was in fact the first email address she ever had.

“I started using Yahoo in college. But eventually more choices came along and now I’m also using many more accounts such as qq and gmail. I don’t think I’m going to move my email content like Yahoo has suggested. It’s too much trouble,” Wang Yan said, Xinhua news agency reports.

Users are advised to register with AliCloud, before the service is completely closed on August 19. The recommended product is run by Alibaba, which became yahoo China’s parent company in 2005, after reaching a deal with the American headquarters.

China has some 200 million email users, and nowadays it’s rather common to have multiple mailbox accounts, as consumers’ demands are changing all the time. Wang Yan’s husband Wan Quan is also one of yahoo China’s users who’ve been slowly driven away by its competitors.

“The closure won’t affect me too much and I’ve migrated my account to alicloud. I chose yahoo China ten years ago because at the time there weren’t many other free and quality options, but now I also use qq because it makes sending super size emails easy,” Wan Quan said.

According to statistics, currently the top five e-mail services are all provided by domestic companies. Tecent QQ, Sina, and Sohu are some of Yahoo’s most outstanding rivals. Not only has its email service rank dropped from number four to six from last year, its mainland employees have also been reduced by two thirds to about only 200 today, leaving just about some 30 people running the email service in China.

China Watch Blog has learnt that a disturbing new type of telecom blackmail has appeared in Shanghai, one that seems to operate through enforcement loopholes of telephone companies and police.

Criminals are using telephone software to make very frequent phone calls to a victim’s cellphone, and threatening to keep it up until they are paid off, the Shanghai Daily reported.

In a recent case, a salesman surnamed Zhang said he received more than 2,000 calls, with a call every one to two minutes over two days, and as soon as he picked up, the call ended, the Shanghai Morning Post reported.

According to a message sent to Zhang, the harassment would stop only if he transferred 500 yuan to a designated bank account.

Zhang called police, but was told the amount of money was too small to file the case, and it is hard to collect evidence as the suspects usually use software and a server outside the city or country to make the calls.

Zhang’s phone service said it could act against only those calling or sending messages using their service.

The harassment started on Friday last week when a call that appeared as “private number” showed up on Zhang’s phone.

“I tried to call back, but the other side hung up right after the call was put through,” Zhang said.

In just 10 minutes, Zhang got 16 such calls. Zhang did not pay the 500 yuan and he received more than 2,000 calls that weekend.

Zhang dared not turn off his phone for fear of missing important calls.

“I think they found my number on the Internet,” Zhang said. “I’m so frustrated. I don’t want to change my number and I’m afraid they are just going to ask for more if I pay.”

“The suspects are very crafty as they asked for only a couple of hundred yuan just to avoid criminal charges,” a police officer said.

The phone company suggested Zhang set up his phone to allow only calls from contacts in his phone, which Zhang said wasn’t a good answer, either.

During the May Day holiday, Zhang turned off his phone and received no more of the calls when he turned it on again. He’s hoping they don’t come back.

China Watch Blog reports that a website specifically devoted to sharing information related to mobile development, according to website “All Things D”, seems to be the site likely responsible for hacking into recent major tech companies.

The report at All Things D says Apple, Facebook, Twitter — all hacked. And there’s probably more to come. And all of them have one thing in common, that is, they have visited this compromised website related to mobile development.

The report said after Facebook employees visited the mobile development site in recent weeks, malicious code injected into the HTML of the site used an exploit in Oracle’s Java plug-in to infect employee laptops, as the company divulged last Friday.

Though the compromised website is named at All Things website, please do not visit it as it may continue to be compromised.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Thai police have arrested three Nigerian men and a Thai woman for allegedly operating an online relationships scam and swindling eight million baht from 18 women.

The Bangkok Post reported that police arrested the suspects on outstanding warrants issued by Chiang Mai Provincial Court at an apartment in Ramkhamhaeng Soi 8 in Bangkok’s Bang Kapi district on Monday.

They seized four ATM cards, a mobile phone and a notebook containing the names of more than 100 women.

Those arrested were identified as Shinonsu Esaeokae, Chidi Enva, Pios Ennajee, and 32-year-old Thai woman Aunchittha Prasertsri, Pol Lt Gen Panu Kerdlarppol, head of the Immigration Police Bureau, told a press briefing on Tuesday.

The Nigerians would pose as wealthy people, using photos of good-looking US and European men when communicating with their targets through chat programmes and social networking websites including Facebook, Pol Lt Gen Panu said.

They web-chatted with the women for between one month and one year to convince them they loved them.

The conmen then told the victims that they had shipped valuables to them as gifts and showed them photos of the alleged expensive goods and fake invoices. In some cases, the gang claimed to have bought a house or a car for the woman.

When the shipment failed to arrive on time as promised, Mrs Aunchitta, who posed as an embassy official, would contact the victims and tell them they had to pay customs duty on the deliveries in order to receive them.

If the victims believed them, the conmen would ask the women to transfer money to them.

The internet fraud gang was believed to have 70 members and the gang’s leader was in Malaysia, Pol Lt Gen Panu said.Police investigations were continuing.

China Watch Blog reports Apple’s revenue may have missed expectations as sales of the iPhone reportedly disappointed. However, data from leading independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight, shows no slump in the number of online searches pertaining to iPhones, in the lead up to Christmas.

In fact, search volumes for the term ‘iPhone 5’ saw a dramatic 594% jump. However, the opposite was true for the term ‘Blackberry’. Just last week, its inventor, Research in Motion (RIM), showed off two new smartphones for its newly built BlackBerry 10 operating system.

According to Greenlight’s ‘Brown Goods Sector Report – Issue 14’, in November 2012, a total of 12 million searches were made on Google UK for Audio & Accessories, Cameras & Camcorders, PCs, Laptops and Tablets, Phones & Accessories and TVs & DVD Players, up 5 million on August 2012 levels.

Phones & Accessories-related search terms proved most popular. They accounted for 53% of all Brown Goods-related queries compared to 32% in August, when searches pertaining to PC’s, Laptops and Tablets dominated (48%).

‘iPhone 5’ search volumes see a six-fold rise

According to Greenlight, the term ‘iPhone 5’ was queried more than 4 million times, accounting for 34% of all Brown Goods-related searches in November, up from August’s 673,000.

In the case of ‘Blackberry’ however, the opposite was true. Greenlight’s data shows search volumes for the term totalled 246,000 compared to 301,000 in August.

Apple knocks Amazon UK off top spot to become the most visible site for Brown Goods

Greenlight also assessed which brands, retailers and review sites were the most visible in both Natural Search* and Paid Media** results and therefore had the greatest share of consideration when UK consumers searched on Google UK for Brown Goods in November.

Greenlight’s Integrated Search league table shows that Apple, which in August lay in fifth place, snatched Amazon UK’s lead to become the most visible website overall. In November, it achieved a dominant share of visibility across both the Natural Search and Paid Media listings – 60% and 72%, respectively.

Whilst Amazon UK was relegated to fourth place, it was one of just three sites that managed to hold on to a spot in Greenlight’s top ten, from August.

China Watch Blog came across this blog – blogkori.com – and found this writers 7 Blog SEO Tips to Gain Bulletproof Search Rankings is the last item when one searches for SEO tips at google search.

But your truly thinks this writer is good and is worth reading, especially his comments on SEO being a new marketing tool.

China Watcb Blog reports that IntroAmerica is an educational consulting business targeting mainland Chinese students who wish to study in America.

Contest Flyer

“We are working with US colleges interested in recruiting Chinese students, while at the same time trying to provide invaluable information to Chinese students seeking information about American culture, college life and the college admissions process. More simply, IntroAmerica aims to be a ‘bilingual match.com for US colleges and Chinese students,” says head of Product, Sondra WuDunn.

She is responsible for its website www.IntroAmerica.com as well as overseeing various aspects of the company’s social media platform. In conjunction with its launch last week, the company is are hosting a video contest and inviting all college students in the US to partake.

All they need to do is create a short video about their college life, submit to Sondra’s website or facebook page, www.facebook.com/introamerica, get their friends and family to ‘like’ our facebook fan page, and ultimately vote. Winners will be announced next month, with the top video contestant earning $3,000.

I invite you to check out our new website and ‘like’ our facebook page, but, more importantly, help spread the word about our video contest to any friend, associate or relative attending college who might wish to participate –please see the formal email announcement below and the attached flyer.

China Watch Blog brings to you a report from CNN which exposes how the tangled David Petraeus scandal highlights how easily the U.S. government can access citizens’ private e-mails.

CNN said the FBI’s request to access Paula Broadwell’s personal Gmail account was one of 7,969 similar requests Google received from the U.S. government in the first half of 2012, according to Google and news reports. The company said it complied with the requests, either fully or partially, 90% of the time.

According to the latest Google Transparency report, Google fielded 20,938 requests for private account data from governments around the world between January and June of this year. That’s up from 18,257 such requests during the last half of 2011, the company said.

“One trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise,” Dorothy Chou, a Google senior policy analyst, writes in the blog post announcing the latest report — the sixth Google has released in the last three years.

Google stores huge amounts of data and personal information about its users. In addition to the wealth of information in e-mail and Google Drive accounts, the company also has users’ IP addresses, which can be used to determine locations.

Beginning in May of this year, the FBI accessed Gmail accounts used by Broadwell to communicate with Petraeus, the former CIA director, during their affair, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The bi-annual Google Transparency report is Google’s attempt to “shine a light” on how often governments around the world ask to access user data as part of criminal investigations.

The company also publishes data on how often government agencies request that public content be removed from Google services, such as YouTube videos or blog posts on Blogger. The most common reason cited for wanting content taken down is defamation.

U.S. law enforcement agencies seem to be the most curious. The country continues to top the list for the most requests for user data in the world, followed at a distance by India. While Google is admirably proactive about releasing data on government requests, in the majority of cases it does turn over the requested information. The company said it cooperates with U.S. government requests more than any other country.

Outdated laws have created loopholes that allow government and law enforcement agencies to request information and conduct electronic surveillance without warrants. The piece of legislation at the heart of the issue is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986.

Technology has changed radically in the past 25 years. E-mails, cellphones, location information and data stored on cloud services weren’t considered when the original law was drafted.

Google is an active member of the Digital Due Process Coalition, which has been pushing for reform of the ECPA. The group’s members include Apple, Amazon, the ACLU, Facebook, Google and Twitter along with a slew of other big-name tech companies and civil liberties groups. Other technology companies, including Twitter and LinkedIn, are joining Google and releasing their own transparency reports.

The United States Justice department is against any updates to the law that would require more warrants.

Revising the ECPA wouldn’t prohibit the government and law enforcement agencies from requesting the information, it would just require they go through an approval process to get the warrants. In a bit of circular logic, the Justice Department has argued that the electronic evidence gathered without warrants is necessary to build enough of a case to later get search warrants.

China Watch Blog has learnt that a week after a microblog post that warned of difficulties for Westerners who marry Chinese women spurred more than 3 million comments online, expatriates in Shenzhen who have a Chinese spouse said that despite cultural differences, they enjoy their cross-cultural marriage.

The Shenzhen Daily reported local expats as saying that mutual respect is needed to maintain such a relationship, which isn’t rare in Shenzhen. Since 2005, there have been 665 cross-cultural marriages — between a Chinese person and a foreigner — registered in Futian District.

The microblog post that lit up Sina Weibo last week lists a number of
adverse “consequences” of a marriage between a Chinese woman and a Western man, and gained instant popularity on Chinese social media when it was posted Oct. 24.

The post was written by a Chinese stand-up comedian who is living in the United States and claimed that he interviewed “a dozen laowai (foreigners) married to Chinese wives” before making his comments.

The post says marrying a Chinese woman means marrying her entire family, having no privacy and being subject to many questions — Where are you going? What are you doing? With whom? — every time you leave the house.

The post also claims that Chinese have a “palate for everything,” including chicken feet, pig ears and other food that Westerners never eat, and that Chinese mothers are “driving their kids to death” by forcing them to study very hard at very young ages.

The post became the No. 2 trending topic on Weibo and garnered more than 3 million related discussions. While significant majorities of Chinese commenters said they found the claims hilarious and somewhat true, others — and some local expats — disagreed.

John Hudson Hawke, an artist from the United States, said different individuals adjust to cross-culture marriages differently.

Hawke, 65, married a Chinese woman named Lu Suxin about eight years ago. Lu had previously lived in Indonesia for several years. Hawke said couples should be sympathetic to each other’s lifestyles in a cross-culture relationship.

“I don’t necessarily believe in everything my wife believes in, such as traditional Chinese herbal medicine and jade,” Hawke said. Many Chinese believe that wearing jade brings luck and health.

Hawke added that while his wife doesn’t necessarily like all the food he enjoys, they both make compromises when agreements can’t be reached.

American Charles Kirtley married his Chinese wife, Zheng Xu, in August, after knowing her for nearly six years.

“Life after the marriage has been quite easy,” he said. “We haven’t met any problems.”

Kirtley said many differences do exist between him and his wife, but he doesn’t see them as being cultural but a matter of human nature.

“We both take each other’s feelings into consideration and respect each other’s culture,” he said.

Kirtley said he buys chicken feet for his wife just because she loves them, even though he never eats them himself.

Both Hawke and Kirtley said language is a barrier in their marriages. Hawke doesn’t speak Chinese. When he has dinner with his wife’s family, who speak mostly Chinese through the entire meal, Hawke said he feels a little ignored.

Kirtley’s wife speaks only a little English, which he said can keep them from having some in-depth discussions.

“It also keeps us from quarreling and fighting,” he noted.

China Watch Blog received an advisory from Shelly Palmer that he had spotted a video submitted to Hacker News by the Polish startup Killswitch.me that clearly showed sending a link in a Facebook private message increases the Like counter on the link’s originating third-party website.

Palmer says this would suggest Facebook is scanning your private messages for shared links to Web pages with Like buttons, so it can increase the number of corresponding Likes for those pages. Facebook confirmed this information with Palmer, so beware of your data on Facebook.