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 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 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 China’s e-commerce economy will grow nearly six times by 2020 as more retailers and vendors tap online shopping to lure consumers.

The e-commerce economy – including online transactions and the e-commerce related service industry and information technology infrastructure – will reach 43.8 trillion yuan (US$7.1 trillion), with the majority made up of enterprise transactions of 33 trillion yuan, according to a Shanghai Daily report.

The value of online retail sales, from individual and enterprise sellers, may reach a combined 10 trillion yuan by 2020, Alibaba Group Research Center said in a report yesterday.

Though e-commerce retail only accounted for 6 percent of China’s overall economy in 2012, the figure is seen to reach 16 percent by 2020 due to its huge growth potential as vendors move to the virtual world to lure shoppers, the report said.

Last year, Alibaba Group’s retail arm Taobao and Tmall recorded more than 1 trillion yuan of sales, 10 times their transaction size in 2008.

China is set to become the world’s largest online market whose size may exceed US$420 billion and rise to US$650 billion annually by 2020, McKinsey&Co said in a report in March this year.

China is home to the world’s largest Internet user base of over 560 million and a younger generation of consumers who shop by clicking their mouse.

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 has learnt that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China’s biggest e-commerce company, plans to step up efforts to fight counterfeiting, which the company head says is the biggest obstacle for its future development.

China Daily reported that the Hangzhou-based company will spend “as much as it can” to tackle counterfeiting problems on its e-commerce websites, said Shao Xiaofeng, Alibaba’s chief risk officer.

The company will set up a committee for intellectual property rights protection this year, which will have Lu Zhaoxi, its new CEO starting on May 10, as head and Alibaba’s different business division leaders as members, Shao said.

The effort came after the company was removed from the United States’ yearly list of the world’s most “notorious markets” last year because of its improvement in reducing counterfeits.

“I am afraid that something we notice but don’t prevent today will eventually grow into a cancer for a company’s future development. … That’s why I think I will surely regret it if we don’t do well in fighting counterfeits,” Ma Yun, Alibaba’s chairman, said at his last news conference before he officially steps down as CEO on May 10.

About 2,000 employees at Alibaba are responsible for protecting intellectual property rights.

Last year, Alibaba dealt with 94 million items that infringed copyrights and handed out punishment 900,000 times, it said.

In the first three months of this year, China’s public security organs have dealt with 3,747 counterfeit cases, which involved a total value of 24.2 billion yuan ($3.91 billion), said Meng Qingfeng, head of the Economic Crime Investigation Department of the Ministry of Public Security.

In December, a report from the United States Trade Representative said that Taobao, owned by Alibaba, “has worked with rights holders to significantly decrease the listing of infringing products for sale through its website, and has committed to continue working to streamline its complaint procedures to further reduce listings of counterfeit products”.

China Watch Blog has learnt that a Russian entrepreneur wants to introduce MAT Russian swear words – to the English speaking world and in doing so upset all sense of decency.

MAT is the term used to describe Russian sacral swearwords and the plot is simple yet ingenious. Introduce English speaking people to MAT and encourage them to use these Russian words regularly. The ingenious part of the plot is that very few of their friends and family will know that they are swearing and by using these words individuals will be participating in one of the best stress relieving activities around.

The leader of this plot to infiltrate the English language and scandalize Americans is Sergey Yanchevskiy. According to Yanchevskiy there is pure healing magic in properly shaped sacral swearwords, especially Russian language swear words. Yanchevskiy and his team are planning to gather the most effective Russian swear words into one book and then deliver these MAT guides to libraries throughout the United States.

Their diabolical scheme is to introduce as many Americans as possible to the healing power of MAT and they won’t rest until they can walk any street in the country and hear these Russian swear words being expressed on a regular basis.

In essence, the goal of Yanchevskiy’s project is to undermine conventional norms by making swearing more acceptable. Using Russian, a language few Americans know is the perfect way to allow people to swear without obviously offending anyone. It’s scandalous, it’s ingenious and it just might work.

Drawing on recent studies by some of the top researchers Yanchevskiy is testing out the new theory that getting made and yelling out swear words is healthy and in fact can have a healing effect. Researchers are now learning that getting angry every now and then and relieving stress by shouting a few swear words can actually help people cope with daily life in a more effective manner.

Of course there is always the problem of the social stigma of swearing but one can only be offended if they are aware that a swear word has been uttered. That’s where Russian MAT comes in. Like a covert operation, Yanchevskiy and his colleagues will infiltrate the English language and offer people the chance to curse to their hearts content with few people understanding what they are saying.

Yanchevskiy argues that Russian MAT is more effective at helping people cope with stress because of the way the Russian words are structured and how they sound. Forcefully pronouncing the Russian words correctly leads to the maximum stress relieve for those who say them.

Yanchevskiy is currently in the early stages of developing his book and is offering the average person the chance to take part in making the book a great success. He has teamed with Indiegogo.com to fund this project. The partnership with Indiegogo let’s Yanchevskiy enlist many different people in his subversive plot to infiltrate the English language and bring Russian MAT to the masses.