technology

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Imagethief was interested to see that the ARJ-21, the Chinese regional commercial jet that is currently in development, had its maiden flight on Friday. China has big ambitions to grow its capabilities in commercial aviation, and there is much riding on the ARJ program. So I was not surprised at all to see that the pilots were complementary after the flight:

"The plane flew normally and it handled well," the report quoted pilot Zhao Peng as saying.
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If you're interested in the specifics of how online censorship works --and doesn't work-- in China, especially with regard to blogging, check out Rebecca MacKinnon's post and presentation on her recent research into the topic. She and her students posted a range of potentially sensitive content onto a number of Chinese blog service providers and tracked what got censored where. Here is the presentation (best viewed in full screen mode), but if you're interested it's worth reading her post as well:
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Long time readers will remember that Imagethief started a blog for CNET on the China technology scene called "Little Red Blog" back in 2006, and ran it for about a year. My archived posts can be found under the "CNET Asia" tag in my tag cloud, at right. When I ran short of time I handed the blog over to the excellent Rick Martin, who improved it and generally did me proud as a replacement for a year and a half.
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This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember when Hu Jintao visited Bill Gates?
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Singapore's PAP has discovered its value as a political marketing tool:

Said PM Lee [Hsien Loong]: “(This) is how this generation communicates —
through YouTube, through images, through sounds — and we have to get
our message across in a serious way, but in a way which people can
accept, and we’ll resonate with them on our website and on many other
places in cyberspace.” 


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Imagethief was not in the least surprised to hear that Chinese netizens were outraged that movie actress Gong Li has taken Singapore citizenship. But then, Imagethief is not in the least surprised by anything that outrages Chinese netizens. Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in "Memoirs of Geisha", alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.
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So report immediately to the Beijing Military General Hospital, net fiends. Or check yourself against this Xinhua article, with details of China's official diagnostic definition of that scourge of spotty teenagers (and, ahem, adult nerds), Internet addiction:
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I've been fascinated by the rise of the online video sharing websites in China. Unlike the US, where video sharing sites have jammed a stick into the side of traditional broadcast media, in China they have jammed sticks into the sides of both traditional broadcast media and the government. This is not surprising since broadcast media and the government are closely entwined in China, and anything that upsets the equilibrium of the government's carefully managed media environment is destined to make for interesting times.
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So we interrupt all this election talk to give a shout out to some great software, though its all stuff that I'm sure most of you have been using for years. Yes, I'm feeling like the last one to the party, no idea why my other co-editors didn't enlighten me, but right now I'm obsessed with two great programs that have been incredibly helpful, Google Reader and AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield.
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