Surprise! China used Google to spy on activists

Google has threatened to pull the plug on its operations in China after discovering that the emails of human rights activists had been hacked.

From AP:

The company disclosed in a blog post that it had detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China." Further investigation revealed that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists," Google's post said.

Google did not specifically accuse the Chinese government. But the company added that it is "no longer willing to continue censoring our results" on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires. Google says the decision could force it to shut down its Chinese site and its offices in the country.

Reporting from China

China wants to create a news and entertainment industry able to compete on the world stage with the likes of News Corp. and Viacom, the New York Times reports. As communication becomes more global, how will news coverage that originates in the United States differ from coverage in other countries? As consumers are given more choices, how will the traditional form of coverage Americans have come to know fare?

Chinese computers unshackled

The Chinese government has delayed indefinitely a requirement that all personal computers sold in the country include special software designed to block pornography and anything else officials deemed unsavory.

From the New York Times:

The filtering software has been the object of furious online debate since the requirement to install it was disclosed. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which licensed the technology from two Chinese developers, says the software automatically blocks Web surfers from seeing “unhealthy Internet content.” Updated lists of banned content are automatically downloaded onto users’ computers from the developers’ servers.

But the software’s current list of banned words, posted online by Chinese hackers, is laced with political topics. Businesses have complained that the software is so poorly designed that it opens computers not just to government snooping, but also to hacker attacks by vandals and criminals.

U.S. official protested the requirement as a violation of free-trade agreements and Chinese retailers had backlogs of pristine PCs.

Iranian protesters caught in the net

Farhad Manjoo at Slate throws some cold water on the theory that social networking tools have delivered the means to bring about revolution in Iran, and warns that these same tools have been wielded by the wicked to sew confusion and silence voices calling for reform. Manjoo writes:

Over the last couple of weeks, those who believe in the transformative powers of technology have pointed to Iran as a test case—one of the first repressive regimes to meet its match in social media, the first revolution powered by Twitter. Even in the early days of the protest, that story line seemed more hopeful than true, as Slate's Jack Shafer, among many others, pointed out. Since last week, though, when the state began to systematically clamp down on journalists and all communications networks leading out of the country, hope has become much harder to sustain. The conflicting accounts about what happened at Baharestan Square are evidence that Iran's media crackdown is working. The big story in Iran is confusion—on a daily basis, there are more questions than answers about what's really happening, about who's winning and losing, about what comes next. The surprise isn't that technology has given protesters a new voice. It's that, despite all the tech, they've been effectively silenced.

-snip-

On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That's right—the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that's no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?

Meantime, the Washington Post reports that repressive regimes in China, Cuba and Burma have censored news of protests in Iran to ensure calls for democratic reform don't go viral.

Good morning at the Nieman Lab

The Nieman Lab at Harvard has some good stuff this morning, including this:

Good morning! The Watergate burglars were arraigned 37 years ago. How would (or wouldn't) Watergate get covered today?

Here are a few of the stories Nieman's linked to today:

1. The Guardian is using crowdsourcing to scour documents in the Parliament expense scandal.

2. Pollster John Zogby asks why people trust the Internet more than newspapers when they're getting the same information from both.

3. Authorities in Beijing plan to hire 10,000 Internet monitors to look for "harmful" websites and content - the other side of crowdsourcing. Last month, China demanded computer makers install filtering software on all personal computers sold in the country.

Another real-estate bubble about to burst

Nobody does a boom-and-bust cycle like America, but the Chinese are trying their best to catch up.

A pre-Olympic building boom has left Beijing has millions of square feet of expensive office space no one wants to lease, fancy stadiums no on wants to play in, and masses of high-end homes and apartments that no one can afford. The iconic Bird's Nest stadium is slated to become a mall.

Real estate prices are tumbling. Banks, however, have yet to begin writing down the loans.

Sound familiar?

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics reported this month that housing sales in the city dropped 40% last year. Chinese economists have predicted that housing prices will drop 15% to 20% in Beijing this year. Shanghai has experienced a similar decline.

"You can look at this perhaps as a healthy correction in the market," [Louis Kuijs, a senior economist at the World Bank in Beijing, said].

In the longer term, he said, "China's urbanization and overall development is going to lead to a very large additional demand for housing in the city."

Before that happens, the situation could get worse. Most of the real estate has been financed by Chinese banks, which have avoided writing down the loans. Eventually, they will be forced to, and that probably will have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

That ripple will almost certainly cross the Pacific and hit American banks that have come to rely on the Chinese for infusions of new capital.