Information/Technology - 46. page

Fang Kecheng, a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and former news reporter for Southern Weekend (a relatively liberal media in Guangzhou), published an article in which he stated that Baidu is no longer a search engine for the public but rather a media promoting its own contents.

According to an experiment that Fang conducted, the first page of Baidu’s search results lists links to Bai Jiahao, Baidu’s own content platform. For example, when searching “British Brexit,” there were seven results on the first page. The first one was Baidu Baike (Encyclopedia), the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh were all Bai Jiahao articles. Searching “U.S. government shutdown,” half of the 8 links on the first page, including the first and second, were Bai Jiahao links. In a search for “Trump,” the links on the first page were: Baidu Baike, Baidu Tieba (Forum), Bai Jiahao, Bai Jiahao, Bai Jiahao, Bai Jiahao, Sina, Bai Jiahao, and Baidu Baike.

The quality of Bai Jiahao’s articles is questionable. For example, it published an article claiming that the CIA admitted that Bin Laden was not related to the “9-11” attack and apologized to his family. That article had been read 400,000 times.

Fang gave his analysis on why Baidu has become so “off the mark”:

One, China’s Internet has fierce competition and those mega companies, such as WeChat, Microblog, and Taobao, do not let Baidu search their contents, so, Baidu’s results are narrow.

Two, Baidu does not want to be a search engine anymore. It just wants to be a marketing platform, so it converts all people using its searches into traffic intended for its own site and then it will make money.

Fang argued that it is not a sustainable business model. Once people discover that they can’t find what they need, they will use it less and less. Baidu’s strategy was equivalent to spending all its money before doomsday.

Baidu’s Counter and Fang’s Rebuttal

Baidu responded to the article and claimed that contents from Bai Jiahao represent less than 10 percent of Baidu’s total search results.

Fang rebutted, “It is meaningless to use the total research results as a measure (and also, aren’t Bai Jiahao’s contents at 10 percent already too big a share of the total result)? People normally just look at the first and second page. It would be more meaningful if Baidu released the percentage data on the first page.”

Sources:

1. Aboluo, January 24, 2019
https://www.aboluowang.com/2019/0124/1236625.html
2. Kejilie.com
http://www.kejilie.com/qq/article/imaYrm.html

Chinese authorities are testing a new application that allows mobile phone users to check the social credit of people nearby. This is China’s latest effort to use technology to implement a social credit system for its 1.4 billion citizens. The beta version of the app, known as the “Deadbeat Map” released on China’s most popular mobile platform WeChat, was tested in Hebei Province last week. The user can use the program to detect, within 500 meters of range, those who do not pay their debts.

With a click on a person’s icon on the map, the app will display that person’s personal information, including name, part of the address, and the offense.

Beijing Youth Daily, an official newspaper in Beijing, has praised this practice. The author said that the innovative measures of using technology to expose the deadbeats accurately are worthy of praise. The article said that, although the court arbitration dealt with those found untrustworthy, they had many evasive methods to escape from the court. The social platform can subject them to ethical pressure from acquaintances.

Critics are concerned that citizens’ privacy is violated. Delia Lin, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, told the Daily Telegraph that those unable to pay their debts due to poverty will find themselves “subjected to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming.”

WeChat users can also report the untrustworthy people through this small program. If they find leads about the “deadbeat’s” property, they can report it to the app’s editor, and the information will be submitted to the back-end administrator and then to the court enforcement authorities.

China began to develop a social credit system in 2011, giving credit scores to individuals and companies. The scores are used to determine whether someone can use specific services such as a loan application or transportation services.

The New York based Human Rights Watch, however, sees this as part of a massive surveillance plan of the Chinese government. The practice of using technology to collect public information, such as the widespread use of facial recognition technology and the installation of tracking chips in student uniforms has also drawn public criticism.

Source: BBC Chinese, January 25, 2019
https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-47004328

According to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the central Internet regulator and censorship agency of China, between January 3 and January 23, the Special Action of Internet Ecological Control cleaned a total of more than 7.09 million pieces of harmful information, closed 308,000 illegal accounts, suspended 733 websites, and removed 9,382 mobile applications.

Since 2016, the Chinese authorities have stepped up control of the Internet. In November 2018, in response to a series of “chaotic problems” in self-media accounts, CAC closed more than 9,800 accounts that were “transmitting politically harmful information, maliciously tampering with the history of the party and history of the country, impairing the nation’s image, circulating rumors, and spreading false information”.

Source: Voice of America, January 23, 2019
https://www.voachinese.com/a/china-internet-control-20190123/4755206.html

The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese national newspaper, reported that a Chinese group is suspected in the 2016 hacking of the computer system used by Keidanren, or the Japan Business Federation. Keidanren, a major Japanese business organization, consists of 1,281 companies, 129 industrial associations, and 47 regional economic organizations.

“The types of computer viruses used in the Keidanren attack as well as the external computer addresses to which information was secretly transmitted were very similar to those that turned up in a separate report” released in April 2017, compiled by the British defense company BAE Systems, the major consulting firm PwC, as well as the British National Cyber Security Center.

The Chinese hacking group is identified as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 10.

According to internal documents obtained by The Asahi Shimbun, in 2014, a Keidanren employee opened an email that had been sent to him with a virus. Consequently, malicious programs existed in communication systems and servers for two years, before an official announcement was made in November 2016 about the network break-in. The hackers could have read the information exchanged between Keidanren and the Japanese government, and then sent the information to overseas computers.

Keidanren’s computer system contained communications with government officials as well as a number of policy proposals.

While Tokyo is investigating this matter, in December, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked China to take measures against “APT 10.” China denied the allegation.

Source: Sputnik News, January 13, 3019
http://sputniknews.cn/china/201901131027343093/

China uses the Great Firewall to shield (its Netizens) from foreign websites. As a result, a large population of Chinese people use circumvention technologies to connect to the rest of the world. One of them is the Virtual Private Network (VPN), which extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network.

On January 4, a resident in Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, was charged with “creating and using illegal channels to connect to the  international network without authorization” and was fined 1,000 Yuan (US$ 148). A police “Administrative Penalty Decision” was spread online, showing that during the period from August to December 2018, the offender installed the Lantern Pro application on his mobile phone, connected to the broadband network at home to circumvent the Internet blockade, and logged on 487 times in the week before the punishment. Around the same time, another netizen in Chongqing received a notice form local police for the same charge.

Jyh An Lee, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said this is the not first case of punishment. Since 2017, there have been a number of such stories.

According to Article 6 of the Interim Provisions on the Administration of International Network Management of the Computer Information Network of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as the “Interim Provisions”), “To carry out international networking of computer information, the output and input channels that the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications provides in its public telecommunication network shall be used. No unit or individual may establish or use other channels for international networking. The public security organ may give a warning to those who violate this regulation and impose a fine of up to 15,000 yuan.

On January 22, 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice and decided to inspect the network infrastructure, network address, and broadband access network resources from the same day to March 31, 2018.

On July 1, 2017, GreenVPN, a brand name VPN service provider with a large number of users, stopped service. Later, more VPN service providers terminated their operations at the request of the regulatory authorities, including Tianhang VPN and Cloud Wall VPN. In 2017, Apple took down 674 VPN applications in the China Store app using the excuse that it was breaking Chinese law.

Lee said that the only legal channel to connect to overseas servers is through the three major telecom operators (China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom). Other forms of connection are illegal channels according to the “Interim Regulations.”

Lee added that the Chinese authorities used to technically block IP and it has now begun to enforce it legally.

According to conservative estimates, there are currently 20 to 30 million Chinese Internet users using VPN. Lee said that, for such a large population, the measures that the authorities take are selectively enforcement and depend upon the behavior’s impact on the government and the extent to which the government feels sensitive.

Source: BBC Chinese, January 10, 2019
https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-46823319