China

China has captured the No. 1 ranking as the country with the greatest number of Internet users, according to a Reuters report.

The country clocked in with 221 million Internet users in February, surpassing the U.S. for the top billing, according to Reuters, which cites the Xinhua news agency's reporting of figures from the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center.

However, the Chinese government's figures do have some competition.

Market researcher ComScore told CNET News.com on Thursday that the U.S. maintains a slight lead over China, according to its March figures. The number of U.… Read more

Once again, criminal hackers are targeting a worldwide event to deposit their malicious software on victims' PCs, according to one security vendor.

Within the last six months, MessageLabs has found at least 13 new Trojan horse programs associated with e-mails bearing subjects such as "The Beijing 2008 Torch Relay" and "National Olympic Committee and Ticket Sales Agents."

The problem is, according to a MessageLabs representative, that the hackers' e-mail messages employ an embedded Microsoft Office database file within the zipped attachment. Microsoft said in a recent security advisory that customers not running Windows Vista or Windows … Read more

Two toolkits designed to help ordinary people participate in denial-of-service attacks against Western media have surfaced on the Internet, according to one researcher.

In a blog Tuesday, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks says one of the toolkits is easier to use than the other though both are designed for "the masses." This isn't new, and toolkits such as these have been created for other political protests in the past.

AntiCNN.exe was the first of the two tools found on the Internet. Nazario reports that it opens a flood of HTTP connections and attempts to hurt the … Read more

I recorded W3C President Tim Berners-Lee's press conference at this week's WWW2008 conference in Beijing.

I will write about the contents later. Click here for the audio and then click on the olive-colored play button.

Please forgive the mediocre sound quality; I record for my notes, and not primarily for broadcast. I came in a few seconds late as Berners-Lee was being introduced in alternating Chinese and English. The remainder of the press conference, including questions and answers, is in English.

Other posts from WWW2008 are here, and I'm Twittering here.

Update: I was having a glitch … Read more

William Chang, chief scientist leading Chinese search engine Baidu, said it's natural for Chinese to use Baidupedia (Baidu Baike) rather than the foreign Wikipedia.

"There's, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia, a service based 'out there,'" Chang said at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing on Tuesday. "It's very natural for China to make its own products."

I agree that there's not always a reason for people to use global services, especially when what they deal with is primarily domestic. But with the wiki world, I think the value of … Read more

I'm now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.

The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He's talking about "cloud computing," the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.

So far, he's been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google's … Read more

Although CNN escaped a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack planned for Saturday, the site has experienced either random outages or inflated response times over the last 72 hours, according to one Internet research company.

Netcraft reported Tuesday that during a three-hour period on Sunday morning, the CNN.com site was unavailable from its listening post in Pennsylvania. And on Monday, the site experienced inflated response times. CNN.com did suffer a minor DDoS last Thursday, but recovered by limiting access from certain geographic areas, mainly Asia.

Also on Tuesday, The Dark Visitor, a site that tracks Chinese hackers, said a downloadable … Read more

Just read the first few sentences of this article from Xinhua, and tell me it doesn't sound like a press release.

Nokia China's new headquarters were completed on the 21st in Yizhuang, Beijing, marking the birth of the world's first mobile phone industry chain fully integrating research and development, management and production, as well as sales, according to Xinhua Net.

Located in Beijing's Yizhuang Economic and Technological Development Zone, Nokia's new headquarters building covers 7 million square meters, and is Nokia's largest regional headquarters in the world. Apart from being the headquarters for the … Read more

China is the Saudi Arabia of waste heat, according to Roger Ballentine, president of Green Strategies.

The country's power plants aren't very efficient and, unlike Denmark or Japan, China hasn't invested a lot in technologies that can capture the heat and harness it to produce electricity. That means there's a vast amount of potential energy being squandered--or waiting to be tapped by an entrepreneur or two.

China isn't alone. Over half of the electricity produced in the U.S., for instance, never actually gets used for a productive purpose. A lot of it gets converted … Read more