China

As the mobile phone industry churns out new handsets every day, the opportunities to distance a product from the massive pack can seem infinitesimal. For that reason Philips deserves some credit for trying some new tricks on the Chinese market.

Its latest offering, the M600, attempts to capitalize on the continuing evolution toward music devices with a design that looks almost more like a media player than a phone. Not only does it have a giant play button just above the keypad, according to SlashPhone, but it also features MP3 hotkeys, 40 hours of playback, and the same "SRS … Read more

A trio of mobile companies including two global giants will collaborate to find more ways to profit from and develop mobile phone-based internet use, the Financial Times reported.

Vodafone, the biggest-earning mobile company, China Mobile, the company with the largest user base, and Softbank, the third-place Japanese carrier, form the coalition.

FT writes, "The collaboration underlines how mobile operators are keen to stop internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo dominating the provision of potentially lucrative services on the wireless internet."

Indeed, Google is working on ever more wireless applications. At WWW2008 in Beijing on Wednesday, Google'… Read more

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