China’s mega traffic snarl strands thousands of motorists for 9 days and counting.  If you thought commuting around LA is the worst in the world, think again.  In Beijing there are motorists who have been stranded along a highway for nine days. 

Imagine a large bottleneck caused by construction and increased traffic from excess cargo trucks making their way to a particular destination.  Add broken down vehicles and minor traffic accidents, and you got the situation in China. 

The scenario has a 62 mile long jam, which may not dissipate for days.  The congestion is expected to continue, as construction is still underway.

Motorists get to combat boredom with area merchants arriving on foot to take advantage of the situation and sell items at an inflated price.

So the next time you’re stuck in traffic for a couple of extra hours, remember it could be worse.  You could be in Beijing stuck on the highway for over a week!

The China oil spill may not be as large scale as the one in the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s still a big deal to those who are worried about its significance.  Workers are working tirelessly to repair a busted pipeline, while other efforts to contain the spill are going on at the same time.  It’s important to clean any oil from the water ASAP to minimize the environmental impact of such occurrences.

One worker drowned in crude during the week, and this is what the incident will be remembered by.  The scene of a human body covered in goo is far too much for some people to bear.

The oil covers an area of 165 square miles in the Yellow Sea, near China’s strategic oil reserves in the city of Dalian. Like the BP disaster, the leak was caused when a pipeline exploded. The cause of the explosion is still under investigation, and the leak has caused oil shipments throughout China to be delayed.

Similar to the Gulf, the seafood industries and tourist industries are going to take a big hit because of the incident.  Crude kills the creatures of the sea and makes it so that people cannot go swimming at the beach.

Something needs to be done to avoid these oil spills.  Ensuring that our environment is preserved is crucial to the continued sustainment of our planet.

An outage of on Thursday was technical and not caused by outside tampering, according to owner Google Inc.

“YouTube is up again following a technical issue which has now been resolved,” a Google representative said in a written statement. “We know how important YouTube is for people and apologize for any inconvenience the downtime may have caused.”

The outage on the popular video web site apparently lasted from about 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. (ET).  Internet users were reportedly able to access individual videos, but the main page had an error message.

A YouTube source said the outage was not the result of any kind of attack or related in any way to Google’s recent move to stop censoring results in China, according to a CNN report.  Since it came just a few days after Google’s announcement about the censoring, the outage prompted speculation on the Internet.

Google has officially ended censoring search results in China. Google has shut down its Chinese search site at Google.cn, and is redirecting its users to its Hong Kong, .hk. .hk includes a note in Chinese that reads ‘Welcome to Google China’s new home.’

Google explains, ” Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to .hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, especially designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from .hk. Due to increased load on our Hong Kong servers and the complicated nature of these changes, users  may see some slowdown in service or find some products temporarily inaccessible as we switch everything over.”

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from .hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created the new web page, which we will update regularly each  day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China. Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.”

Bai Ling from a Beautiful Life which opened in theaters October 2 and she has started in over 8 films this year.

Bai Ling means White Spirit in Chinese. Ling was born in Chengdu on October 10, 1970. She was raised by her grandmother.

At 21 Ling moved to New York City and studied at New York University’s Department of Film. She did not speak English when she arrived in NYC, but soon mastered it.  She made her American film debut as the villainous Myca in the movie The Crow. In 1999 she appeared in Wild Wild West and Anna and the King. She’s alson been seen in The Beautiful Country (2004), My Baby’s Daddy (2004), and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). Ling had a small role as a senator in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), but was cut during editing. She claimed that this was because of her posing for the June 2005 issue of Playboy magazine, but director George Lucas denied it. She also appeared in Man About Town (2005) with Ben Affleck.

For the only way to get the Bai Ling playboy pics, click here

The salient features of the economies of China and India provide sharp contrasts. Jing Ulrich, the chairman of JPMorgan’s China Equities, points out: “Private enterprise plays a greater role in India’s economy than China’s. China’s gross domestic product is about three times larger than India’s and its exports are eight times larger. China’s $US4.8 trillion in savings dwarfs India’s $US215 billion.

“China’s large savings pool provided the investment funds for the rapid build-up of its export-oriented infrastructure. But this has been a mixed blessing. The surplus of capital led to overcapacity and contributed to poor returns on investment. In contrast, Indian companies used their funds judiciously and enjoyed higher returns. A scarcity of savings also explains why India has focused in services, which are less capital intensive.”

Continue Reading

CNN is reporting that an ex Pentagon worker who supplied classified information to a New Orleans furniture salesman, whom he thought was, a Taiwanese aligned individual, but in reality a mainland China spy has been convicted of spying. The sentencing would be carried out later.

At the sentencing, 51 year old Gregg W. Bergersen of Alexandria apologized and said he never meant to hurt his country and he did it out of the sense that ends justified the means. All the time thinking that he was further strengthening the defence of American ally Taiwan.

Continue Reading

Businessweek came out with a list of Top 100 technology companies that showed the strongest growth and how, in its words, they are faring in a treacherous economic climate.

Of the top of my head I knew any such list would feature Apple, Google, IBM etc. But over all the list definitely managed to be a lot different.

America dominated overall in the list with 33 companies, 1/3 share of the whole. Besides the popular American companies there were some from Europe, a lot from Asia especially Taiwan. In fact way too many from Taiwan clearly showing how advanced and progressive the country is when it comes to trade in high tech.

A pleasant surprise was India which had 6 companies in the list. Only Taiwan had more than India. Which means Indian companies managed to beat other strong contenders like South Korea, Japan, China etc. Thats a big deal by any measure. Its a sample of things to come in future when Indian companies would dominate their counterparts in the world just like American and Taiwanese companies do now. In fact many of the developed countries had just one company in the list.

The Indian companies shown in the list were:

Continue Reading

Cyber warfare attacks emanating from China and hitting targets in US have been old news for some time now. Business Week and other reputable American magazines have covered this growing form of threat extensively and have written in detail about the type of attacks, social engineering techniques used, level of sophistication of these attacks etc. that have been coming from computers located in China.

If the latest reports from Times of India (TOI), a leading Indian daily but which consistently lowers its standard to cater to the lowest common denominator, are to be believed, it seems India also is hovering on the Chinese radar screen. Nothing surprising though.

NEW DELHI: China’s cyber warfare army is marching on, and India is suffering silently. Over the past one and a half years, officials said, China has mounted almost daily attacks on Indian computer networks, both government and private, showing its intent and capability. According to senior government officials, these attacks are not isolated incidents of something so generic or basic as “hacking” — they are far more sophisticated and complete — and there is a method behind the madness.

Looking at the definition the article author gave for BOT, it is quite apparent they are not really familiar with the term:

A BOT is a parasite program embedded in a network, which hijacks the network and makes other computers act according to its wishes, which, in turn, are controlled by “external” forces.

Even a cursory research on Wiki would have told them that Bot is generally referred to a hijacked computer. Botnet is a group of bots, i.e. a network of hijacked computers. The computers are compromised via installing worms or trojans on the computer.

Continue Reading

Many of you would have noticed the heavy chatter in the media about China and its atrocities in Tibet. With the oncoming games, people are the world are protesting about the excesses China has been committing.

Apparently, CNN too couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon when one of their hosts trashed China on its harsh policies.

This ruffled quite a few feathers. Besides the Chinese government coming out against CNN, a bunch of hackers planned to get back on CNN by launching a full scale cyber attack against the online presence of news giant.

Continue Reading