Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 1324

South China Sea: China Is Building on the Paracels As Well

As Vietnam’s Communist Party Chief Nguyen Phu Trong met with China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week, China’s government news service Xinhua extolled a “deep-rooted partnership” between the two nations. But 400 kilometers off Vietnam’s coast, in the Paracel Islands, China was rapidly consolidating its hold on islands that both countries vehemently claim as their own. Read more

Why Did China Just Release 5 Feminists?

After an international outcry, the five women are free on bail. One of the women’s lawyers, Liang Xiaojun, told the New York Times that prosecutors had decided not to press charges – at least not immediately. The women are still under investigation and, in the meantime, will remain under police monitoring. However, experts believe it’s unlikely they will be formally charged at this point. Read

The Chinese Internet Hates Hillary Clinton Even More than Republicans Do

On the afternoon of April 12, Hillary Clinton announced her long-expected decision to run for president in 2016. Within hours, Chinese news sites shared the announcement on Weibo, China’s most popular micro-blogging platform, provoking thousands of comments from Chinese netizens. Most of the popular comments were nasty. Read more

Meet the team who just exposed China's insanely powerful hacking tool

Bill Marczak, the lead researcher at Citizen Lab, explained to Business Insider that as soon as they saw the strange traffic patterns causing the DDoS attacks, they thought, “Oh, this was interesting.” Read more

You Can Barely Tell That These Are Photos Of Chinese Cities, Because They're Just Photos Of Smog

Two years after the Chinese government launched a $277 billion plan to fight smog, despite some small steps of progress, air pollution is still so bad that the mayor of Beijing recently called the city unlivable. For a new photo series, photographer Benedikt Partenheimer spent five months traveling around China documenting some of the country's dirtiest cities. Read more

China’s Island-Building Is Ruining Coral Reefs, Philippines Says

China's island-building activities have destroyed about 300 acres of coral reefs and are causing “irreversible and widespread damage to the biodiversity and ecological balance” of the South China Sea, a spokesman for the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. Read more

Chinese Journalist to Receive Verdict Friday on Charges of Revealing State Secrets

Gao Yu, a veteran Chinese journalist tried nearly five months ago on charges of revealing state secrets, will receive a verdict this week after the court twice postponed giving a judgment, one of her defense lawyers said on Monday. Read more

China Releases 5 Women’s Rights Activists Detained for Weeks

Police officers on Monday evening released five female activists who were detained early last month in China after trying to start a campaign against sexual harassment on public transportation, two lawyers representing the women said. Read more

China’s Great Cannon - The Facts

China's deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of “bystander” systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack.  Read more

Obama: China 'using muscle' to dominate in South China Sea

The US president's comments came amid heightened focus on Beijing's construction of artificial islands in disputed areas of the sea. On Thursday a US think tank released images showing land reclamation work on a reef claimed by the Philippines. Read more