Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

There’s an Apple Store coming to Beijing. The three-story building is being designed by US architect Ben Wood, who runs an architecture firm called Studio Shanghai:

Beijing’s second official Apple store will be built on Qianmen Street, just blocks away from Tianamen Square. It will open this fall.

Using Bittorrent (BT) in China is quite a bit more difficult than in the US. Popular trackers, such as the ubiquitous PirateBay are blocked. Torrent sites are blocked. Torrent software such as uTorrent does not appear to discriminate against geographically distant peers.

Currently in Shanghai, I’m downloading a torrent with 500 seeds and another 500 peers on uTorrent. Most of these came from decentralized systems (DHT, Peer Exchange) and not from a tracker:

Name			Seeds	Peers	Downloaded
[DHT]			198	170	0
[Peer Exchange]		523	587	0
mightynova (timed out)	6	7	30

The speed is also nothing to write home about, at 10 KB/s, about 120x slower than my 1.1MB/s I get on Verizon FIOS back in NYC:

According to Speakeasy’s speed test, the connection here gets 123 KB/s down, so it’s not that I’m hitting the cap, yet! If you’ve got hints, let me know.

Qǐngwèn is an application for iPod Touch and iPhones which allows quick and easy Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary lookups. Take a look at Karan Misra’s site which has more information about the free application. Here’s some screenshots of my own:

The thing I like most is that you can type a word, in either English, Chinese, or pinyin, and get back the right translations and context that word can be used in. Once you’ve translated from English to Chinese, you can also use the search features to find other words containing said character. It’s a great application!

Note that Qingwen uses a modified version of CC-CEDICT as its dictionary.

An interesting article, How China’s ‘50 Cent Army’ Could Wreck Web 2.0, describes how the Chinese Communist Party has enlisted 300,000 to post pro-China propaganda, paying them $.50 RMB for every post they make:

The difference between China’s 50 Cent Army and astroturfing is fourfold. First, is scale. A typical astroturfing campaign might involve a few or maybe a dozen people at most. Or, in the case of a mass mailing, it could involve thousands of people who voice or submit their opinions only once or twice. China’s approach involves thousands of times more people.

The second difference is duration. China’s 50 Cent Army works every day, all year, year after year. Astroturfing efforts, on the other hand, are one-off projects designed to achieve specific, limited goals. The reason is that a free press and the machinations of multi-party democracy quickly expose astroturfing projects and turn public opinion against their agendas. Because the Chinese government is accountable to neither the public nor the press, it can sustain Internet mass-propaganda efforts indefinitely.

It’s an interesting article, and it’s interesting to see China taking advantage of the social web to spread their message.

If you wanted to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremony online, you might have had some problems so far. Friday, for us in the US, NBC’s site wasn’t working well (they hadn’t even posted the opening ceremony cuts). But now, there are a number of options available to you:

NBC’s Official Olympics Site

Direct link to their 52m ‘Opening Ceremony’ recap

The video is excellent quality, far better than Youtube, sound quality good. Unfortunately, it requires an installation of Microsoft’s Silverlight flash competitor, and has brief 20-30s advertisements before clips. You also can’t make the video full screen. However, if you live in the US, and don’t mind just watching the Olympics, the NBC site has a good selection of live video feeds as well as packaged and cut primetime recaps.

Mininova Bittorrent Search

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony Beijing 2008 PROPER 720p HDTV x264-PiX [eztv]

Using torrents to download the parts of the Olympic games you’re interested in guarantees a permanent archive, full screen high quality video, but perhaps an inferior selection of topics. Its legal status and availability differ around the world. Still, it’s a powerful online option.

Google’s Youtube Beijing 2008 Channel

Beijing 2008 Channel

If you don’t live in the US YouTube might an option for you. Google is going to syndicate at least three hours of Olympics a day on their special channel. But, the quality is crappy, and if you live in the US, you’ll just see “This channel is not available in your country.”

I also recommend you check out the Boston Globe’s 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony Big Picture Photos and Wired’s Watch the Olympics Online Wiki for more 2008 Beijing Olympics Online!