'South Park' creators issue mock apology over China censorship

BEIJING -- The creators of "South Park" have issued a mock apology to China after censors scrubbed their popular animation from the Chinese web.

The tongue-in-cheek statement, skewering Beijing's demands that western brands conform to its world view, came with officials apparently annoyed about an episode that crossed several of the Communist Party's red lines.

The episode -- called "Band in China" -- depicted forced labor at a Chinese prison, and parodied companies that cave in to censorship for commercial gain.

"I can't sell my soul like this," says one character, who was under pressure from Chinese censors to rewrite his music.

"It's not worth living in a world where China controls my country's art," he added.

The incident comes as the NBA and its Houston Rockets franchise are facing fierce criticism and financial punishment in China over a tweet supporting Hong Kong's democracy protesters.

Both the league and the team have scrambled to apologize over the tweet by Rockets' general manager Daryl Morey, as calls for a boycott gather steam in one of the NBA's most lucrative markets.

But the apologies have sparked derision in the United States, where critics said the league was sacrificing morals for money.

Writing on Twitter, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone offered spoof contrition over any offense they had caused in China with their satirical show.

"Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts," they wrote.

"We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all," the statement added, a reference to banned memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping with AA Milne's portly bear.

"Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn's sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?" the statement read.


On Tuesday, searches for "South Park" on China's Twitter-like social media platform Weibo and popular film review site Douban did not return any results.

And while information on South Park was still available on a few video streaming sites, episodes could not be played.

Parker and Stone's response to China stands in stark contrast to that of major Western brands who have quickly beaten a retreat when faced with potential losses in China's huge -- and fiercely nationalistic -- consumer market.

Companies ranging from airlines to fashion houses have issued fulsome apologies, often after being charged with "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people."

As well as any indication of support for protests in Hong Kong, common crimes include labelling Taiwan as a separate country -- China believes it is a renegade province -- or discussing Xinjiang, where rights groups say a million mostly Muslim minorities are being held in prison camps.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trade war, censors blow chill wind through China's giant tech scene

BEIJING -- Wang Miaoyi's small one-bedroom apartment, which doubles as her design studio, is overflowing with game magazines, figurines and boxes of sci-fi novels.

The 30-year old game developer is a child of the county's tech boom: she studied at one of China's top universities and her company hit it big with an award-winning game that was published on Nintendo's Switch console and the PC gaming platform Steam, with plans for roll-out on other game platforms.

Now her ambitions - and those of many others across China's giant tech industry - are facing a reckoning, with rising state control over the sector, tightening regulation and a biting trade war with the United States stymieing growth.

"(In 2015) doing a start-up was popular. So many young people set up small businesses, like developing games, and dreamed of making big money as well as being free," she said. "But they found out now it's really unrealistic."

Wang says she has had to abandon for now hopes of releasing the game on new platforms in China, closing the original studio that developed it and working instead on updates with a skeleton crew of freelancers. She has moved from the Beijing tech hub of Zhongguancun to the city's cheaper far-west outskirts to cut costs.

She is not alone. Reuters interviewed a dozen tech industry insiders, from gig economy workers to investors, who said that the boom days of easy returns looked to be over.

Until last year, China's tech industry had enjoyed years of breakneck growth. Firms including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd almost doubled in value in 2017 alone, making big-ticket investments as part of a multi-billion dollar expansion into cloud, offline retail and finance.

But now the market is feeling the pinch. Hiring numbers are down, company margins are thinner and tumbling technology stocks have wiped nearly half a trillion dollars this year from the value of China's top listed tech firms.

The biggest names in tech have flagged concerns, including Alibaba and Baidu Inc, who revised down their full-year sales forecasts in recent weeks on the weaker outlook.

"Investments into the tech space have definitely cooled down, measured by almost every metric: number of deals, deal size or fund raising," said Zhang Chenhao, Shanghai-based Managing Partner at technology-focused Prometheus Fund.

"I think this year is the first time over the last 30 years when greed yields to the fear."

HAND OF THE STATE

The technology sector is facing challenges on all sides.

A broader economic slowdown saw China's third quarter GDP slow to its weakest pace since the global financial crisis. The currency has slid against the dollar and domestic markets are down sharply.

Alongside a series of tit-for-tat trade tariffs, the United States has accused China of stealing technology, barring tech acquisitions by Chinese firms and blacklisting others.

At home, tech companies from social media to gaming and fintech have seen tightening regulation and a heavier hand from the ruling Communist Party.

Gaming and social media giant Tencent has seen its stock price dive by more than 25 percent this year amid a temporary ban on licences for games, its top revenue driver.

At the country's top internet forum in Wuzhen this week, officials signaled they would look to rein in the country's tech giants.

"They can be big but we should also be well-regulated," said Gao Xiang, vice minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Thursday.

China's regulators have already cracked down on everything from rude joke apps to livestream bloggers disrespecting national anthem - sending a chill through the free-wheeling and innovative online arena.

"The people who worry about technology is first older people, second government and third successful people, they hate it and worry about it," Alibaba's billionaire executive chairman Jack Ma said at an event in Shanghai last week.

"Normally businesses do innovation and governments talk innovation. In order to protect yesterday's interests... they will say please don't do it."

This year Alibaba has lowered its revenue forecast for the first time since listing in 2014.

Meanwhile, local ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing, backed by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp, has cut the subsidies it pays to drivers after being forced to shutter its car-pooling services under a plan agreed with regulators following criticism over the murders of two young female passengers in separate incidents.

"(In 2015) I bought my first vehicle because you could earn almost 800 yuan a day with the subsidies," says Huang Sun, who used to drive full-time for the company but now says he only takes rides when he is bored. "Now maybe you can't even earn 200 yuan if you drive all day."

HIRING FREEZE

The chill across the tech industry is reflected in hiring data.

According to statistics released by leading local job website Zhaopin.com, job demand in the IT and internet sector has dropped by 51 percent as of September compared with a year earlier.

Companies have slowed hiring in certain fields, including sales and software development, recruiters and human resources staff at Alibaba and Tencent said, asking not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to press.

Tencent did not respond to a request for comment. Alibaba had no immediate comment.

"In general, they are all reducing headcount, or they're not preparing a very big budget for headhunting," said Mocca Wang, who is the director of the IT industry unit at international recruitment firm Spring Professional, which works with companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.

Smaller start-ups, a key driver of growth in the sector, are also being squeezed by tighter access to credit.

"These companies can't get capital and can't invest," said Wang. "They're going bankrupt."

China's tech firms are, to be sure, still posting sales growth rates above overseas peers.

Tencent chief Pony Ma told state television in a recent interview that there was still "tremendous potential" in the market, though admitted "there are challenges of various kinds right now".

But the numbers suggest tougher times lie ahead - a worry for China's steeply-valued private tech start-ups and newly-listed firms such as smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp and Tencent-backed food deliver giant Meituan Dianping .

"Before the feeling was that anyone can get funding, that if you throw out words like blockchain, AI, big data and machine learning that would get you funding," said Benjamin Speyer, managing director at Hangzhou-based consultancy Serica.

"Now everyone is a bit more nervous about potentially making a mistake with their money."

Alibaba, whose China commerce sales growth dropped to its lowest rate since 2015 in the last quarter, said it would take less income from its platforms for the near future, effectively subsidizing merchants, in an effort to retain brands on its platform.

Competitor JD.com Inc, which posted a loss last quarter, is seeking to revive profits by outsourcing some of its 2.5 million square meters of warehouse space.

The country's upstart technology workforce are even more keenly aware of the slowdown.

Even as property and living costs continue to rise sharply in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, tech workers say salaries can't keep up.

Beijing-based Liu Wangwei works as a software engineer at one of the country's highest-valued start-ups and rents a two-bedroom apartment because his partially-disabled mother often stays with him.

He said his rent has risen by almost 50 percent since they moved to the area in 2014 and says he is considering moving to another of the company's offices in a smaller city where the government subsidises housing for technology workers.

"I always thought I could join the well-known tech companies and never worry about money," said Liu. "When I was in university our teachers gave us encouragement to be like (Steve) Jobs and Jack Ma. It's not the same as we were promised."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

10,000 Google staff set to police YouTube content: chief

LONDON - Google is to deploy a staff of 10,000 to hunt down extremist content on its YouTube platform following recent criticism, the video-sharing site's chief executive told Britain's Daily Telegraph Tuesday.

Susan Wojcicki admitted in the broadsheet that "bad actors" had used the website to "mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm."

British Prime Minister Theresa May has put pressure on internet giants to root out online radical material following a spate of terror attacks, while YouTube last week pulled 150,000 videos of children after lewd comments about them were posted by viewers.

Wojcicki claimed that her company had developed "computer-learning" technology to identify extremist videos, and that it could also be used to identify content that risked children's safety.

"We will continue the growth of our teams, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018."

Last week's move to take down suspect content came after a British newspaper reported that ads for big-name brands were displayed alongside videos of children or teens which, while innocent on their own, drew viewer comments that seemed paedophilic in nature.

Media reports indicate the situation made advertisers skittish, with some halting YouTube advertising.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

UK says WhatsApp lets pedophiles and gangsters operate

MANCHESTER - Britain said WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption communication services allowed pedophiles and organized crime groups to operate beyond the reach of the law and called on the messaging service to move faster to help governments catch offenders.

After 4 militant attacks in Britain that killed 36 people this year, senior ministers have stepped up demands over the past 6 months to make internet companies do more to suppress extremist content and allow access to encrypted communications.

The government says full-scale encryption has complicated the job of law enforcement both in thwarting extremist attacks and in investigating more commonplace crimes.


Internet companies say they want to help governments remove extremist or criminal material but also have to balance the demands of state security with civil liberties.

"Every day hundreds of millions of people use WhatsApp to communicate with each other – including to share sensitive personal information. Encryption helps to keep all those communications safe and secure," a WhatsApp spokeswoman said.

In the face of resistance from the industry, Prime Minister Theresa May - a former interior minister - proposed trying to regulate cyberspace after a deadly attack on London Bridge in June.

Such a sharp public reprimand for WhatsApp indicates frustration within the government.

"We also know that end-to-end encryption services like WhatsApp, are being used by paedophiles," Home Secretary Amber Rudd told party activists in the northern English city of Manchester.

"I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement," Rudd said. "We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency."

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and similar services let users communicate with pictures, video and text, using "end-to-end" encryption that can be read only with a key held on the user's device. Without access to the devices, security services cannot read the messages.

Rudd also called on technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to go further and faster to counter extremist material.

The industry argues that encryption is vital to protecting the wealth of personal information that electronic devices collect about individuals and for securing everything from banking and shopping to government records. They say they need to balance demands by law enforcement with privacy protections.

"Child exploitation has absolutely no place on our service -- which is why we work with law enforcement to identify these accounts and block them," the WhatsApp spokeswoman said.

Britain's MI5 security service has said it needs access to encrypted communications to foil attacks. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has pushed for full access to encrypted communications and devices, but Congress has so far refused.

The issues are hotly debated even among security officials. Jonathan Evans, who ran Britain’s MI5 spy service from 2007 until 2013, said that while encryption did make attacks harder to stop, it also helped to prevent criminals and even foreign governments from hacking private data.

Security Minister Ben Wallace, who oversees British counter-terrorism and communications data legislation, said he was disturbed to see that end-to-end encryption services prevented security services from tracking criminal messaging.

"We see on a daily basis that this end-to-end encryption protects pedophiles, it protects organised crime too, but it is very disturbing in my job when I know that we know 2 pedophiles are talking and we think they are doing something about snatching a child but we don't know and we can't get into these communications," Wallace said.

"There are other ways I can't talk about which we think they can help us more without necessarily entering into end-to-end encryption. So we think they can do more."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Asia's Silicon Valley redefines 'Made in China' phones for the world

SHENZHEN, China - A motley of smartphone logos light up an entire street lined with electronics shops one balmy afternoon, another day in Asia's Silicon Valley, which continues to thrive notwithstanding what the West sees as heavy state controls on the internet.

In the last three decades, this port city was transformed from farmlands to a major research and manufacturing hub for consumer electronics, hosting regional hubs of Chinese giants Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent.


At Huawei's service center in the downtown area, there's a steady stream of clients who cling to the promise of swift one-hour service. People from all over the mainland come to Shenzhen to score bargains, with factories located no more than an hour's drive away.

"We are working hard in this town," Clement Wong, director of product marketing at Huawei consumer business group, told reporters. "We call Shenzhen China's Silicon Valley."

Huawei maintains a two-square kilometer campus here, where a man-made lake is home to black swans that its founder, Ren Zhengfei, imported from New Zealand to remind employees of the need to innovate. 

Some buildings also have design inspiration from the Tang Dynasty, in a nod to the company's goal to lead the market. Huawei overtook Apple for the first time in June and July to become the world's second LARGEST-SELLING smartphone brand next only to Samsung, according to industry tracker Counterpoint. 

Huawei is leading the barrage of Chinese-made phones that offer features comparable to Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy, but at considerably lower price points, and at the same time, redefining perceptions on Chinese-made electronics.

Buildings and sidestreets in Futian district house rows upon rows of unofficial Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi stores. Startup One Plus, which built its brand around word of mouth on the web, is also headquartered in this city.

Shenzhen is also a showcase of life inside the "Great Firewall of China." Anything from convenience store purchases to bike rentals can be paid for using a built-in electronic wallet on WeChat, a messaging app that has developed into a social media and e-commerce suite, where Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are unavailable. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

India won’t censor social media: minister

MUMBAI — India does not intend to censor online social networks such as Facebook, a minister said Tuesday, but he demanded that they obey the same rules governing the press and other media.

“I want to say once and for all, without any obfuscation, no government in India will ever censor social media,” Telecoms Minister Kapil Sibal said at an IT summit in Mumbai.
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“I never wanted to censor social media and no government wants to do so. But like the print and electronic media, they have to obey the laws of the country,” Sibal told the gathering.

Sibal held a number of meetings with leading Internet companies late last year in which he asked about the possibility of pre-screening content posted online by users.

He reportedly showed executives examples of obscene images found on the Internet that risked offending Muslims or defaming politicians, including the boss of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi.

Since then, 19 Internet firms including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have been targeted in criminal and civil cases lodged in lower New Delhi courts, holding them responsible for content posted by users of their platforms.

The Indian government has given its sanction for the firms to be tried for serious crimes such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord, offences that could land company directors in prison.

Google and Facebook said earlier this month that they had removed the allegedly offensive content used as evidence in the court cases.

The groups have appealed to the Delhi High Court asking for the cases against them to be quashed on the basis that they cannot be held responsible for the actions of their clients.

The comments of a judge hearing the case raised further fears that freedom of expression online could be restricted.

“You must have a stringent check. Otherwise, like in China, we may pass orders banning all such websites,” the judge said during a hearing in January.


source: interaksyon.com