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Imagethief was interested to see that the ARJ-21, the Chinese regional commercial jet that is currently in development, had its maiden flight on Friday. China has big ambitions to grow its capabilities in commercial aviation, and there is much riding on the ARJ program. So I was not surprised at all to see that the pilots were complementary after ...

If you're interested in the specifics of how online censorship works --and doesn't work-- in China, especially with regard to blogging, check out Rebecca MacKinnon's post and presentation on her recent research into the topic. She and her students posted a range of potentially sensitive content onto a number of Chinese blog service providers and ...

Long time readers will remember that Imagethief started a blog for CNET on the China technology scene called ''Little Red Blog'' back in 2006, and ran it for about a year. My archived posts can be found under the ''CNET Asia'' tag in my tag cloud, at right. When I ran short of time I handed the blog over to the excellent Rick Martin, who improved ...

This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember ...

Imagethief was not in the least surprised to hear that Chinese netizens were outraged that movie actress Gong Li has taken Singapore citizenship. But then, Imagethief is not in the least surprised by anything that outrages Chinese netizens. Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in ''Memoirs of Geisha'', alongside ...

So report immediately to the Beijing Military General Hospital, net fiends. Or check yourself against this Xinhua article, with details of China's official diagnostic definition of that scourge of spotty teenagers (and, ahem, adult nerds), Internet addiction:BEIJING, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic ...

I've been fascinated by the rise of the online video sharing websites in China. Unlike the US, where video sharing sites have jammed a stick into the side of traditional broadcast media, in China they have jammed sticks into the sides of both traditional broadcast media and the government. This is not surprising since broadcast media and the ...

If you're a regular reader of China blogs you will have caught some mention of IBM's new virtual Forbidden City. If not, a good place to start is Ogilvy China's Digital Watch, where, in a post titled ''Forbidden City without the damn crowds!'' Kaiser comments:Over the weekend I played around a bit with “Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time,” the ...

Predictably for Skype, the mainstream coverage of the TOM.com keyword trapping scandal has grown, with associated reputation damage for the former naive idealists at Skype and their parent, E-Bay. (Browse examples at ZDNet, Reuters, The Register, GigaOM, Financial Times, the BBC, AFP, and god knows where else.) Among the mainstream coverage so ...

If you don't know the story, you can read up on the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (and again in the Journal here, with more focus on the backlash for Skype). In a nutshell, the story is that the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which focuses on Internet, free-speech and censorship issues, released evidence that TOM-Skype, the joint ...