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Domain: globaltimes.cn
Stories and comments across the archive that link to globaltimes.cn.
Stories · 8
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China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: China will introduce the world's first driverless trains to run at speeds of up to 217 mph (350 km/h) on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway line. The automatic operation bullet trains were trialled on a section of the Beijing-Shenyang line in 2018 by the China Railway Corporation (CRC) and the system passed all safety tests. "The bullet train can automatically depart, operate between stations and adjust the train's operation to meet its precise timetable after a single button is pressed," a researcher from China Academy of Railway Sciences told the Sciences and Technology Daily. A driver currently performs these operations on high-speed trains.
For the first 10 years of the high-speed ATO trains, an attendant will still be deployed on board to ensure nothing goes wrong. After that, the trains will be totally driverless. Experts say this should improve safety long-term. "An automatic driving system could greatly improve the safety of trains which run on high-speed railways, compared with human drivers who may have sudden health problems or disregard safety precautions during driving," Sun Zhang, a railway expert and professor at Shanghai Tongji University, told the Global Times. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Line is currently being constructed for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, "to enable easy travel between Beijing and the Winter Olympic Village in 50 minutes," the report says. -
Chinese Schools Are Using 'Smart Uniforms' To Track Their Students' Locations (theverge.com)
"It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge: Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the school, with an added dose of facial recognition software at the entrances to make sure that the right student is wearing the right outfit (so you can't just have your friend, say, wear an extra shirt while you go off and play hooky). Try to leave during school hours? An alarm will go off....
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016. -
Toutiao, One of China's Most Popular News Apps, is Discovering the Risks Involved in Giving People Exactly What They Want Online (nytimes.com)
The New York Times reports: One of the world's most valuable start-ups got that way by using artificial intelligence to satisfy Chinese internet users' voracious appetite for news and entertainment. Every day, its smartphone app feeds 120 million people personalized streams of buzzy news stories, videos of dogs frolicking in snow, GIFs of traffic mishaps and listicles such as "The World's Ugliest Celebrities." Now the company is discovering the risks involved, under China's censorship regime, in giving the people exactly what they want. The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source).
Last week, the Beijing bureau of China's top internet regulator accused Toutiao of "spreading pornographic and vulgar information" and "causing a negative impact on public opinion online," and ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours. In response, the app's parent company, Beijing Bytedance Technology, took down or temporarily suspended the accounts of more than 1,100 bloggers that it said had been publishing "low-quality content" on the app. It also replaced Toutiao's "Society" section with a new section called "New Era," which is heavy on state media coverage of government decisions. -
China Cuts Off Some VPNs
jaa101 writes The Register (UK) and the Global Times (China) report that foreign VPN services are unavailable in China. A quote sourced to "one of the founders of an overseas website which monitors the Internet in China" claimed 'The Great Firewall is blocking the VPN on the protocol level. It means that the firewall does not need to identify each VPN provider and block its IP addresses. Rather, it can spot VPN traffic during transit and block it.' An upgrade of the Great Firewall of China is blamed and China appears to be backing the need for the move to maintain cyberspace sovereignty. -
Gmail Access Starts To Come Back In China, State-Run Paper Blames Google
An anonymous reader writes Basic access to Gmail is starting to come back online in China on Tuesday after going down on Friday. The state-run Global Times China did not explain what caused the four-day outage, despite the fact that the government clearly implemented the block, and instead pointed to Google's unwillingness to obey Chinese law. All of Google's products have been severely disrupted in China since June. While users in Chinaare not able to access Gmail via the website, email protocols such as IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 had been accessible. The Great Firewall of China started blocking the IP addresses used by Gmail for these protocols, leaving users in China with no way of sending or receiving emails. -
China Praises UK Internet Censorship Plan
mormop writes "The Chinese government has praised UK Prime Minister David Cameron's plan for censoring social networking sites at times when the government feels threatened, believing it legitimizes China own behavior. Quoting Chinese state media website Global Times: 'Britain's new attitude will help appease the quarrels between East and West over the future management of the Internet. As for China, advocates of an unlimited development of the Internet should think twice about their original ideas.'" -
China's High-Speed Trains Coming Off the Rails
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that China's expanding network of ultramodern high-speed trains is coming under growing scrutiny over costs and because of concerns that builders ignored safety standards in the quest to build faster trains in record time as new leadership at the Railways Ministry announced that to enhance safety, the top speed of all trains was being decreased from about 218 mph to 186. Without elaborating, the ministry called the safety situation 'severe' and said it was launching safety checks along the entire network of tracks. Meanwhile China's Finance Ministry announced that the Railways Ministry continues to lose money as the ministry's debt stands at $276 billion, almost all borrowed from Chinese banks. 'In China, we will have a debt crisis — a high-speed rail debt crisis,' says Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University and longtime critic of high-speed rail who worries that the cost of the project might have created a hidden debt bomb that threatens China's banking system. 'I think it is more serious than your subprime mortgage crisis. You can always leave a house or use it. The rail system is there. It's a burden. You must operate the rail system, and when you operate it, the cost is very high.'" -
Teen Killed At Chinese Internet Addiction Camp
eldavojohn writes "Sixteen-year-old Deng Senshan was tragically beaten to death by three of his instructors in an internet addiction camp in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China. Reportedly it was for not being able to run fast enough. An article in the Wall Street Journal says that, 'China's netizens have played a key role in drawing nationwide attention to recent cases of deaths in prisons and detention centers, so it should be no surprise that they are up in arms over the fate of one of their own. Many questioned the fairly new diagnosis of "Internet addiction" as a mental disorder.' You may recall electroshock treatment being banned from use on internet addicts in China. According to Xinhua, more than 100 juveniles remain in 'treatment' at the camp, which has stayed open. Perhaps for Senshan it would have been better to let him endure his cruel affliction instead of having his parents pay over $1,000 to have him beaten to death?"