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Face tracking is not the biggest threat. The biggest erosion of personal freedom in China is this one: WeChat Pay.

Why? Before the advent of WeChat and Alipay, China was mostly a cash based society, so the government had little knowledge of your payment transactions. Which is why China has to rely on state-owned enterprises for revenues, since there were no effective way to collect taxes from ordinary people and 95% of Chinese do not file a tax report.

Now, that's all changed: everything is paid via WeChat and Alipay, even pant handlers. So every transaction can be tracked, and taxed.

Of course, in the U.S., people have been on checks and credit cards for who knows how many decades. China is catching up fast on that front.

I'm on my 3rd chip card in China and they are complete shit. What stupid motherfucking idiot decided to put electrical contacts on a plastic card? Eventually, the card won't read properly, requiring yet another new card. I now only use my card at the ATM and just use WeChat Pay.

The interesting part to me, if you browse to qq.com you'll see a logo that was clearly ripped off from the Google Chrome logo.

My interpretation is that the Chinese government is mocking Google's attempts to scorn them - hence, they are a bunch of whiners - QQ.

The picture used in the AP news are traffic jam from an unrelated area. I call this good journalism. Following are some news from the real traffic jam, so you can get the real picture.
A, B, C, D, E, F, G

Blah, so it's mainly a truck jam?

We have comparable truck jams which last for weeks here almost every year lately.

Here being Finland, jams being trucks trying to get through Russian border.

It's not that every vehicle has been stuck in there for nine days: it's that the traffic has been crawling for nine days. Usually a traffic jam clears out at a later hour, but volume is too high even at night.

Sorry, that does not appear to be true.
(Scroll down to the guys sitting in a circle in the middle of the road playing cards. That is not "crawling" that is "shut off your engine and sit for days".)

The picture used in the AP news are traffic jam from an unrelated area. I call this good journalism. Following are some news from the real traffic jam, so you can get the real picture. A, B, C, D, E, F, G

Youtube isn't globally popular:
http://www.youku.com/

Facebook isn't globally popular:
http://www.zhanzuo.com/

MSN messenger isn't globally popular:
http://www.qq.com/

And in fact there is a cloned super-sanitized version of every web service that exists, so the majority of people just don't notice or even care.

This really isn't that hard.

QQ is indeed an instant messaging service like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo. Just like those sites, each user is given a "homepage" where account owners can post pictures, leave messages, ect.

QQ isn't nearly as bad as depicted on the sometimes untrustworthy Wikipedia. Don't like the built in ADs? Use Tencent Massager, which offers less features but doesn't display an AD window (think AIM)

Tencent Messanger 2008 is what I'm using currently. It actually has a smaller memory footprint that any of the "big 3".

You might also check out the new QQ 2009 Beta, which uses the same streamlined interface. They also, to my dismay, offer a Mac and Linux client as well.

This really isn't that hard.

QQ is indeed an instant messaging service like AIM, MSN, or Yahoo. Just like those sites, each user is given a "homepage" where account owners can post pictures, leave messages, ect.

QQ isn't nearly as bad as depicted on the sometimes untrustworthy Wikipedia. Don't like the built in ADs? Use Tencent Massager, which offers less features but doesn't display an AD window (think AIM)

Tencent Messanger 2008 is what I'm using currently. It actually has a smaller memory footprint that any of the "big 3".

You might also check out the new QQ 2009 Beta, which uses the same streamlined interface. They also, to my dismay, offer a Mac and Linux client as well.

I think you are mistaken here.

The sites in question are not qq.com they are subdomains of .qzone.qq.com
(BTW http://qzone.qq.com/ by itself does not use QZHTTP 2.3 web server software it uses Apache)
like
http://182273490.qzone.qq.com/
Here is the netcraft report for that site:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=182273490.qzone.qq.com

These sites appear to be running on Linux and state they are running QZHTTP-2.3 web server software.

Yes you can edit the banner but often netcraft digs further into it then this (response times, packet information, etc) and doesn't blindly use the banner value.

It is likely to be using a modified version of Apache like Google do with their GWS (Google Web Server) software.

And thus given a separate version of web server software in its own right. So I suspect there has to be a significant changes to the normal operation/code of Apache (or whatever they have modded). It could be a whole new set of web server software but likely a significantly modified version.

Hope it helps

I think you are mistaken here.

The sites in question are not qq.com they are subdomains of .qzone.qq.com
(BTW http://qzone.qq.com/ by itself does not use QZHTTP 2.3 web server software it uses Apache)
like
http://182273490.qzone.qq.com/
Here is the netcraft report for that site:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=182273490.qzone.qq.com

These sites appear to be running on Linux and state they are running QZHTTP-2.3 web server software.

Yes you can edit the banner but often netcraft digs further into it then this (response times, packet information, etc) and doesn't blindly use the banner value.

It is likely to be using a modified version of Apache like Google do with their GWS (Google Web Server) software.

And thus given a separate version of web server software in its own right. So I suspect there has to be a significant changes to the normal operation/code of Apache (or whatever they have modded). It could be a whole new set of web server software but likely a significantly modified version.

Hope it helps

It's launched successfully.

Check this video out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoKgvqhPHnw

or a longer version

http://news.qq.com/a/20080925/003662.htm

1110 rounds of rain-inducing substance fired on Aug-8. It contains silver iodide to accelerate rain formation, the rain cloud will lose much of its water content before it was blown to the bird's nest. So the clear sky part was also fake. It should have been raining that night.

http://2008.qq.com/a/20080811/002571.htm

A Chinese website reported over the weekend that the opening swoop over Beijing was a computer simulation:

http://cd.qq.com/a/20080809/000059.htm

It says the computer simulation took over a year to make, and that only the final set of footprints was real. The simulation was created by a Beijing firm, Crystal Digital.

http://www.crystalcg.com/

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I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?

In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.

Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.

So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.

China here (Beijing). A few years ago the market was dominated by a Chinese program called QQ, but these days MSN has a bigger share. QQ still advertise heavily, but they're fighting a losing battle.

QQ is a product produced by Tencent, Inc, located in Shenzhen, China. The south african website to which the parent linked seems to be some third party attempt to get people in south africa to use QQ's english client. Here's the real download website http://im.qq.com/ and an english about page for those who don't read chinese. http://www.tencent.com/about/about_e.shtml