Tragic, yes, as your site is going to lose out to competitors (e.g. Youtube) that DO play on those other devices that you may not care about, and that thus get more mind share and market share with it.
The true tragic of the Internet is that for many services there is place for only one of each. The biggest. There is no place for a second eBay because they are smaller, offering both less choice for buyers and less customers for sellers. There is only place for one video sharing site (being taken by YouTube), honestly I don't know of any others like it. It's become the default place to share your videos, and the place where you can find the largest audience as publisher and largest choice as consumer.
In effect there is only place for one standard for video - and that one appears to become h.264. Do not support it and become irrelevant. Publish using something else, and no-one can watch (the time where a link like "please install plugin x here" is still followed and acted upon is long gone), and your site will have no visitors. People do not try again.
With all respect to the many good Chinese, there are plenty of bad ones. Especially when it comes to money. Money gives status in China, and both are known to corrupt. China is unfortunately a very very corrupt country at the moment, and it wouldn't surprise me if those employees were simply paid off to provide such access.
Almost every day I read in the local newspaper (in Hong Kong) about corrupt government officials being caught, and of course also corrupt businesspeople. There are always two sides to corruption. And if it is normal for the government being paid by businesses for favours, why wouldn't government officials pay off company employees for the same.
For companies investing in China, trust in their employees is a major issue. You invest in a factory producing photo cameras, for example. Then it is quite commonplace that soon you see exact copies of your camera appear in the shops, with the exact same specifications and quality, just a lot cheaper. And it can very well be that those copies are made in your own factory in a second shift, after they are done producing your own orders. Or that the factory manager simply set up a second factory which is a copy of your own investment.
So there being "internal security vulnerabilities" wouldn't surprise me. At all. Whether it's really national pride, or cold hard cash, or something else I can't tell, possibly a combination of it all. But with the current state of corruption in China well it's at the very least highly plausible.
I think what the GP means with "voice logs" is the actual spoken words, the sounds, carried along the lines. That, afaict, is not normally stored. I don't think they are even allowed to store that data (which is in effect listening in to phone calls) without a warrant.
Wouldn't it be possible to use an extension for that? I'm not a moz dev but it seems to me having used some extensions that they can basically do anything. Hooking in to the video tag, checking whether there is h264 content, and if so take care of that content should be possible. Either with supplied codec, or by using whatever the underlying system exposes.
Then indeed anyone outside the US would be able to legally see h264 in Firefox. And anyone inside the US would be able to illegally do the same.
And then there is mplayer-plugin. Since quite some time I am watching YouTube videos in Firefox/Ubuntu without even having Flash installed. Greasemonkey and some scripting pull the h264 from YouTube and feed it to mplayer.
I have always heard that the consortium pushing Betamax at the time was actively preventing porn to be released on Betamax.
In case of Beta/VHS and HDDVD/Bluray I have no idea what would stop a publisher (porn or mainstream) from shipping both formats, especially if they have a reasonably large sales volume. This particularly looking at the Beta/VHS case where there is nothing special like menus or so to be added. It's plain video.
Microsoft is a software company, selling proprietary software, with a business model based around lock-in and obscurity on file formats and the like. Open source is the complete opposite of what MS's business model needs. Now obviously MS's business model is (was) a pretty good one considering they got very very rich with it (one of the richest companies in the world, if not the richest). Business wise they're a winner, no contest. Open source is breaking that.
Absolute winners for MS are of course Office with their doc format lock-in (slowly being eroded by OOo), and the Windows/Exchange/Outlook combo for which I don't know of any true competitor. Plus the many windows-only games of course. MS needs to keep their sources closed, their standards theirs and theirs alone, and needs to keep competitors out of their network. The network situation is improving but it is still very much everything except Windows talks easily to everything except Windows, and Windows talks easily to Windows alone.
When I'm at it, I was thinking of their two most high-profile competitors.
Apple: they couldn't care less about open/closed source and will likely go with the wind. Except maybe iTunes but then that contains DRM which requires the closed-source obscurity to not be cracked before it's released. OS-X is largely open-source even. Apple is a hardware company, after all. They make software to sell their hardware.
Google. Google appears to love open source: they are all about interoperability. Everyone on the Internet, everything on the Internet, the browser is the platform. Which browser? Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari? What would they care. Operating system? Irrelevant. Hardware platform? The cheaper the better, whether it's a laptop, phone, desktop or "slate". As long as the device understands standards. And open source is pretty good at exactly that: standards.
Yahoo is likely in the Google camp, being an Internet company. Though I don't hear much of any software developments coming from there. And they are quite friendly with Microsoft.
Then there is Microsoft's Bing. Gaining market share rapidly, got some positive comments a few stories ago here on/.. Makes me wonder where that stands really, as Bing just needs a standards-compliant browser. I haven't used the site, but I understand from the comments that it is pretty standards-compliant at the moment. And with the current market share of non-IE browsers, they will have to. You can't afford to lose 30% or so of your market, especially as that 30% will tell their friends "Bing sucks, doesn't work properly, use Google, that works good". People don't tend to try again later.
Then start publishing the fact that you found a 0-day vulnerability, that supplier of said software/device is unwilling to fix it, and instead sued you and put you under a gag order that prevents full disclosure of the actual vulnerability - and suggest that it is just a matter of time before the black-hats find out as well, and that everyone is at risk. That's pretty much what I recall Google has done before ("we are forced to remove several links from your search results, click here to see which links that are").
And next time indeed just skip this vendor notification part, but publish with reference to the first case.
If that is true, then just publishing it is the only way to go. And that would indeed show stupid arrogance on the side of D-Link (in this case), and will come back to haunt them.
However I still think it would be nicer to first notify D-Link, followed by full disclosure after a reasonable time (which I think is no more than 30 days). That should allow D-Link to come up with a fix in time. If D-Link doesn't then it's time to put them to shame.
When the government really monitors you, they can afaik still see the links you are going to. Or does https also encrypt the url? No matter what they can still see which SERVER you connect to. So they can still see you are connecting to al-jazeera or whatever.
What you are talking about is far more than just encryption of traffic between you and the server you visit: this requires something like tor where you can hide which site you are actually trying to connect to. Which in itself would be a serious red flag for investigators: why using such a system, at high cost (slow connections, maintenance, etc) when you have nothing to hide?
And if your boss is mandating such high level monitoring of your internet use, then there are probably far more serious problems than accidentally running into something sexually explicit or so while trying to read/. at work.
Besides that I have never heard of it, and have no idea whether it's widely implemented, there are plenty of pitfalls mentioned in that very wp article.
Oh and it doesn't solve my core issue: key exchange.
http (web): my e-banking is encrypted, I couldn't care less to get my slashdot feed unencrypted. Well save for sending my password when logging in maybe. https is nice there. But reading a newspaper online, no. Most of http traffic is not sensitive, it is public information that is sent to anyone who asks for it. Still if a site is going https it gets encrypted and I as user don't have to do anything. If I remotely log in to my server, I use ssh, again encrypted and fully transparent for me as user.
Now e-mail: encryption could be very nice but how am I going to get keys from my correspondents? Do I have to manually ask them to send me or so? It seems so. I am not aware of any automated method to get their public key. ssh is transparent in key exchange, https too. E-mail not (yet). Besides, is there any (formal) standard to encrypt mail? And if I cc: to several recipients that means the e-mail has to be split before encrypting already. Makes it quite expensive when you're on a slow uplink.
And IM well not using that much any more but 8-10 years ago ICQ did have an option to encrypt traffic if a direct connection was in place, but that may be a feature of my licq client alone. But it shouldn't be too hard to implement automatic key exchange and user-transparent encryption there.
All in all I think there is a lot more information that is public on the Internet than what is private. Only private information should be encrypted, the rest is a waste of resources, so https has an important place but only for specific info. Encrypting stuff like BitTorrent is merely to hide activity, not because the transmitted information is sensitive. And encrypting e-mail is at the moment just plain impractical.
We're talking about a diagnostic device. Not a life saving device. Not even for internal use. It is quantifying balance: we know the patient has balance, we just want to know how much of it. It is not even diagnosing whether a patient has a disease or not, or what disease a patient has.
If it is faulty, the doctors will know. Either it doesn't work, or the values do not make sense. A doctor with a little bit of experience will know from looking at the test about where the number should end up, and if out of expectations can take another device to test again. They're cheap, so you can have more than one on hand.
Sterility is not even an issue here (beyond basic cleanliness of course), it is not for use in an OR.
The main reason these things are/were so expensive I think is because of the very small product runs. Really small: hundreds, maybe a few thousand. There was no other use for these sensors, so development cost has to be shared over a few thousand pieces at most. Come the Wii with its gadges using basically the same tech, and both production cost and development cost per unit drop enormously. It matters a lot if you share costs between 1000 or 100,000 units.
Then probably the medical version is much stronger and sturdier, lasting longer, but the price difference is too big to make up for that.
Why? Because I can download it, copy it to a USB stick, stick that in my DVD player, and watch the video on my TV. DivX is the only format supported by that DVD player. And it's for sure not an old model, I bought it maybe a year ago.
And before you start saying "just play it on your computer": my TV has a comfy sofa in front of it, is almost twice the diagonal of my monitor, and is in a room big enough to watch with more than one person at a time. Particularly important when watching something with my 3-year-old.
Aircraft are high profile. The slightest mishap is in the newspapers (e.g.: a month or so ago a lengthy article about flight disruptions due to clogged aircraft toilets causing problems for Cathay Pacific - no casualties, just inconvenience and a couple flights got delayed).
People are naturally afraid of flying: it's after all unnatural. Driving is more natural, you remain on the ground. You can just stop the vehicle and get out, you can't just stop and leave an aircraft halfway the trip. And that I think is what makes it a great target to spread terror.
Flying is a necessary evil - I have to fly fairly regularly, and don't like it most of the time. Always happy to get off that darn plane. But the views sometimes are stunning, and they are mighty efficient to travel larger distances.
A number is very easy to give over the phone. Easier than an e-mail address. This as so many letters sound very similar and so.
In practice I have been giving my fax number over the phone so they could fax me their e-mail address. Works great! Particularly considering I am often working with Chinese and other Asians with sometimes very poor spoken command of English. Numbers then go remarkably easy.
There has always been a lot of talk on/. about RedHat not playing mp3 out of the box, supposedly for patent reasons.
I have never had such an issue using non-US distros (mainly Mandrake/Mandriva, now also Ubuntu). And all those software patents are very much a US-only issue
For a lasting relationship it helps to have not too much of an age difference. More than 10 years and you are almost looking at a generation difference.
Best chance to find someone attractive is at Walmart I think.
Admittedly I have never been to Walmart.
But I have have visited gyms.
And many people go there to get in shape. Most that go there are not in shape. Which is why they go there in the first place. Gyms seem to have a strong attraction to people that are not in shape.
Compare that to your local supermarket. Now everybody has to eat, whether or not they are in good shape.
The central government in China is seen pretty positive by most people in China.
However many "mass incidents" (protests, riots, etc) are taking place, and the number is increasing. I have heard numbers of tens of thousands of such "mass incidents" each year, but hard to impossible to get any reliable numbers on that.
It is the local governments that are highly unpopular, down to local leaders being murdered and the village celebrating: such a case is now going on. This as many if not most local leaders are very corrupt, and have local business interests as well. This has issues for land rights and environmental pollution. It's those leaders that the protests are targeted against primarily. E.g. the local mayor owns a large share in the local coal mine, and will thus turn a blind eye on safety issues. Large brothels or gambling dens that were housed across the police station - the owner being a brother of the police commissioner.
You won't see much protest targeting the central government, and most of those are people asking for help in problems with local officials.
Google surely localises search results. It's one of the many factors in their page ranking. That is at least my experience over the last few years. I suspect it's not even just the local site you access but also the language settings in your browser and the actual location where you are connecting from (geographic location of your IP).
The current income levels in Beijing should be near RMB 4k per month, or RMB 48k per year, that would be USD 6k. I don't think there is less than a factor 2 purchase power difference between US and China. I would more expect that to be a factor 5 or so. China is half price of HK and HK is way cheaper than US (for normal residents - not counting expats that expect luxury housing, which is very expensive in Hong Kong).
Slashdot Mirror
Tragic, yes, as your site is going to lose out to competitors (e.g. Youtube) that DO play on those other devices that you may not care about, and that thus get more mind share and market share with it.
The true tragic of the Internet is that for many services there is place for only one of each. The biggest. There is no place for a second eBay because they are smaller, offering both less choice for buyers and less customers for sellers. There is only place for one video sharing site (being taken by YouTube), honestly I don't know of any others like it. It's become the default place to share your videos, and the place where you can find the largest audience as publisher and largest choice as consumer.
In effect there is only place for one standard for video - and that one appears to become h.264. Do not support it and become irrelevant. Publish using something else, and no-one can watch (the time where a link like "please install plugin x here" is still followed and acted upon is long gone), and your site will have no visitors. People do not try again.
That are probably your personalised search results.
With all respect to the many good Chinese, there are plenty of bad ones. Especially when it comes to money. Money gives status in China, and both are known to corrupt. China is unfortunately a very very corrupt country at the moment, and it wouldn't surprise me if those employees were simply paid off to provide such access.
Almost every day I read in the local newspaper (in Hong Kong) about corrupt government officials being caught, and of course also corrupt businesspeople. There are always two sides to corruption. And if it is normal for the government being paid by businesses for favours, why wouldn't government officials pay off company employees for the same.
For companies investing in China, trust in their employees is a major issue. You invest in a factory producing photo cameras, for example. Then it is quite commonplace that soon you see exact copies of your camera appear in the shops, with the exact same specifications and quality, just a lot cheaper. And it can very well be that those copies are made in your own factory in a second shift, after they are done producing your own orders. Or that the factory manager simply set up a second factory which is a copy of your own investment.
So there being "internal security vulnerabilities" wouldn't surprise me. At all. Whether it's really national pride, or cold hard cash, or something else I can't tell, possibly a combination of it all. But with the current state of corruption in China well it's at the very least highly plausible.
I think what the GP means with "voice logs" is the actual spoken words, the sounds, carried along the lines. That, afaict, is not normally stored. I don't think they are even allowed to store that data (which is in effect listening in to phone calls) without a warrant.
Wouldn't it be possible to use an extension for that? I'm not a moz dev but it seems to me having used some extensions that they can basically do anything. Hooking in to the video tag, checking whether there is h264 content, and if so take care of that content should be possible. Either with supplied codec, or by using whatever the underlying system exposes.
Then indeed anyone outside the US would be able to legally see h264 in Firefox. And anyone inside the US would be able to illegally do the same.
And then there is mplayer-plugin. Since quite some time I am watching YouTube videos in Firefox/Ubuntu without even having Flash installed. Greasemonkey and some scripting pull the h264 from YouTube and feed it to mplayer.
I have always heard that the consortium pushing Betamax at the time was actively preventing porn to be released on Betamax.
In case of Beta/VHS and HDDVD/Bluray I have no idea what would stop a publisher (porn or mainstream) from shipping both formats, especially if they have a reasonably large sales volume. This particularly looking at the Beta/VHS case where there is nothing special like menus or so to be added. It's plain video.
Microsoft is a software company, selling proprietary software, with a business model based around lock-in and obscurity on file formats and the like. Open source is the complete opposite of what MS's business model needs. Now obviously MS's business model is (was) a pretty good one considering they got very very rich with it (one of the richest companies in the world, if not the richest). Business wise they're a winner, no contest. Open source is breaking that.
Absolute winners for MS are of course Office with their doc format lock-in (slowly being eroded by OOo), and the Windows/Exchange/Outlook combo for which I don't know of any true competitor. Plus the many windows-only games of course. MS needs to keep their sources closed, their standards theirs and theirs alone, and needs to keep competitors out of their network. The network situation is improving but it is still very much everything except Windows talks easily to everything except Windows, and Windows talks easily to Windows alone.
When I'm at it, I was thinking of their two most high-profile competitors.
Apple: they couldn't care less about open/closed source and will likely go with the wind. Except maybe iTunes but then that contains DRM which requires the closed-source obscurity to not be cracked before it's released. OS-X is largely open-source even. Apple is a hardware company, after all. They make software to sell their hardware.
Google. Google appears to love open source: they are all about interoperability. Everyone on the Internet, everything on the Internet, the browser is the platform. Which browser? Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari? What would they care. Operating system? Irrelevant. Hardware platform? The cheaper the better, whether it's a laptop, phone, desktop or "slate". As long as the device understands standards. And open source is pretty good at exactly that: standards.
Yahoo is likely in the Google camp, being an Internet company. Though I don't hear much of any software developments coming from there. And they are quite friendly with Microsoft.
Then there is Microsoft's Bing. Gaining market share rapidly, got some positive comments a few stories ago here on /.. Makes me wonder where that stands really, as Bing just needs a standards-compliant browser. I haven't used the site, but I understand from the comments that it is pretty standards-compliant at the moment. And with the current market share of non-IE browsers, they will have to. You can't afford to lose 30% or so of your market, especially as that 30% will tell their friends "Bing sucks, doesn't work properly, use Google, that works good". People don't tend to try again later.
Then start publishing the fact that you found a 0-day vulnerability, that supplier of said software/device is unwilling to fix it, and instead sued you and put you under a gag order that prevents full disclosure of the actual vulnerability - and suggest that it is just a matter of time before the black-hats find out as well, and that everyone is at risk. That's pretty much what I recall Google has done before ("we are forced to remove several links from your search results, click here to see which links that are").
And next time indeed just skip this vendor notification part, but publish with reference to the first case.
If that is true, then just publishing it is the only way to go. And that would indeed show stupid arrogance on the side of D-Link (in this case), and will come back to haunt them.
However I still think it would be nicer to first notify D-Link, followed by full disclosure after a reasonable time (which I think is no more than 30 days). That should allow D-Link to come up with a fix in time. If D-Link doesn't then it's time to put them to shame.
When the government really monitors you, they can afaik still see the links you are going to. Or does https also encrypt the url? No matter what they can still see which SERVER you connect to. So they can still see you are connecting to al-jazeera or whatever.
What you are talking about is far more than just encryption of traffic between you and the server you visit: this requires something like tor where you can hide which site you are actually trying to connect to. Which in itself would be a serious red flag for investigators: why using such a system, at high cost (slow connections, maintenance, etc) when you have nothing to hide?
And if your boss is mandating such high level monitoring of your internet use, then there are probably far more serious problems than accidentally running into something sexually explicit or so while trying to read /. at work.
I don't create files, I just download them. I have never transcoded a video file yet. Most of the stuff is available in XviD already.
Besides that I have never heard of it, and have no idea whether it's widely implemented, there are plenty of pitfalls mentioned in that very wp article.
Oh and it doesn't solve my core issue: key exchange.
http (web): my e-banking is encrypted, I couldn't care less to get my slashdot feed unencrypted. Well save for sending my password when logging in maybe. https is nice there. But reading a newspaper online, no. Most of http traffic is not sensitive, it is public information that is sent to anyone who asks for it. Still if a site is going https it gets encrypted and I as user don't have to do anything. If I remotely log in to my server, I use ssh, again encrypted and fully transparent for me as user.
Now e-mail: encryption could be very nice but how am I going to get keys from my correspondents? Do I have to manually ask them to send me or so? It seems so. I am not aware of any automated method to get their public key. ssh is transparent in key exchange, https too. E-mail not (yet). Besides, is there any (formal) standard to encrypt mail? And if I cc: to several recipients that means the e-mail has to be split before encrypting already. Makes it quite expensive when you're on a slow uplink.
And IM well not using that much any more but 8-10 years ago ICQ did have an option to encrypt traffic if a direct connection was in place, but that may be a feature of my licq client alone. But it shouldn't be too hard to implement automatic key exchange and user-transparent encryption there.
All in all I think there is a lot more information that is public on the Internet than what is private. Only private information should be encrypted, the rest is a waste of resources, so https has an important place but only for specific info. Encrypting stuff like BitTorrent is merely to hide activity, not because the transmitted information is sensitive. And encrypting e-mail is at the moment just plain impractical.
We're talking about a diagnostic device. Not a life saving device. Not even for internal use. It is quantifying balance: we know the patient has balance, we just want to know how much of it. It is not even diagnosing whether a patient has a disease or not, or what disease a patient has.
If it is faulty, the doctors will know. Either it doesn't work, or the values do not make sense. A doctor with a little bit of experience will know from looking at the test about where the number should end up, and if out of expectations can take another device to test again. They're cheap, so you can have more than one on hand.
Sterility is not even an issue here (beyond basic cleanliness of course), it is not for use in an OR.
The main reason these things are/were so expensive I think is because of the very small product runs. Really small: hundreds, maybe a few thousand. There was no other use for these sensors, so development cost has to be shared over a few thousand pieces at most. Come the Wii with its gadges using basically the same tech, and both production cost and development cost per unit drop enormously. It matters a lot if you share costs between 1000 or 100,000 units.
Then probably the medical version is much stronger and sturdier, lasting longer, but the price difference is too big to make up for that.
Personally I like AVI and DivX/XviD.
Why? Because I can download it, copy it to a USB stick, stick that in my DVD player, and watch the video on my TV. DivX is the only format supported by that DVD player. And it's for sure not an old model, I bought it maybe a year ago.
And before you start saying "just play it on your computer": my TV has a comfy sofa in front of it, is almost twice the diagonal of my monitor, and is in a room big enough to watch with more than one person at a time. Particularly important when watching something with my 3-year-old.
Aircraft are high profile. The slightest mishap is in the newspapers (e.g.: a month or so ago a lengthy article about flight disruptions due to clogged aircraft toilets causing problems for Cathay Pacific - no casualties, just inconvenience and a couple flights got delayed).
People are naturally afraid of flying: it's after all unnatural. Driving is more natural, you remain on the ground. You can just stop the vehicle and get out, you can't just stop and leave an aircraft halfway the trip. And that I think is what makes it a great target to spread terror.
Flying is a necessary evil - I have to fly fairly regularly, and don't like it most of the time. Always happy to get off that darn plane. But the views sometimes are stunning, and they are mighty efficient to travel larger distances.
A number is very easy to give over the phone. Easier than an e-mail address. This as so many letters sound very similar and so.
In practice I have been giving my fax number over the phone so they could fax me their e-mail address. Works great! Particularly considering I am often working with Chinese and other Asians with sometimes very poor spoken command of English. Numbers then go remarkably easy.
Really cool pictures. No I never visited it before. And somehow I do have the feeling that this is not a random sample of the people visiting Walmart.
There has always been a lot of talk on /. about RedHat not playing mp3 out of the box, supposedly for patent reasons.
I have never had such an issue using non-US distros (mainly Mandrake/Mandriva, now also Ubuntu). And all those software patents are very much a US-only issue
For a lasting relationship it helps to have not too much of an age difference. More than 10 years and you are almost looking at a generation difference.
Best chance to find someone attractive is at Walmart I think.
Admittedly I have never been to Walmart.
But I have have visited gyms.
And many people go there to get in shape. Most that go there are not in shape. Which is why they go there in the first place. Gyms seem to have a strong attraction to people that are not in shape.
Compare that to your local supermarket. Now everybody has to eat, whether or not they are in good shape.
The central government in China is seen pretty positive by most people in China.
However many "mass incidents" (protests, riots, etc) are taking place, and the number is increasing. I have heard numbers of tens of thousands of such "mass incidents" each year, but hard to impossible to get any reliable numbers on that.
It is the local governments that are highly unpopular, down to local leaders being murdered and the village celebrating: such a case is now going on. This as many if not most local leaders are very corrupt, and have local business interests as well. This has issues for land rights and environmental pollution. It's those leaders that the protests are targeted against primarily. E.g. the local mayor owns a large share in the local coal mine, and will thus turn a blind eye on safety issues. Large brothels or gambling dens that were housed across the police station - the owner being a brother of the police commissioner.
You won't see much protest targeting the central government, and most of those are people asking for help in problems with local officials.
Google surely localises search results. It's one of the many factors in their page ranking. That is at least my experience over the last few years. I suspect it's not even just the local site you access but also the language settings in your browser and the actual location where you are connecting from (geographic location of your IP).
In Tai Po, a 600 ft2 flat wouldn't cost more than HKD 2 mln at the moment (unless you go for new "luxury" apartments). That's about USD 240k.
My lunch normally costs me HKD30-34, or USD 3.8-4.4.
Dinner around USD 8.
A ride on the train costs you somewhere between USD 0.4 and USD 2.5 depending on the distance. Buses cost similar. Taxis are well under USD 1/km.
Now i don't know prices in New York but I do know European prices: they are 3-4 times higher for the food and more so for transport.
The current income levels in Beijing should be near RMB 4k per month, or RMB 48k per year, that would be USD 6k. I don't think there is less than a factor 2 purchase power difference between US and China. I would more expect that to be a factor 5 or so. China is half price of HK and HK is way cheaper than US (for normal residents - not counting expats that expect luxury housing, which is very expensive in Hong Kong).