Interesting recaps on WoWs history in China have been posted at two (totally games-unrelated) blogs, written by China-based international lawyer Dan Harris and Dan Maas, head of special effects company, Maas Digital:

“Blizzard had successfully brought WoW into the Chinese market in 2005 through a license agreement with local game developer The9. The relationship turned sour last summer when negotiations to renew the license bogged down in a dispute over division of profits. Blizzard ultimately decided to terminate The9’s license and shift WoW’s China operations to another local company, NetEase. (The9 responded acrimoniously, filing suit against Blizzard and announcing development of its own sword-and-sorcery game called “World of Fight”). WoW was knocked off-line for over three months during the transition, leaving a gigantic vacuum in the market which competitors rushed to fill. Kingsoft, Shanda, and other gaming companies stepped up promotional efforts to lure former WoW players to their own games…”

The punch-line here seems to be that western companies like Blizzard are struggling with an unclear regulatory atmosphere and sharing of revenues, while local developers are thriving on better cultural understanding and other practical advantages (like smoother payment systems, looser regulatory oversight, etc.)

Read the full post after the jump.

Google reported cyber attacks to its network, originating from China and reportedly targeting email-accounts of Chinese human rights activists, as David Drummond, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer writes:

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google…

…we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists… Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.”

Drummond concludes that Google will react by not un-censoring all results on Google.cn from now on, which might even lead to shuttering their service in Mainland.

An impressive reaction — with only a minor flaw. Google never had a substantial footing in China; according to various sources its market penetration is around 30%, whereas Baidu — China’s largest search-engine has a share of over 90%. I am guessing that their revenue from Mainland is insubstantial. I don’t want to sound cynical, but it’s a convenient moment to push human rights if it doesn’t cost you anything. Google might even utilize this opportunity to exit the Mainland market without loosing their face before they fall flat like Facebook.

As much as I hate to be a smart-ass, but I’ve been highly skeptical already last year about Facebook’s acclaimed attempt to conquer the Mainland’s social network market. Just like I predicted, FB’s efforts are folding, as the Wall Street Journal reports–with active users dwindling, from one million… to around 14,000:

“Many Facebook users found proxies and other methods of connecting to Facebook, and many others stood by, hoping the Web site would be unblocked quickly (no luck yet). Meanwhile, according to Inside Facebook, the Web site’s latest statistics showed only 14,000 active users in China as of the beginning of October, down from a million in July….
It’s no secret among people in the Internet business in China that Facebook was interested in the world’s largest Internet user population. But apparently — according to various parties that met with a delegation of Facebook officials some time in the last few years — they came, they saw, and they left Chinese social networking Web sites like Renren.com…”

Renren actually is the former Xiaonei, who started as blatant FB carbon copy, ending up with more venture capital under their belts than the original. The Renren domain was, by the way, home to an early Chinese socnet, about 10 years ago, as VirtualReview has it. This rebranding seems to indicate Xiaonei’s future plans: while Xiaonei literal meaning is “inside school”, Renren is Pinyin for “everyone”.

The Chinese socnet market is continuously dominated by Xiaonei/Renren, Kaixin001 and 51.com.

Recently, Chang Ping, editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, wrote an article about the debate of internet addiction in Mainland:

“Chinese media and the medical field quickly imported the word “internet addiction.” But, strangely, if you look at material on the topic in Chinese you won’t find the other side of the argument or that it is even being argued about. You’d think that “Internet addiction” is a new kind of disease, which is declaring war on the future of human kind, and the best doctors in the world are bravely fighting in the war and are up to their neck in it…
The Ministry of Health has stopped using electro-shock therapy to cure “Internet addiction” … What this really means is that they are announcing a different standard for treating Internet addiction, and the officials will still decide that “Internet addiction” is a kind of disease.”

I am sharing Chang’s opinion — as much as the media keeps repeating internet- and gaming-addiction as a matter of fact, we shouldn’t forget that this kind of compulsory behavior is not even recognized as a disease by experts yet. Isn’t the internet more of a channel to relieve one’s obsessions (like compulsory buying)?
Personally, I find the German means (just taken as an example) to prove obsessive computer-gaming an addiction pretty questionable; namely, showing screenshots of their favorite games to participants and recording if their brain-activity matches the brain-activity of alcohol-addicts when being shown pictures of alcohol.

A compulsory disorder is a terrible burden to its victim, but it’s not entirely helpful to prematurely demonize its origins, like Mainland is still doing it:

“In the Chinese medical organizations’ publicity material, “Internet addiction” has been described as a great beast, and the symptoms of all types of mental disorders, for example bad mood, slow mind, dizziness, shaky hands, low energy levels, tiredness, a lack of desire for food and drink, a suicidal desire or wanting to hurt others — all of these have been written out for Internet addiction. Yang Yongxin (杨永信), who has just been told by the Ministry of Health to stop his electro-shock treatments, also says adamantly that “Internet addiction” will cause the human aspect of the person to recede, and will turn a person into a beast.”

(via Danwei)

Kotaku and Gizmodo point to a 3D-map of Hong Kong recently:

“While Google Maps is pretty useful at the moment - especially Street View - we can’t help but look at this Chinese map of Hong Kong and wish that, instead of “Street View”, we could instead have “SimCity View”.
This map is real (though not provided by Google), and accurate, and can be used to plot your course or find landmarks as easily as you can on Google Maps…”

Only that it isn’t accurate… I mean, just take a look at Central; what about the pier-area around the IFC2? I’ve been passing this neighborhood myself quite often on my way to catch a ferry — shouldn’t there be an additional road and a walkway? Instead there is a bunch of greenery to be seen, which does not exist to that extend. And what about the area on the backside of HSBC? The 3D-view shows a large park-area there — so where’s Queen’s Road, or Lower and Upper Albert Road and Robinson Road? Must have been overgrown since last time I’ve been there. Oh, and if you scroll towards Kowloon-side, then you’ll find that the map just stops at Boundary Street. I guess it means that this is a map of Hong Kong within its boundaries of 1898.

This map is a nice, cute and useless gimmick. I prefer the homegrown centamap.com any day. By the way, the map’s provider Edoshi is a Mainland-based company specializing in such 3D-views of a variety of large cities like Hanzhou.

As InformationWeek reports, Mainland China has declared that they are (finally) banning trading virtual currency for real goods and services.

“The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services,” China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce declared.

While this might have repercussions for quite a few MMOs and virtual worlds — and especially gold-farmers thereof, this move seems to be more specifically targeted at Tencent’s QQ and their virtual currency QQ-coins. Due to the popularity of QQ in Chinese young population (QQ currently boasts around 220 million users, and around half of them seem to actively trade their coins), QQ coins gradually got more and more accepted as currency in online stores and gaming sites in exchange for “real” merchandise such as small gifts, thus raising the concern of inflation.
This issue already has a longer history, PlayNoEvil already reported about insider reports of the People’s Bank of China hinting at financial regulations of QQ coins and similar currencies back in 2006.

The mainland government is soon to introduce a new local censorship software, called Green Dam, which is going to be required on all PCs sold in the country. The even lesser funny news here: Green Dam contains a serious security loophole, which can be exploited by any website the user visits — issues that were discovered at the University of Michigan in less of 12 hours of examining Green Dam. As their report has it:

“Once Green Dam is installed, any web site the user visits can exploit these problems to take control of the computer. This could allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet. In addition, we found vulnerabilities in the way Green Dam processes blacklist updates that could allow the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process.
We found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing, and we believe they may be only the tip of the iceberg. Green Dam makes frequent use of unsafe and outdated programming practices that likely introduce numerous other vulnerabilities.”