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.

I nearly missed this piece: Facebook lost its lawsuit against German competitor StudiVZ. FB claims that StudiVZ infringes on FBs design and features, and that StudiVZ illegally stole source-code from Facebook. Well, at least the first claim seems to be pretty obvious; the only even more blatant FB-clone I can think of is its Chinese copycat Xiaonei (they did not even change the colors, like StudiVZ).

IMO German jurisdiction concerning Internet cases is inconsistent and weird at best, maybe a reason for this verdict. The court seems to have argued that “StudiVZ isn’t trying to trick users into thinking they are actually on Facebook. Another factor in favor of the German site: When StudiVZ went live in Germany in November 2005, Facebook was virtually unknown in that country.”
Hmm, so it’s okay to clone a web-service in Germany as long as the original is not really that well-known here, and as long as you do not pretend to be them; this seems to contradict normal German trademark-law — I need to keep this in mind…

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.”