A few recommended reads from the past days: China Economic Review has an insightful recap about Yahoo’s whistle-blowing incident about the fate of Chinese reporter and dissident Shi Tao. I find one assumption especially noteworthy:

“Yahoo itself is guilty of (…) a lack of foresight concerning the risks of locating user information in China (Google, for example, keeps its servers offshore, although this arrangement has yet to be properly tested)”

Locating the server which houses your business is really an important and delicate decision. We moved our digital home to Canada lately after a lot of considerations.

Two more interesting tidbits about Mainland China: China Web 2.0 Review blogs about a report called “Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground Economy on the Chinese Web”. According to this report, around 1.5 percent of China’s 145.000 most commonly visited websites are infected with malicious code which might introduce trojans and viruses to their users’ computers. Phew, I wonder about similar statistics for the US or Europe — anybody any ideas?

And finally, check out this article from Danwei about Milk. Milk is an acclaimed magazine about pop-culture, style and design published in Hong Kong, which is now available in Mainland, too. The Mainland Milk does not seem to be as delicious as the original…:

“the initial reaction seems to be disappointment, at least from the people who had been eagerly anticipating the magazine’s arrival. Members of the milk group on Douban, a social networking service oriented toward students and young white-collars, seem to agree that the mainland edition is a far cry from the HK original.”

…which keeps reminding me that Hong Kong and Mainland China are two very different playing-grounds.