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Downloading Frenzy in China: Gov’t Blocking All Torrent Sites Soon?

11 Dec 2009

Over the past 10 days, Chinese downloaders have flooded – and in some cases, crashed – major P2P and torrent sites after rumors that the government would be effectively disabling all media downloads in the country.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has closed hundreds of file-sharing sites since last week as part of an ongoing effort to fight piracy and porn. However, many users say these sources are one of few ways to access films, books, and music banned in China, whether the media is lewd or merely politically dissident. What will media-seeking Chinese citizens do when their links to the wider world are finally severed?

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A document called Regulations on the Protection of the Right of Communication through Information, created by SARFT in 2006, was posted on its website late last week, just before the agency rounded up and shut down around 530 bittorrent sites, including the 50-million-users-strong BTChina. SARFT states that websites are not allowed to provide audio or video products without specific licenses.

SARFT rep Cao Yunxia told China Tech News that “illegal audio-visual service websites have brought great harm to the media industry and the administration will continue to seek and destroy illegal Internet audio-visual program providers.”

Following these sudden and unforeseen website closures, many Chinese rushed to download what may be their final foreign films and albums.

“I may never be able to download Hollywood movies or classical records again,” one college student told China Daily.

When China’s largest file-sharing site, VeryCD, has server issues yesterday, many speculated that the government had shut that website down, as well. However, VeryCD’s users still have time to continue downloading content, although it is unclear how much time may actually remain.

While VeryCD has applied for a license to distribute its content, it has not yet received official sanction from the Chinese government and has been warned by SARFT about allowing the distribution of unauthorized multimedia content throughout the country.

The site’s owners hace said they may suspend downloads over the coming weekend to avoid further trouble with SARFT, and they were unable to comment on the long-term future of the website.

As our loyal readers may recall, China’s ongoing censorship of content and restriction of free speech earned it a spot on our Top 10 Failures of 2009 list. Although it is hardly the in the domain of a humble blogger to dictate national policies on media, we feel a great deal of empathy for those who download content not only because it’s free online but because they have no other way to access it.

From Ben-Hur to Brokeback Mountain, check out this list of some of the films banned in China. What would you do as an Internet user if illegal downloads were your only way to see content like these films or to listen to many kinds of Western music? What work-arounds would you recommend to Chinese citizens? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Tags: Ben-Hur, bittorrent sites, Brokeback Mountain, China, chinese citizens, classical records, content, Download, government, Hollywood, SARFT, torrent sites, website

5 Online Services You Can Update By Email With A Mobile Phone

In: tutorial

21 Nov 2009

emailphonecorner As the owner of a new internet-enabled phone, I have been looking at various ways I can update my favourite online services using the phone’s built-in email function. If I am out and about, and I want to update something, the easiest way to do it would be to send an email with any images as an attachment. Uploading to the actual website with a mobile phone is a lot more difficult than you might think (little buttons, little keys, big fingers!)

But who offers such a service? These tools are not normally offered in a very prominent place and you have to do some digging on each site for them. After some browsing, I found 5 services who offer secret email addresses for you to update while on the go. There are probably many more but here are 5 of the top ones that a lot of people normally use.

Flickr

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Flickr is the first service I found that supplies secret updating email addresses. If you take a photo with your phone and you want to directly send it to your Flickr photostream then doing so is extremely easy.

Just go here to see your own updating address (Flickr log-in is required). Then add that address to your email address book (you can even ask Flickr to send the address to your email address book if you are too lazy!). You can also specify any default tags you want added to emailed-in photos. Since I will always be using the email function with my mobile phone, I chose to have added #frommobile with these pictures.

Then in the future, when you take a photo with your phone :

open a new email window
add your secret email address
add the photos as attachments
put the desired title of the photo in the email subject line
put any photo description in the body of the email
tags can be put in the subject line or in the body of the email using the tags: title.

Or for those of you who like graphical explanations :

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When I tested it, it took 15 minutes for photos to arrive on my Flickr photostream. So it isn’t an instant thing. But if you are out and away from your computer anyway, 15 minutes won’t make any difference.

If you think your secret upload email address has been revealed to others, you can also easily reset the address by pressing a button on your Flickr page.

As soon as the picture(s) arrive at Flickr, the site even offers to put them on your blog automatically. Is there anything Flickr won’t do for you?

YouTube

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This one is a bit redundant for me as my Android phone already has YouTube uploading built in. But for those of you who haven’t got this feature by default, here’s a quick and easy way to send your videos to YouTube.

By going here (again, log-in required), you will see your secret uploading YouTube email address. Now whenever you want to send a video to the site, just attach it as an email attachment and send it to your secret address.

Be aware with this one that virtually all email services have an attachment size limit. Videos are normally huge in size so unless you keep the video clip small, you may have trouble getting your email service to accept it. So no uploading Ben-Hur! Keep it short, simple and small.

Facebook

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The Facebook one seems to only allow the uploading of photos so no status updates or poking with this address. But if you regularly upload lots of drunken party photos to Facebook then go here and find your secret Facebook uploading address. Speed is of the essence if you want your boss to find out why you really took the day off sick.

Blogger

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Blogger has two methods of letting you post content via your mobile, and of course, me being me, the first method didn’t work at all! Typical.

The first method, which you can read about here, involves authorising your phone to send content to your blog. But when I tried, I got an email back saying that my “device was not authorised”. Wait a minute – a Google Android phone is not authorised to send content to a Google-owned blogging company? Spot the irony there.

The second method is to set up a secret blogging email address. Unlike the other services, you can choose what the second half of the address will be (so you can choose a secret word or phrase that only you will remember). You can set this up by logging into Blogger then going to settings–>email & mobile.

bloggerupload2

The title of the blog post goes in your email subject line and all blog images go as email attachments.

Posterous

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I couldn’t do a post like this without mentioning Posterous, the blogging site which seems to be doing surprisingly well. The whole concept of Posterous is that you email in everything and it will be automatically posted for you – text, photos, mp3’s, videos, documents, the lot.

Just set up your blog, associate an email address with it and then send your blog entries with that email address to post@posterous.com . It will then shortly appear on your Posterous page. The simplicity of it is winning over a lot of bloggers and I have to admit, I am starting to weaken.

So there are 5 services where you can email in your updates. Do you know of any more? If so, let us know all about them in the comments so I can update my email address book…

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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