Terry Gou, chairman of Taipei-based Hon Hai, Foxconn's parent company, called his employees animals at a recent company party, according to Want China Times. Foxconn makes many of the devices Western consumers use, such as the iPhone and the Kindle.
"Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide," he said, "and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."
China Real Time, the Wall Street Journal's blog devoted to the world's second-largest country, has developed and launched China Econtracker, a valuable tool to access and understand economic data on the country.
Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world's second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.
Mark Zuckerberg's closely-watched, 2010 trip to China isn't the only reason why Facebook may be the safe bet on which of the major U.S.-based social networks will be the first to get the go-ahead to operate in China.
Access to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are all currently banned by the Chinese government. Google may be renewing expansion efforts in China, but a recent crackdown on popular Chinese microblogging sites designed to mimic Twitter suggest that if any of the big three get the permission to operate in China, the nod will go to Facebook.
There are parts of the world where it's understandably difficult for the topic of Internet piracy, or the theft of U.S. intellectual property, to be elevated to critical significance. There is still rioting in Syria, a cruise ship has run aground killing some passengers, and Japan is still struggling to emerge from the devastation of the tsunami.
But Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration awakened many broadcast organizations to a strange and, for some, unexplored new question: Is the U.S. truly planning to implement legislation that could shut parts of the Internet off? That's how the Saturday statement truly appeared for some who had not been following the goings-on (such as they are) in the U.S. Congress.
Today could be the point in history at which we look back and say, "that was the day the Internet fundamentally changed." Today is the day the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) opens up its new registry for generic Top Level Domains and it will have a profound affect on how people find and consume information on the Web. Will it be a gold rush? Is this the end of the ".com" era as we have come to know it?
A top level domain is a core part of how the Internet organizes and parses the names of websites. The most common, of course, is .com, but other TLDs are .net, .org and country domains like .CO or .UK. ICANN's new gTLDs will allow companies, governments and other organizations to register unique strings. For instance, are we about to enter the era of .pepsi? See below for everything you need to know about the new domain name system.
On Monday, Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin staged the first production of a play live on Facebook. The play was a stage adaptation of the novel "Effi Briest" by Theodor Fontaine.
According to Reuters, the online production, Effi Briest 2.0, "used status updates, photo uploads and wall postings from characters to relate protagonist Effi Briest's descent into disrepute." The Facebook experiment was a way to do a spectacularly different pre-dress dress rehearsal prior to the play's in-the-flesh opening this Saturday.
Described by gaming site Kotaku as a potentially "deadly game of chicken," over 300 workers at the Foxconn factory in China threatened suicide. On Jan. 2, a group of workers appeared on the roof of the main production facility in Wuhan and threatened to jump.
Foxconn produces devices for Microsoft (including the Xbox360), Apple (the iPhone and iPad), Sony (PlayStation3) and Nintendo (the Wii), as well as the Amazon Kindle.
After releasing 15,000 credit card numbers hacked from an Israeli website on Tuesday, the Saudi hacker known as 0xOmar has released 11,000 more today. He has threatened to release a further one million.
The hacker broke into a popular Israeli sports site, making off with hundreds of thousands of accounts' worth of personal information, including some credit card numbers.
If you think anti-piracy legislation like SOPA and Spain's so-called Sinde law are as far-reaching as it gets, you obviously don't live in Tehran. Well aware of the disruptive threat to its power posed by the Internet, the Iranian government is beginning to implement a plan that would get rid of it all together.
Web censorship in the Islamic republic is nothing new, but this latest initiative cranks things up quite a few notches and paves the way for a government-approved domestic intranet that will be completely cut off from the public World Wide Web we all know and love. Iranians are already reporting painfully slow Internet connections and difficulty accessing certain sites or using VPNs, the Wall Street Journal reports. Soon, Internet cafes in the country will be required to videotape all Web users and gather personal information about them.
Last week, the Spanish government enacted a law containing provisions that allows copyright holders to have allegedly-infringing websites shut down within days of a complaint. The legislation, which sounds like a more extreme version of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being debating in the U.S., had actually already been passed, but wasn't implemented until Spain's new, notably more conservative government took control.
The Sustainable Economy Law, which contains the anti-piracy provisions, was enacted in part to help encourage investment by U.S.-based media and technology companies. Today it was revealed that American interest in the law being enacted may have been more than casual. Spain was actually threatened by the US with being put on a trade blacklist if the law wasn't passed, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
