More likely than not, the phone or tablet you have sitting nearby was assembled in mainland China at one of the mega-facilities run by companies like Foxconn. The news cycle has recently brought stories of poor and dangerous working conditions, and even suicides in Foxconn plants. Still, the lines outside an employment agency yesterday in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou illustrate how easy Foxconn still finds it to hire workers.
That fact that China is home to more Internet users than ever before isn't surprising, but the rate of growth at which people in China are hopping on the Web is simply staggering. A report by the state-run China Internet Network Information Center says the number of people using the Web topped half a billion, rising 12 percent in December to 513 million people, to be precise.
Don’t let the headline fool you; Apple’s still selling plenty of iPads in its Chinese stores, especially the ones in Shanghai and Beijing. Those honeypots may soon dry up, though, as a Chinese court has determined that Apple has no right to use the iPad moniker in mainland China. The company that owns Chinese rights to the name now plans to sue the pants off of Apple for selling the iPad on the mainland. But the infringed company is totally cool that Apple used the iPad name on the island of Taipei. Sound complicated? It is.
With China contributing such a huge chunk of the world’s human population and being the world’s largest cellphone market, it should not surprise anyone that it’s said to have overtaken the United States in smartphone shipments during the third quarter. According to research firm Strategy Analytics’ latest research, China is now the world’s largest smartphone market in terms of total shipments. Hit the jump for more.
Starting alter this month, Beijing will start rolling out a free public Wi-Fi network dubbed “My Beijing.” The service is being supported by three of China’s biggest telecom companies; China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. In the next few years, the government hopes to have roughly 60% of the massive city covered with Wi-Fi. As with all free things, there is a catch. Users will have to hand over their wireless numbers to connect to the network.
As if relations between China and Google weren't already tense, it's being reported that the Chinese government has gone and blocked the Android Market in the mainland. There's no love lost between these two giant entities, though why exactly China has chosen to erect a firewall in five major provinces to block users from downloading Android apps is not yet known.
There’s more news from the China front today, but this tidbit is a little more sinister than a dry piece on PC sales numbers. For a long time, the Chinese government has been rumored to be the hidden hand behind cyber attacks across the world. They’ve always denied any wrongdoing. But now, it appears that a Chinese military propaganda documentary has inadvertently (or not) tipped China’s hand and shown proof of the nation’s role in hack attacks.
For as long as PCs have been around, Americans have been the ones buying them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the old Stars n’ Stripes dominated the PC salescape when you remember that the field was pioneered by US-based companies like Apple and IBM. Now, that streak has come to an end; a new report says that China surpassed the US in both PC shipments and sales in the second quarter of 2011.
It's common practice to point the finger at China every time there's a major cyber attack, just as many security analysts did following 
Security firm McAfee on Tuesday published the results of "Operation Shady RAT" (where RAT stands for Remote Access Tool), which the company describes as "the most comprehensive analysis ever revealed of victim profiles from a five year operation by one specific actor." McAfee said it traced several cyber shenanigans back to a single server used by the intruders to hack into 72 organizations, including offices of the Associated Press, governments of the United States, the United Nations, and others agencies around the world.Connect with MaximumPC
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