China Tech Roundup: GFW gearing up for holiday season mischief, electric cars and the OPhone

• The International Herald Tribune was all in a tizzy about its sister newspaper the New York Times being blocked in China last week in an article posted on Saturday. This comes after another article that they posted on the preceding Tuesday Olympics over, China said to be blocking Web sites again. According to China web watchers @fuzheado and @ullrich, the NYT had indeed been blocked in Beijing and Shanghai but was now working fine. We get the feeling that the good folk at the Golden Shield Project might just be messing with the NYT for the bad press the previous week.
• Still in the arena of China cyber-policing, a website and an internet user were fined for posting details of a love triangle in which the "spurned wife" committed suicide. This IHT article comments that the landmark case sets a precedent for the cracking down on the online incitement of vigilantes. We have seen other cases of public justice exercised by Chinese netizens as in the case of Running Fan during the Sichuan Quake.
• Chinese auto maker BYD has beaten many major international brands to the punch by announcing the mass production of the first plug-into-the-wall electric car. They say that this advancement is made possible due to the development of an iron battery that can be used 2000 times before degrading and can be fully charged in 20 minutes. Not to be outdone though, Engadget reports that an alliance of 14 US firms including 3M and Johnson Controls-Saft has been put together to bring the highly toxic battery manufacturing back to the US. The Engadget article quotes the Wall Street Journal that "More than four dozen advanced battery factories are being built in China but none, currently, in the U.S."
• Lenovo and China Mobile in a bid to ride on the success of the iPhone and G1 have officially announced that they have reached an agreement to develop their own 3G, internet friendly handset called...wait for it... the OPhone. The "O" in OPhone stands for OPEN as it is based on the Open Mobile System we told you about earlier.

Image by Roger Wo