Results tagged “youtube”

If you've lived in China a while, you start to think of the Great Firewall as simply a fact of life: a cultural quirk sometimes and a major pain the ass others. But if this latest YouTube/blog/Wikipedia ban's got you flummoxed (and you're too cheap/poor to get a VPN), check out some of our favourite free ways to get up and over the Great Firewall.

Have you been missing laughing babies and sneezing pandas? Haven't seen Star Wars kid in too long of a time? Or you just wanted to feel plugged into the international video-trading scene again?

It seems that we are getting reports around Shanghai that the block may be over and Youtube is back up. Much like the previous wonky Youtube ban though, it seems to only be working for some of us right now. Log your experiences here and on Herdict.

Update (4:45PM): The AFP has corrected the story. The new version sent out across the wires now reads at the top "ATTENTION - CORRECTION: REMOVES quotes from blogger Marc van der Chijs in paras 15-19 which were mistakenly taken from comments made in a blog dated 2007. Here is a corrected repetition." In an email to Shanghaiist, an AFP employee wrote: "The story went out this morning so it should be corrected before it is published in any Australian newspapers and web site versions should also be updated and corrected automatically."

According to several media reports, Xinhua has come out and said that separatists and supporters of the Dalai Lama had "fabricated" a video showing Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after last year's riots. Though Xinhua didn't explicitly state the video, it's probably this one. Google has said it doesn't know the reason for the block, but "We are looking into it and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible." So... we guess we won't be getting the 'tube back until either Youtube takes down the videos or Google finds some way to filter specific content from China IPs. Great.

Ugh. Most of you have already noticed by now, but Youtube's been Great Firewall-ed for the second time this month. Unlike the weird half-assed blocking in early March though, it looks like this time the video site is down. completely. everywhere.

Did you know China had a burgeoning parkour scene? We didn't either until 56minus1 discovered a bunch of online Chinese parkour groups, communities and forums.

Everybody would like to know! Starting from last night, Youtube.com has been having intermittent issues all over the country - yet, because some people can't get on while some people can, it's hard to say whether we've all been great firewalled again (which happened last time around politically sensitive dates) or whether it's just some strange China-only technical glitch.

Avid Youtube watchers rejoice, the days you struggled against the slow crawl of the Chinese Internet may soon be a relic of the past! Shanghai's Science and Technology Commission announced that the city will be getting an Internet service 50 to 100 times faster than current speeds sometime this year.

While some of us spent Chinese New Year's Eve enjoying grilled seafood on a beach in the Philippines, Luis Tapia of Shanghai-based Daedalum Films was lugging his camera to a Shanghai rooftop to record the fireworks. The results, as you can see above, are beautiful (be sure to watch in HD). Thankfully, the video does not include actual sound (you probably got enough of that last night). Instead, the soundtrack is "El Pico" by Ratatat. You can buy that song on iTunes. Enjoy.

Via City Weekend we learn that the documentary film about last year's Converse-sponsored (and Split Works organized) Love Noise rock music tour of China is now viewable at a DVD player near you. Love Noise put Beijing bands PK14 and Queen Sea Big Shark on a converted bus and sent them on a two-week, six-city tour during the height of Olympics craziness last August. The trailer to the Love Noise film is embedded in this post, and after the jump you'll find a slew of related clips, uploaded to YouTube six days ago. The director's first name is Hammer, so it's got to be good.

China Tech News reports that about 80 copyright holders will be ganging up on Tudou for copyright infringement. Some of these companies in the alliance include Joy.cn, Beijing Polybona Film Distribution, Beijing Orange Sky Entertainment Group and SFS Emperor and are said to be suing for RMB10 million. Tudou is a video sharing website that is bigger than YouTube in China showing 1.2 billion videos each month including bootlegged versions of TV shows and clips from Hollywood movies. Tudou, possibly in response to this suit, will be launching a reporting system for copyright owners after Spring Festival that they are currently testing. Of course the alliance could be fishing for some of that $85 million they raised in funding, most of which is apparently just sitting in the bank.

Kids really do say the darndest things! We almost fell off our chair watching this vlog. Basically this 16 year old gay expat teen in Shanghai has just come out to his parents and he decided to share his story with the world on Youtube. After telling his mother on Tuesday over Skype, Zach was half expecting to get a good lynching, as all gay teens do when they come out. What he got was a surprise of his own — his mom turned around and came out to him! Okay, we won't spoil the rest for you. Watch it for a good laugh!

What do you think?

From Danwei: "But conspicuously missing from the list are the Big Three of the Chinese Youtube clones: Youku.com, Tudou.com and 56.com. Although 56.com has been off line for nearly two weeks after an apparent porblem with the authorities, these three websites have the largest amount of funding of any video websites in China, most of it foreign. By most accounts they are also the most popular video sites in China."

Standing a foot taller and six inches broader than anyone else on HuaiHai Lu, the young man who calls himself Red Laowai (George to his Mother) is easy to spot. Although this is his first trip to mainland China, George has already gathered a large following by recording video clips singing (mostly Communist) Chinese songs and releasing them on the internet.

It’s shaping up to be a bad week for the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (the catchily acronymed SARFT) – and it's still only Wednesday. Recent events surrounding bans of video sharing site Tudou and then actress Tang Wei (汤唯) seem to suggest that SARFT is slipping into farce.

Editor's Note: This is an update to that flash mob we told you about earlier. The writer was the organiser of the event.

People who made the news this week

As mentioned before, US expatriates are, for the first time, able to vote in a global primary, meaning that they get their own set of delegates during the primaries, which decide each party's respective presidential candidate. This particular event, held on Tuesday at the ecologically sound and coolly designed URBN hotel, was well attended. Computers were set up to help people register, liquor and hors d'ouevres helped people mingle, and Barack Obama's victory speech from the South Carolina primary was played on a big screen. Melanie McGanney was there and wrote about it on the Huffington Post. Youtube has a video of the speech here, and you can see some more of our photos here.

If you think Chinese children can't get any more obnoxious, go watch Please Vote for Me (via YouTube in five parts - p1, p2, p3, p4 and p5), an award-winning indie documentary and pay special attention to Cheng Cheng, the pudgy kid who is one of the three students running for the position of class monitor. He then gets increasingly irksome as he sabotages fellow elects and manipulates his classmates for votes.

Have you got an opinion? Shanghaiist has started publishing opinion pieces from readers on selected weekends, so if you feel like you've got something to get off your chest, email it to us at info AT shanghaiist DOT com and if we like it, we will publish it under this column.

This video entitled “这个女人太要了” ("This girl wants it too much") uploaded to Youtube just five days ago has received over 317,000 views and raised a storm on the Chinese internet. It shows a young Chinese couple hugging and kissing at a subway exit point before finally saying goodbye. Well, it turns out that the clip was taken via the surveillance cameras that you see all around subway stations and the (really annoying) voices in the background were Metro staff. Shanghaiist doesn't quite understand Shanghainese, but here are two choice quotes:

“哦呦！这个女的还满好看的！”

Continue reading "Subway voyeurs are watching you"

Thanks to the commenters on that last post, especially the one that alerted us to videos of the protests/marches that were on the Taiwan Youtube site. There were two that we found, embedded below. The first one is just a short clip of people walking around during the day. The second is from Xujiahui in the evening, with more chanting, from the evening of January 6. Oh yeah, and to the commenter who mentioned that we ought to put "alleged" in front of "health effects", you're probably right. If you're interested in learning a little about what health effects maglevs might have on people, you could try this Google scholar search. No definitive answers, but maybe a rudimentary way of glimpsing what is out there.

Just as the rest of the world is getting swept away in a social networking frenzy, googling for keywords such as "Badoo", "Facebook", "Ebuddy", "Hi5" and even "Second Life", Chinese googlers it seems are a completely different species. In 2007, four out of the top ten keywords among Chinese googlers were wealth-related, searching for keywords such as "stock", "China Merchants Bank", "Industrial and Commercial Bank of China" and "China Construction Bank". Bank of China is conspicuously absent from the list!

How a CCTV-5 news-reader aired her marital grievances at the launch of the new Olympics channel

We apologize in advance for another post about another YouTube video, but our editor is still in Hong Kong on an unanticipated visa run and we are busy trying to figure out what to pack for a trip that includes both Florida (83°F/28°C) and Pennsylvania (36°F/2°C).

We have a confession to make: We have been known to watch the occasional episode of America's Next Top Model. Odd that while living in America we refused to watch trashy American reality shows (other than The Real World, which we allowed in on a grandfather clause) and now that we live in China and own a Filipino TV satellite (that we won't shut up about) we seemingly can't get enough of them. What can we say — this place makes you do strange things.

We who live in Shanghai have to have a soft spot for Filipino cover bands — there could be one waiting around just about every corner in certain parts of the city. And so despite having nothing to do with Shanghai (or China), we thought we'd post this tip we got from reader Ryan Martin this morning via email: