Big mobile plans afoot for Baidu, the Google of China that leads in search and has launched a host of other services in the wake of that business. The company today unveiled the first smartphone to be built on its own platform, the Changhong H5018. And while that device is designed on a “forked” version of Android — forked Android devices being very popular in China — Baidu says that it doesn’t want to stop there: the idea is to take its platform, the Baidu Cloud Smart Terminal, to other operating systems like Windows Phone and iOS.

“We want Baidu’s Cloud Smart Terminal to function as a platform that sits on top of all operating systems, such as Windows Phone and iOS,” Kaiser Kuo, a spokesperson for Baidu, told TechCrunch today.

“We are not yet working on a Windows Phone device but the hope is to make one,” he noted, adding that while Baidu plans to leave no stone unturned in its strategy, “some stones are proving to be more recalcitrant than others.” That is likely a nod to Apple and how Baidu could develop its platform on iOS without completely ruining its relationship with the iPhone giant.

Mobile is a big and growing area for Baidu. In Q1, it noted that 20 percent of all of its search traffic is now coming from mobile — it is already the leading search engine in official Android devices with 80 percent penetration, Kuo noted — and he added that the mobile traffic percentage is “growing rapidly”, almost certainly faster than its more mature traffic on fixed internet devices. At the same time, mobile continues to boom in China, with the country now outstripping the U.S. and the world’s biggest smartphone market.

The Changhong H5018 is Baidu’s big strategy to create a device that will appeal to the less affluent demographic in the country. While the iPhone has proven to be hugely popular in China, it is sold at a premium price and that cuts out large parts of the addressable market that cannot afford it. Kuo notes that at the moment there are some 1 billion mobile users in the country still on feature devices. “It’s a market dominated by feature phones that prevent users from taking full advantage of the internet,” he said. “There is a tremendous market for low-priced but feature-laden smartphones, and this product fits that niche very well.”

It’s understood that while the basic price for the device will be 1,000 yuan (around $159), it will be sold through resellers that will attach data and calling tariffs to the device — the first named carrier is China Unicom — and subsidize the cost of the handset in the process. The phone will start to sell later this year, the company says.

Part of the reason the device will be priced so inexpensively, Kuo said, is because most of the services that Baidu is loading into the device will be cloud-based. That means the device does not need to have as much processing power built into it. “You don’t need a lot of power, just the ability to connect to the internet because we are shifting the computing from the terminal back to the cloud,” he noted.

Among the services will be a cloud-based storage service, location-based services and Baidu Map, voice recognition and handwriting-based search input, Baidu Music and services to recharge your call and data credits on the device.

In other respects the device sounds like it will be very much on par with other basic smartphones: 3.5-inch touch screen; 3G connectivity; 3 megapixel camera and a 1400mAh battery.

The phone is being made by Foxconn and that in itself is an interesting development and shows how the manufacturing giant — partner to Apple for the iPhone and iPad among many others — also has ambitions to position itself as a mobile brand in its own right.

It also follows on from an earlier model that Baidu had released in conjunction with Dell, which Kuo described as the “precursor” to the phone launched today.

Baidu’s plans to extend its circle of partners for the phones was also indirectly confirmed by its VP of engineering Jing Wang, who noted in a company statement that “The Baidu Cloud Smart terminal platform is a crucial step in Baidu’s overall Cloud strategy in the mobile Internet sphere…it will significantly lower manufacturing costs for many mobile manufacturers and cooperating partners. Baidu is joining hands with hardware vendors, terminal manufacturers, developers and others in the industry so that everyone along the whole value chain is a winner.”

Although Baidu certainly has a lot of ambition, for now it looks like most of the mobile plan is limited to China. Although Baidu has “dipped its toe” into other countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Egypt, there are currently no plans to offer Baidu’s new phone in markets outside of the mainland. “The whole point is that it is supported by Baidu’s cloud services and all of these are currently in Chinese and not supported outside of China,” he noted. “When we have robust cloud offerings outside of China, only then would it make sense to offer terminals there.”

Technology from next-generation chipmaker Tilera is powering a new 512-core router from Maipu, the largest enterprise router supplier in China, the companies said this week.

A sign of a crack in the Great Chinese Firewall? Internet users in China today are reporting that they are able to access Facebook in the country: some say they can access the site through mobile Internet connections and iOS apps; others are reporting access using HTTPS connections on their computers.

The social network has been having problems in the country as far back as 2009, when the site was “punished” for allowing a Uighur activist to post details of an upcoming protest.

Today’s news comes by way of Georg Godula, a marketing professional based in China with the Web2Asia consultancy, who first noted in a tweet that he was able to access the network using an iOS app, “but not on Safari or any broadband connection.”

Later he told me by email that today he and several other users on China Unicom mobile using the iOS Facebook app found that it could be opened without a VPN connection: before now, using a virtual private networking tunnel was the only way of accessing the social network. “Also several of my friends in Beijing reported they could use it on their broadband Unicom connection through a PC browser,” he added.

That PC usage seems to be supported by some additional reporting: the Voice of America blog notes that it too was able to achieve access by prefacing the URL with HTTPS in Beijing. But it also said that users in Chongqing and Ningxia were not able to access the site using this route.

China has 500 million Internet users and for the moment the most popular social networking sites are those that have been home-grown, such as Sina Weibo. The government monitors these.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are among the social media sites that are blocked in China regularly, and some have wondered if Facebook’s $1 billion Instagram purchase might help the social network get a better foothold in the country: at the moment Instagram is on the OK list.

In March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, took a vacation in China and sparked a flurry of speculation over whether this signaled a new effort for Facebook in the country. Nothing official came out of that speculation, however. But as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has noted in the past: “You can’t connect the whole world and not China.”

It’s unclear whether today’s breaches in the firewall are permanent or just temporary. We have reached out to Facebook about this story and will update it as we learn more.

Update: Facebook has gotten back to us with an official no comment for now.

Update 2: Looks like it is answer B: just temporary. Jeremy Goldkorn, founding director of Danwei.com, a website and research firm that tracks Chinese media and internet, tells us that it was just a temporary bug that is getting fixed. He also adds that this is not a market where Facebook is making much headway at the moment:

“There is nothing Facebook can do to sort itself out in China,” he said in an email exchange. “Any attempt to enter the market as Facebook itself or to sneak in using a smaller company like Instagram is doomed and will lead to world of pain — a PR nightmare in the U.S. and a huge waste of money and energy in China.”

He adds that “the only smart thing” for Facebook to do in China is to invest in or acquire notable startups, “if they can find any.”

How do you end up with millions of new sales overnight with low development and implementation costs? In the case of Chinese electronics companies Rock Chips and Box Chips the answer has been simple – hitch a ride on Android.

China’s economy is booming thanks to low cost assembly, the country’s key advantage when competing on the global playing field. Manufacturers deliver low cost laborers who are able to follow processes and procedures to a reasonable degree of accuracy at very reasonable rates, and thus gain an edge over Western manufacturers.

In my years in China I’ve seen technologies come and go, but none have excited these manufacturers like the prospect of Android. It’s a solid, “open” operating system that lets them do a number of interesting things without many risks.

The West in turn has provided the “design” element of the process, enabling the overall product to be reliable and aesthetically pleasing. Chinese companies aren’t yet geared to competing in this arena. In order to undertake the gamble of developing an OS that gave them an exclusively Chinese platform (a la Microsoft or Apple for the US), Chinese firms would need an extensive process of re-education.

Then there’s the problem of IP. While Western competitors have strong rules in place (and real penalties) for infringement of their IP – Chinese companies face a business environment where their development costs would be lost overnight as soon as another company could clone their product. Success, then, often led to copying.

This of course doesn’t mean that Western companies in China get an easy ride. In fact Apple, a strong defender of its IP everywhere, has been unable to prevent clones and copies from flooding the market, all guaranteed to look similar to the original, though never approaching the same quality or usability.

So it becomes clear why Android is so appealing to the Chinese marketplace: it enables companies to move into the usability “design” space that they’ve previously been unable to access. Here you have a strong, internationally accepted operating system, with an open license to be copied (at no cost) and installed and used on any device you like. In fact the OS developer positively encourages you to do so.

It’s a stable platform with the weight of Google behind it and the thousands of talented computer science graduates in the country can play with it, adapt it and improve it – without having to design a system from the ground up. The market entry costs are limited to wages, so there’s a huge incentive for Chinese firms to get involved.

This means that the traditional IC players now face stiff competition from China, with Rock Chips and Box Chips already selling millions and another local firm, Actions, about to enter the fray. These companies can focus on the Android platform and develop newer and faster processors to support the latest hardware and Android updates. As the OS gains further market traction and the Chinese companies find a growing talent pool of skilled engineers to work with it, this competition is going to get stronger.

Niche developers in China will benefit, too. They’ll have local chip sets for reasonable costs, and a versatile workforce to draw on – moving more in the long-term to a quality model, based on customization opportunities and away from a volume pricing model.

Currently there’s still a defined lag from Chinese firms in the commodity technology market, and when Android first launched this lag was a year or more over developed nation equivalents, but today this is down to 3 or 4 months. Soon Chinese companies, playing to their own strengths in the supply chain, will close this gap to make it negligible or even begin to take a leading role.

For Google this is a big win too. The Chinese consumer market is a huge one and the trade-off for using a free Google service is that the user agrees to share data with Google. Of course Google’s ability to aggregate massive amounts of personal data directly relates to the quality of their products and services, but it matters more how they can exploit the information they gain from their use.

China has only 40 million credit card users (based on slightly outdated figures released in 2010) and over 500 million computer users. This means that if the Android system were to appear on just 10% of all devices in the country, Google could conceivably, but probably won’t be able to access, more information on Chinese consumers than the country’s credit agencies! The rub is that the Android these firms are running is not “official” and as such rarely communicates with Google’s servers.

As the price of Android tablets and phones continues to decrease, the percentage of users is likely to grow exponentially.

This model of quality firmware partnered with lower-cost, mid-quality hardware, enables companies like Rock Chips and Box Chips to make millions of unit sales, and to win over not only the traditional “value” customer, but also the more discerning customers, domestically and overseas. It also encourages other IC manufacturers to come to the party and many will soon be joining them in an Android led technology revolution.

Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner is the founder of szceit.com in Shenzhen, China.

Trailrunner7 writes with an article at Threat Post about China's ability to block Tor. From the article: "The much-discussed Great Firewall of China is meant to prevent Chinese citizens from getting to Web sites and content that the country's government doesn't approve of, and it's been endowed with some near-mythical powers by observers over the years. But it's somewhat rare to get a look at the way that the system actually works in practice. Researchers at Team Cymru got just that recently when they were asked by the folks at the Tor Project to help investigate why a user in China was having his connections to a bridge relay outside of China terminated so quickly. Not only is China able to identify Tor sessions, it can do so in near real-time and then probe the Tor bridge relay and terminate the session within a couple of minutes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gzipped_tar writes "The 'Chinese Software Developer Network' (CSDN), operated by Bailian Midami Digital Technology Co., Ltd., is one of the largest networks of software developers in China. A text file with 6 million CSDN user credentials including user names, password, emails, all in clear text, got leaked to the Internet. The CSDN has issued a letter of apology to its users. In the letter, it is explained that passwords created before April 2009 had been stored in plain text, while later passwords were encrypted. Users created between September 2010 and January 2011 may still suffer from email address leaks. A summary of the most frequent passwords without the corresponding usernames is available at GitHub. Somewhat surprisingly, the cryptic sounding password 'dearbook' ranks 4th with 46053 accounts using it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpzToid writes "The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that a group of hackers in China breached the computer defenses of the United States Chamber of Commerce. The intrusion was quietly shut down in May 2010, while FBI investigations continue. 'A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Geng Shuang, said cyberattacks are prohibited by Chinese law and China itself is a victim of attacks. ... Still, the Chamber continues to see suspicious activity, they say. A thermostat at a town house the Chamber owns on Capitol Hill at one point was communicating with an Internet address in China, they say, and, in March, a printer used by Chamber executives spontaneously started printing pages with Chinese characters.'" According the article, the group "gained access to everything stored on its systems" and may have "had access to the network for more than a year before the breach was uncovered."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alphadogg writes "iBahn, a provider of internet services to some 3,000 hotels worldwide, denied on Thursday a news report that its network was breached by hackers. Bloomberg wrote that a highly skilled group of hackers based in China, which U.S. investigators have called 'Byzantine Foothold,' attacked iBahn, citing unnamed sources, including one U.S intelligence official. In a written statement, iBahn said it was aware of the allegations in the news report but it had 'not found proof of any breach on the iBahn network.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter lacaprup writes "Chinese-based hacking of 760 different corporations reflects a growing, undeclared cyber war. From giants like Intel and Google to unknowns like iBahn, the Chinese hackers are accused of stealing everything isn't nailed down. Simply put, it is easier and cheaper to steal rather than develop the legal way. China has consistently denied it has any responsibility for hacking that originated from servers on its soil, but — based on what is known of attacks from China, Russia and other countries — a declassified estimate of the value of the blueprints, chemical formulas and other material stolen from U.S. corporate computers in the last year reached almost $500 billion"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "China should look at establishing a cyber crisis hotline with the United States, according to a Chinese newspaper seen as a window into official thinking. Discussions about a crisis hotline might seem an obvious first step in improving relations. But if it's a sign the Chinese government is beginning to think about how to coordinate a rapid, unified response to cyber emergencies, then it is an extremely important one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.