Revised rules set to impose much heavier penalties on drivers who run red lights, drive after drinking, or make phone calls while at the wheel, as Wang Xiaodong reports . Drivers in China will have to pay more attention to traffic rules or risk paying much higher penalties, according to a revised regulation that takes effect on Tuesday.
www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-01/01/content_16073734.htm

You can buy devondale long life Australian milk at Parkson. 20rmb per litre.

I have been told that there is going to be another big crack down starting tomorrow (Jan 1) on unregistered ebikes.

China threatens to censor apps.

Apple adopted https in App Store. China threatens to censor apps.

Recently, China threatens to require every app to have a license in order to go on sale, as reported by New York times. The time is too coincidental as Apple adopted https on iTunes for searching and downloading Apps.

Before this adoption, searching for certain keywords such as "vpn" would lead to a connection reset on iTunes and visiting the page for certain Apps, such as VPN Express would also cause a reset, which means there is no way for users in China to search for or download certain Apps even if they are available in China App Store.

But because now https is implemented by Apple on almost all connection to iTunes server, Great Firewall of China has no way to selectively block connection to certain contents. A test to the same link mentioned above with https protocol yields no censorship.

This change provides a commercial platform in China(China App Store uses CNY for payment) not subject to the arbitrary censorship of the government. For example, opendoor an app dedicated to circumventing the Internet is on sale on China App Store and users are willing to pay to remove ads in the app.

Any other trading platform, such as Taobao(Chinese version of ebay) is actively censoring Internet Circumvention tools and selling anti-censorship tools there is not possible.

Therefore, it is highly likely that the government have noticed this loophole in its censorship net, and is now trying to close it.

In China Tightening Controls on Internet Willy Lam tells the AP that:

Chinese leaders "realize there are detrimental impacts on business, especially foreign business, but they have counted the cost and think it is still worthwhile," said Lam. "There is no compromise about the political imperative of controlling the Internet."
world.time.com/[...]