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Chinese developer charged with espionage

GeneralEdward Kiledjian

Image by Katy Levinson used under Creative Commons License

American federal authorities have charged a Chinese developer (believed to be an ex-IBM employee) with stealing source code from big blue. The defendant, Xu Jianqiang was arrested by the FBI in December and since they have raised the indictment to 6 charges (from the original one):  3 x economic espionage and 3 x theft of trade secrets. 

The prosecutor claims the source code was stolen to benefit Chinese authorities and are "a product of decades of work". He was caught while trying to sell his stollen assets to 2 undercover law enforcement agents. The american claim is that he also intended to sell it to  the National Health and Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China.

If he is found guilty of all charges, he could end up in prison for 75 years. 
 

Weird Food - Thousand Year Old Egg from China

TravellingEdward Kiledjian

The Thousand Year Old Egg is also called the Century Egg and is a Chinese delicacy.  

It is an egg (duck, chicken or quail) that is "preserved" in a special mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime and rice hulls.  I have heard that these can be stored for weeks or months.

Like the Balut, this is incredibly difficult for westerners to stomach. Unlike Balut, I have tried this and it is a taste I did not like. Just thinking about it makes me gag.  

Baidu Antivirus Pro free

technologyEdward Kiledjian

Baidu is China’s response to Google and they have just launched a free antivirus solution called Baidu Antivirus 2013. In my tests, it was light, easy to use and fast anti-virus. They promise to protect you from malware, viruses, spyware and adware. I tested it against some more common malicious code and it seems to catch and clean the system. Although we haven’t seen any independent tests yet, I expect them to be as good or better than many of the traditional free products but not as good as the stronger for pay products.

Before anyone asks the question, it does come in English and the English version is very good.

You can download it here.

Considering this is Chinese, I have to urge caution if you chose to use it. I tested it on a sandboxed virtual machine and I would never install this on any of my personal computers.