» Pan Asia News

Best news in a long time…

Due-East — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:11:57 +0000

The news is depressing lately. Well, it’s actually pretty much always depressing. But I just got some great news to offset some of the doom and gloom! After almost 4 years, InLove is finally releasing a new album in July! The singer, Lu, kindly stopped by the site to leave a message about it. Here are her comments (in part) below:

。。。inLove的新專輯將會於七月中推出, 到時會有發佈演出, 場地是香港藝術中心的一個小型演奏廳。

我們都很興奮, 因為已經接近四年沒有推出專輯, 所以今次有點緊張, 但也會盡力做好。希望也能得到Chris你的支持。^－^

最後想說的是, H1N1病情似乎愈來愈嚴重, 敬請大家都要保重身體, 也一起祈禱, 希望病者早日康復, 以及全球病情盡快得到控制。。。

Lu

I’m really excited about this because their first album was awesome. Every song on it had a certain warmth that kept me wanting to listen again and again. If this were the 80s, when all we had were records or cassette tapes, I’d probably be on my 4th or 5th copy of it because I would’ve worn out several copies already from listening so much. Check out the video below for a taste of their sound:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The unspeakable horror of life inside a North Korean prison camp…

Due-East — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:13:02 +0000

Shin Dong-hyuk is the soul escapee of North Korea’s prison camps

He may be a free man in a physical sense, but Shin Dong-hyuk is still a prisoner. He is the only man known to have successfully escaped a North Korean prison camp, but he still bears physical scars and lives with unimaginable emotional anguish. Born in Prison Camp No. 14 to parents of a marriage arranged by prison guards as a reward for his father’s good work as a mechanic, he has experienced unspeakable horror in his twenty-six years of life: torture by fire in an attempt to extract a confession about a family conspiracy that he knew nothing about, having half of one of his fingers cut off as a consequence of accidentally dropping a sewing machine at the prison camp’s garment factory, and witnessing countless executions in the prison camp’s square, including those of his own mother and brother. His cousin was raped by prison guards, and food was so scarce that one young girl was beaten to death for having just a few grains of contraband wheat in her pocket. He even once picked just three kernels of corn out of a pile of cow dung, wiped them off, and ate them, considering himself lucky for happening upon such a treat. He says that growing up in the prison camp, he never heard the word ‘love’ and that he can’t grasp the concept of forgiveness that he hears spoken of at church. Perhaps the most tragic of all: he suffered all of this simply because he was born to his father, who was in turn guilty because of being the brother of two men who had collaborated with South Korea during the Korean War.

The Washington Post article I sourced goes into even more heart-wrenching detail about his life inside the camp and the mental and emotional anguish he has experienced since breaking free of his prison. And similar situations no doubt play out daily among the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inmates in North Korea’s prison camps. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around how any human could endure such suffering. The fact that he did is a testament to how well the human mind is designed. I can’t help but feel a bit guilty for being in a comfortably heated room as I write this. To say that it is unfair that I was born here in America and that he was born there in such a demonic place is the grossest of understatements…

Link to article

In the future, Internet crime will come mostly from Asia…oh, and Mexico

Due-East — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:42:11 +0000

F-Secure.com just published the resulting maps from their study of the shifts in Internet crime trends since 1986. The results are pretty interesting. The map below illustrates that up to the year 2003, criminals from the United States and Europe have been the creators of most malware. According to F-Secure, the time period covered by this map was characterized by “opportunistic ‘hobbyists’ learning their craft” and “old-school virus writers operating from areas in Europe, United States, Australia and India.”

And then in the “recent history” (is 1986 considered ancient history now?! Am I that old?!), people apparently started getting bored of just playing around and writing viruses and things just to wreak havoc; they wanted to make money or achieve some other goal, so “professional, targeted attacks” started to rise. Here’s how F-Secure describes the characteristics of malware creation in this period:

Malware creation hotspots growing in the former Soviet countries (such as Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia). Other major areas of criminal activity are Brazil and China, which have large numbers of individuals with sophisticated computing skills but without the job opportunities to make a living for themselves in the IT sector. Online crime often presents a more lucrative path to raising living standards for people like these.

I’m not sure these maps are totally accurate. It seems kind of fishy that at least graphically they’ve pinned ALL of the world’s virus-writing guilt on Brazil, Russia, and China. C’mon, guys…Americans aren’t that lazy that they’re gonna let other countries make all the illegal money. I mean, the US pretty much invented the Internet and Internet crime; they’re not going out like chumps.

Moving on…the folks at F-Secure now don their prophet caps and look to the future, predicting that in the future, malware will come mostly from Asia with generous helpings coming from Africa and Mexico. Their site makes the following two points:

“Internet usage is growing fastest in Asia, followed by Africa. IT job growth will be lacking behind, creating a breeding ground for online criminals.”
“In many countries there will be a delay before the legal system catches up with developments in the IT sector. Computer criminals may also be able to escape the law more easily in countries which are undergoing serious political and security problems.”

It makes perfect sense to me. If the citizens of a country are poor and the government of that country is too busy with its own growing pains or internal struggle to pass and enforce Internet-related laws, naturally people there are gonna take advantage of the situation. Often, in terms of what people will and won’t do, hunger > laws > ethics. So when the chips are down, most people will do whatever they need to put food on the table regardless of ethics or laws, and if there’s no law to telling them they can’t do something, they’re even more likely to give it a shot. Anyway, below is their map of the future of Internet crime.

So it looks like we all get to look forward to more virus-laden e-mails trying to trick us into doing the same old things with the same old consequences, only now with even worse English than in the past, probably confusing Rs and Ls throughout. Ah, grobarization!

Link to F-Secure study

Avril Lavigne: killing my opinion of Canadians since 2007.

Due-East — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:36:18 +0000

I can’t believe we’re exporting this garbage to other countries.

I came across a video on YouTube earlier that really grates on my nerves. It’s Avril Lavigne trying to sing her song “Girlfriend” in Chinese, and it’s bad. Really bad. Her accent is kind of almost good, but at the same time still really, really bad. There are other videos of her covering the song in other languages, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of them because this one was just too painful. She obviously couldn’t sing the lines all in one take, so they had to perform some [not-so] creative editing to get her words to fit with the song, and the result is a really choppy vocal “performance” in which she sounds like a drunk, stuttering computer. Did I mention that it’s bad? Now, Chinese isn’t the easiest language to speak, but it’s not hard to sing in Chinese because you don’t have to worry about tones. I just can’t believe that someone would actually sign-off on this version of the song and say, “Yep, that’s what I want people to hear from me in that foreign country.”

Normally I would be much kinder about this kind of thing in the interests of building people up and being positive, but the song’s vulgar, too, so I feel justified totally bashing it. Any song that says “mother f***ing” in it shouldn’t be translated in any way into any other language. Granted, only the chorus of the song is actually sung in Chinese, but that doesn’t make it any less crappy to send it overseas. Couldn’t they have picked a non-profanity-spewing song to dub into other languages? I just think it’s really, really trashy for your one foray into a foreign culture to come along with that phrase. And she’s married, anyway, so why does she need to sing a stupid song like this?

Should you choose to watch the video, you can safely stop at about 25 seconds and see what I’m talking about before any English (and then profanity) comes in…that is, if you can make it that far before it grates on your nerves so much that you stab pencils into your ears.

Link to crappy video. Feel free not to watch it.

The Japanese are more polite than you are

Due-East — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:03:43 +0000

So polite!　So tidy!

The results are in, and the Japanese are the most polite people on earth when they’re traveling. A study conducted for Expedia.com compiled the responses of 15,000 European hoteliers and found that Japanese are the most gracious travelers, followed by Americans and then the Swiss. The Japanese are described as “polite and tidy” and received 35 percent more votes than Americans.

The world’s worst travelers according to the study are the French, followed by India, China, and then Russia. I wonder if China’s ranking had anything to do with their penchant for spitting everywhere and picking their noses at the table.

The Japanese were also awarded the distinction of being “most likely to grope women and steal their underwear from their suitcases.” Ok, not really…

Link to more-interesting-than-this-post article.

Show up at an event, or have your house turned into a “sea of blood”…tough choice.

Due-East — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:25:29 +0000

It must be tough being famous in Asia. You may have heard stories about mobsters in Asia really messing with actors and actresses specifically. One we’ve heard had to do something with Chow Yun Fat being forced by the mob to drink his own or somebody else’s urine for some reason. Today’s post-worthy story comes from Korea.

Allegedly (ooh, see that word? It makes us legit!), two mobsters blackmailed Korean heart-throb Kwon Sang-woo (the guy in the totally unedited photo above) into appearing at some promotional event in Japan last April. They allegedly threated to turn his alleged house into an alleged “sea of blood” if he didn’t allegedly appear at the alleged event. He was allegedly freaked out and thus allegedly went to the event. Now we question the alleged allegedness of the mobsters’ claims as to what really happened based on the fact that mobsters aren’t known for being truthful people, but we’re feeling lazy today, so we won’t comment any further other than to say, “Riiight, Mr. Mobster. That’s what really happened…” If you wanna know what we’re talking about, you’ll have to read the story for yourself. If you don’t, we’ll turn your house into a sea of blood.

Link to article.