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Now that the Beijing Olympic Committee has finished cracking down on non-licensed fuwa, maybe they can send a team over to Sohu.com to break some kneecaps. The mega-portal appears to have been caught with its pants down stealing flash games from independent (read: poorer than BOCOG members) games designers:

Here’s the story more-or-less in full from its source: The Pencil Farm. You can click on the link there for more details including some hilarious screen comparisons showing the harmonious pro-Olympics version of the game side-by-side with the original.

The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

I did some research and it seems that the web site was created by Sohu.com, the company that last year busted Google for plagiarizing from one if its products. At the time Sohu made three requests of Google: that they stop offering the software for download as quickly as possible, that they make an apology, and that they discuss compensation for the offense. I’m currently considering my legal options, but I think these three things sound like reasonable requests to make of Sohu.

The Beijing Olympic Committee has also not been lenient with copyright infringers. Back in October the director of the State Intellectual Property Office, Tian Lipu, pledged to prevent Olympic piracy. Indeed, the Olympic web site even has a page set up where you can report infringement of intellectual property rights. Evidently, they are slightly less concerned when The Olympics infringes on the rights of others.

This is several times more delicious than when Hanban pirated foreign media content for its boondoggle of a Chinese-learning website. I’m personally indifferent to the Olympics as an event (running and jumping aren’t high on my A-list of activities that should be state-subsidized), but a full year of stories like this is just the sort of thing that could make me a convert.

Bizarre entries from the Linguistic Data Consortium still surface every now-and-then like sea creatures from the deep. The latest I noticed was a surprising definition for 深入研究. The dictionary had it as “lucubrate”, which WordNet defines as “to elaborate on”.

True to form, both Dict.cn and Kingsoft appear to have copied the entry wholesale without lucubrating too much over accuracy or attribution. Still, a definite step-up for them from the depths of “nigger-brown“.

What do people feel about switching the output of the “popup annotation” (the default output from the Adso home page and the popups on newsinchinese.com to a more comprehensive definition (something that includes all of the glosses in the database)? Right now Adso chooses the most likely definition/pos given its understanding of Chinese grammar. I’m not sure that most people notice this selectivity until the system actually gets something wrong….

The reason the system is built this way is that Adso aims to offer gist translation and other sorts of generic semantic analysis functionality. Being able to hone down a word to a single definition is much more useful for search/semantic/translation applications than just showing a list of possible definitions. I strongly believe that structuring data in a way that enables this is important for the ability of the open source community to innovate in the long-term in this space.

But maybe this is the wrong approach for data-display, and especially for a project that aims to make it easy for people to collaborate around language. I’ve noticed that a lot of users (especially new contributors) like to pack multiple definitions into the popup windows rather than add new ones. I usually edit these during the review process, but don’t want people to feel disappointed if their edits “disappear” from one release to the next, especially if they aren’t really gone, but merely restructured. Also, if people really WANT more comprehensive definitions when they use an annotator, it is easy enough to change the system and get Adso to produce that sort of output. It’s actually much faster to do as well since this eliminates the hard work of grammatical disambiguation.

Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this, especially since the next review is coming up fast and it looks as if we’ll have more than a thousand new submissions.

Even those whose sole experience with China involve booze-fueled stopovers are probably familiar with the local custom of ignoring lines, regulations and courtesy except insofar as they provide opportunities for graft. This is cute for a while in the 入乡随俗 spirit of adventuring, but gets old fast once you realize there aren’t many other places where customs involve getting spit on while biking to work.

But rushing past that, let me devote this post to complaining about something I’ll call the Shanghai cab-shuffle. This behavior isn’t unique to Shanghai, but it’s particularly egregious here, perhaps because it’s impossible to get a cab in normal circumstances and desperate times call for desperate measures when you’re hustling through life and need to get to a club pronto.

Those with experience in northern China are probably nodding, and thinking “nothing special here”. And to be fair, the shuffle is not unknown in the northern hinterlands. You see it a lot during traffic jams or Mongol invasions when social order collapses and the Beihai economy picks up. Even in these circumstances though, I think the northern shuffle is a more furtive beast, and you’ve got a decent chance of shaming someone by calling them a dick in Chinese. In Shanghai, I don’t think anyone would bat an eyelid at this — screwing your neighbour is not only commonplace, it’s expected.

Put another way, Shanghai elevates hostile, feigned oblivion to an art. After all, getting a cab is not exactly a subtle diversion. At a minimum, it involves wading into the bike lane and pumping your arm using the sort of repetitive motion that centuries of evolution have trained human eyes to notice lest it involve wolves leaping out from undergrowth. In Shanghai, the atavistic response to seeing this is to walk two meters over and try to flag one down first. This is such pointless behavior it’s baffling to see it on a large scale: does no-one ever just snap in this country? But then astonishment turns to something else when you realize that people here really do value saving a bit of time over visibly and unapologetically screwing their neighbour. In a sign that irony might be divine but stupidity is definitely human, I noticed each of the people who shuffled me tonight getting progressively angry at being shuffled in turn. But when the fifth person showed up, something happened that I’d never seen before….

I saw hesitation on his face.

Had courtesy for the common man crept into someone’s heart? Was he wondering WHO he should stand behind? Curious which of our four lines was “moving fastest”, so to speak? Not at all! He was panicking because he couldn’t inch any CLOSER to oncoming traffic without wading right out into the road and getting flattened by a bus. Which was when I started walking home, contemplating that any city that requires you to wage pointless and silent battles for street positioning needs a heart.