China opposed to US listing Taobao as market for piracy

China is "greatly concerned and strongly opposed" to the United States' listing of Taobao, the country's largest consumer e-commerce website, as a notorious market for piracy, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Commerce said on Wednesday.

Last month, the United States kept Alibaba Group's Taobao unit on the United States Trade Representative's (USTR) November notorious markets list for offering a wide range of copyright infringing products.

"When referring to Chinese businesses, we noticed that the United States notorious market list would use terms like 'alledged' and 'according to industry information'," Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, told a news conference.

"With ambiguous terms and no conclusive evidence or detailed analysis, this is very irresponsible and not objective," Shen said.

China believes the United States should take into account the efforts made by Chinese companies to fend off piracy.

"We urge the US to take into account China's effort for IPR protection and the progress made on it and to make a more comprehensive, more objective, more fair evaluation," Shen said.

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Sunway BlueLight supercomputer in operation

The Chinese Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with domestically produced microprocessors and is capable of performing around one-thousand-trillion calculations per second, has officially gone into operation at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in east China's city of Jinan, the center said Thursday.

The computer was installed in September 2011 and underwent a three-month-long trial operation period before going into official use, making China the third country in the world to be capable of producing a supercomputer with domestically produced processors after the United States and Japan.

Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, Sunway BlueLight marks a great technological leap for China's indigenous innovation in development and utilization of high-performance computers, according to the NSCC.

The role of Sunway BlueLight in promoting scientific and economic development of Shandong province, of which Jinan is the provincial capital, will be tapped, namely in fields of ocean utilization, biopharmacy, industrial design, and financial risk prediction.

Meanwhile, the computer will serve as a node in China's national computing grid, contributing to scientific and economic development of the whole country, the NSCC said.

A product that is a combination of high-density packaging and low energy consumption technologies, the supercomputer ranks among the world's leading supercomputers in terms of comprehensive performance, according to the NSCC.

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Ziyuan III satellite sends back images

The Ziyuan III satellite has sent back its first set of visual data days after the orbiter was successfully launched on January 9 to produce high-resolution imagery for civilian use.

According to a statement released Thursday by the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation, the administration has made hi-res imagery based on analysis of the data and posted it on tianditu.cn, a map website made by the administration with independent intellectual property rights.

The visual data covered an area of 210,000 square kilometers that included the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Fujian, said the statement.

The image quality produced from this data is even higher than that achieved by overseas satellites with the same resolution, said the statement, adding that ongoing tests on the satellite might further improve its image quality.

The satellite is expected to compete with its foreign counterparts that currently dominate the country's hi-res remote-sensing and mapping market.

According to the center, the satellite is tasked with offering services to aid the country's land-resources surveys, natural-disaster prevention, agriculture development, water-resources management, and urban planning.

The orbiter was developed and produced by the China Academy of Space Technology, a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

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