Nearly 10,000 Chinese Web site operators have lost the use of their .com Internet addresses due to telecom problems caused by last month's earthquake near Taiwan, state media reported yesterday.
The quake, which severed major international telecommunications lines, caused thousands of .com domain names held by Chinese users to vanish from world registries, the Beijing Times reported, citing domain registry sources.
Lingering disruptions to overseas Web connections also have prevented them from accessing the overseas registries to re-register the names.
"So far, a large number of domain names held by businesses have been snatched by overseas investors, causing businesses to suffer losses," the newspaper said. It provided no examples.
Domain names ending in .com or other suffixes provide easily recognizable names for Web site addresses, which are actually a series of underlying numbers.
Though underlying Web sites are unaffected, the paper said more than 9,000 domain-holders had lost the use of their .com addresses, and the number was expected to grow while the Internet disruptions last.
The undersea quake damaged cables that carry most of the region's telecom traffic, sparking widespread communications dis-ruptions affecting Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere.
Knock-on problems occurred as far away as Australia.
Access in China to overseas Web sites was cut off for several days following the quake. Though largely restored, the connections remain slower than normal.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to