Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Sohu has fast hands

The Olympics stole my game: The Sohu-developed, BOCOG-hosted flash game Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds is an unauthorized re-skin of a game written in 2006 by Cadin Batrack:

Flash game theft is nothing new. I’m actually quite used to having my games taken without my permission, and without receiving compensation. The difference here is that this is not some crappy no-name portal. This is The Olympics.

...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).

via trevelyan at adsotrans.

Update: The game has been removed from the BOCOG website following an inquiry from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Thoughts on bankruptcy of the last ‘Animal Farm’: At Global Voices Online, George Sun translates an Oriental Morning Post column by Xiong Peiyun on the fate of Nanjiecun, a famed communist model village:

Nanjie Village, the last “Animal Farm” in China, has been known by the Chinese as the ‘red billionaire village’ and ‘communism village’ until the recent revealment by newspapers that it has arrears around 1 billion yuan although it gradually changed its economic system years ago in light of some ‘capitalistic elements’. In a relevant review, Blogger Xiong Peiyun thought it indicates the failure of ‘communism myth’.

Five things that didn't happen (but might have): At Frog in a Well, C. W. Hayford looks at possible alternate histories:

[W]hat if the Manchu unification had been successfully challenged? In the 1770s and 1780s, the Tay Son brothers led a great rebellion which destroyed the old regimes in the north and south of what is now Vietnam by mobilizing the populace into mass armies. The Qian Long Emperor dispatched troops to support the old regime, which had been loyal to Beijing, but in the "First Tet offensive of 1789" the Vietnamese sent them packing. Tay Son dynamic rule replaced Chinese model government with a more indigenous style. Vietnamese brag that the Quang Trung Emperor thought seriously of incorporating the south of present day China, which had been ruled by Vietnamese towards the end of the Han Dynasty. There were to be two capitals, one Hanoi, the other Guangzhou.

Xinhua: China to probe Bjork concert: Xinhua has published an official response to Bjork's 'Tibet!' cry at the end of the song 'Independence' at her recent Shanghai concert:

China's Ministry of Culture said Friday it will investigate into Icelandic singer Bjork's Shanghai concert during which she shouted 'Tibet' at the end of an unapproved song, 'Declare Independence'.

Bjork's 'political show has not only broken Chinese laws and regulations and hurt the feeling of Chinese people, but also went against the professional code of an artist,' the ministry said on its website.

...It said it will tighten the scrutiny of foreign artistic groups coming for performance in China to prevent similar incidents from happening again.