Just thought I would post something that isn’t about #LIGATT…

From one of my favorite sites, Danwei, comes an amusing post covering the China Computer World article cursing Tencent, one of the largest Internet companies in the PRC. Tencent is the primary developer of QQ, what may be the most widely used IM client in the world.

Chinese hacker sites are constantly talking about methods for stealing QQ numbers and QQ money.  I’d love to see the dollar figures associated with this.

We rarely write about these type of exploits because very few people outside of China use QQ.  I’m guessing the reason for the limited appeal to people outside of China has something to do with the fact they use that pesky Chinese language.

Well, that has all changed.  QQ is now available in English.  Be the first on your block to say, “Who the hell stole my QQ number?!?”

The new benchmark for any Chinese internet enterprise now seems to be when the number of users surpasses the total US population.  QQ has now accomplished that with 350 million registered members.

Funny thing too, the last report on the Chinese online population put it at 290 million.  So, everybody in China uses QQ and another 60 million from outside the country?  Pretty sure Jumper registered a couple of hundred QQ accounts himself, so that narrows the numbers a bit.   At one point, QQ had 1/2 billion registered users primarily due to people gathering special numbers:

In some places, special QQ account numbers, such as 88888 or 66666 (6 and 8 are lucky numbers in China) were sold, or stolen and then sold, at a high price in the black-market. Some users even registered tens of QQ accounts in one day in order to get their favorite account numbers. In 2002, register users increased almost 1 million every day.

This is actually a very good article from China Daily on the history of QQ and Pony Ma, the founder.

As most of you know, if you want to contact a Chinese hacker for a DDoS attack or any other nefarious reason, you have to do it via his or her QQ number.