Until now, there are more female celebrities have been sucked into the scandal with some of the latest pictures released. Here's one of the very exotic looking Maggie Q (李美琪).
pparently though, this was just a promotional picture for Edison Chen's clothing line and may have nothing to do with his sexcapades. Really, there's nothing too scandalous about the pic anyway. Nevertheless, a sex tape involving Edison Chen and Maggie Q is said to be circulating in Hong Kong...
More updates on the gorgeous Maggie Q and Edison Chen sex scandal coming soon...
Yesterday Hisae was telling me about the Edison Chen photo scandal in China. She'd read about it on Japanese bulletin boards, and joined the millions who'd downloaded the photos to see what all the fuss was about. Brief recap: Canto-Pop star / rapper / playa / actor Edison Chen took his pink Apple laptop in to get fixed at Elite Multimedia in Hong Kong, where he'd bought it. A repairman there, Sze Honchun, found up to 10,000 explicit images of Edison fucking various famous Chinese singers and actresses (Gillian Chung from Twins, actresses Cecilia Cheung and Bobo Chan, and others), copied them, and started releasing them on the internet to make money. Arrested on charges of dishonest gain, Sze is currently out on bail, awaiting trial.
The scandal has thrown the careers (not to mention the personal lives) of some of China's biggest stars into turmoil. It's also focused the attention of Asia, if not the world, on sexual mores. Is China sexually conservative? How widely is porn viewed there? Which is more sexually permissive, ex-colonial Hong Kong or ex-communist mainland China? How do the Hong Kong stars' public images differ from their private behaviour?
Some amazing stats have emerged. When the photos were posted on mainland Chinese chatroom Tianya.com, they were downloaded up to 20 million times a day. The government didn't take any steps to remove them initially -- although they censor political or religious stuff severely, the Chinese authorities don't seem to care much about sex images. "Web sites on the mainland are usually more sensitive to political issues than to pornography," says the Wikipedia entry, "and for several weeks major sites such as Baidu permitted the images to be disseminated, attracting Hong Kong users". Eventually, on February 18th, the official Beijing Network News Council held a meeting about what they rather charmingly called "the romantic pictures", rebuking search engine Baidu for spreading them.
By this time -- three weeks after the first photo appeared online -- it was too late to stop the images from circulating. Hong Kong media outlet Wen Wei Po sent a questionnaire out and found that 40% of high school and primary school kids had already seen the sex pictures. Some were even trying it for themselves. For people of all ages, there was stigma involved in not having seen the images. Japanese bulletin boards hosted discussions in which people criticized the shape of Edison's penis (too smooth, straight and veinless, thought the Japanese, with too small a head) or gave it new names (the "Edison sausage").
Western media coverage was contradictory and somewhat confused. Used to treating mainland China as a conservative, censorious place, the West seemed surprised that people in Hong Kong had had to use mainland Chinese servers to access the images. "We tend to imagine Hong Kong as a free-wheeling, anything goes kind of place," said Foreign Policy. "But in many ways, it still reflects the conservatism of the mainland."
Maybe they should have said "in many ways, it still reflects the conservatism of the West". Daisann McLane, a Hong Kong-based freelance journalist, told the LA Times: "In many ways, Hong Kong preserves a lot of Confucian ideals that got swept away on the mainland," she said. "There is a disjuncture between public image and what's in the pictures."
On this last point -- the disconnect between what the Japanese call omote and ura, public face and daily life -- there was more agreement. "The shock many Hong Kong residents felt at seeing images of the stars nude and having sex either online or in print with certain body parts strategically blocked -- including some adorned with stuffed animals, police uniforms, fishnet lingerie and bikinis -- was compounded by the fact that several of the female stars have been marketed as ingenues," continued the LA Times.
This obviously interests me -- a couple of days ago I was telling you how Emmy the Great's style reflected a Hong Kong ingenue mode. "What made the scandal especially shocking was that some of the female stars in the photos have built their careers on "innocent girl" images," remarked Foreign Policy.
While I agree that this makes the images exciting, I don't think it's in any way contradictory. People in the West have a tendency to focus too much on things being logical opposites, which in our minds makes them not mutually-creating complementaries but mutually-banishing irreconcilables. Something must either be guilty or innocent; it cannot be both. As a result, unable to hold opposites in its mind at the same time, the West tends to be rather too quick to charge people with hypocrisy. Asia is much more dialectical in its thinking. A dialectical view of the ingenue is that her innocence is in dialogue with its opposite, is a theatrical representation. If this is true of ordinary people, it's even more true of actors and singers, who have not only the public / private split, but also a whole series of fictional personalities and audience projections overlaid onto their natural contradictions. It's very simple, and very complex. An ingenue is someone who pretends to pretend not to know her own sexual power. Or, to make it even more simple and complex, who pretends to pretend to pretend to pretend, in order to gain sexual power, not to know her sexual power. An ingenue, in other words, is not a victim, or a hypocrite. She's a powerful sexual actress.
Here's a video of Gillian Chung weeping at a press conference apparently held impromptu in a public railway station following the publication, last year, of nude photos of her shot in Malaysia. Now these are very complex tears, with onion layers of meaning. They might represent real pain because people saw her naked, but they might also be a way to re-establish a conservative public ingenue persona after being caught in private in a rather different mode. Caught doing something much "worse", Gillian hasn't cried in public this time (though she may well be crying about the cancellation of her Olympic opening performance). Her statements, this time, have been terse and unemotional. She was foolish, she said, and has grown up since Edison snapped her. Here she is acting the part of a schoolgirl, with Edison as the only boy student in a girl's school:
It seems real Hong Kong schoolgirls have also grown up rather quickly in the last month. But maybe their innocence was always somewhat more dialectical than we presume.
Katrina Halili and Hayden Kho has a sex video scandal. The BUZZ reported that Vicky Belo has a copy of the scandal.
This rumor is circulating now after a source told The BUZZ that Vicky Belo, ex-girlfriend of Hayden has a copy of the said video. According to the source, the doctor has the sex video scandal of Katrina Halili and Hayden Kho, which ultimately led to the breakup of Hayden and Vicky.
Rumor has it that Hayden Kho tried to commit suicide after Belo left him because of Katrina, but Vicky quickly denied such rumors.
After remaining silent for Chinese New Year, the anime loving “Kira” released new sets of pictures featuring more of Hong Kong’s favorite stars Gillian Chung and Cecilia Cheung (people say she’s the equivalent of Lindsay Lohan over there). A Maggie Q sex tape was rumored to have been posted on a large forum, but was quickly taken off by forum moderators. Batgwa.com suggests a showbiz insider is spreading these pictures since an individual emailed them pictures to one of their addresses that was never publicly published and was only used for media contacts.
“We are incredibly curious to know who sent us this message. The email address it was sent to has never been listed on the ‘Contact Us’ or ‘About Us’ pages of our website. It has only ever been given to music and film companies for them to send us press material. And we have only ever used it to send out press releases to other media outlets such as newspapers.”
Even CNN reported on the scandal sweeping a nation. In any case, Edison Chen is in hiding as is Gillian Chung. Bobo Chan’s wedding has been called off at the behest of her fiance’s mom or grandma. Edison has also been dropped from Stephen Chow’s movie, Jump. I don’t know why the media is chastising Edison for this. Over here in America, when an actor tapes himself screwing the biggest celebrities in the country, every guy he meets on the street will give him a jumping high-five and every girl he filmed will get even more movie deals and record contracts.
Finally, I offer you this quote from a commenter by the name of YM.
It’s a PR disaster. They should not have claimed that the photos were faked in the first place. That drew a bunch of Photoshop experts to the scene and delivered crash courses on Photoshop techniques. Not to mention an even bigger audience who came for more earthly purposes than to learn Photoshop 101.
They should not have cried bloody murder in such high pitch to attract police attention. You know, police in HK are so servile these days. So they made arrests like crazy, and their false interpretation of the laws muddled the distinction between “crime and sin†which ended up attracting even more people to speculate on the what, who, when, where, and how.
You have to take a look at the sheepish smiles of the police spokesman when he clarified that sending those pics to your friends is okay, but not to the public…(Aside: so those asking for their mailbox be filled may be setting traps for you.) and that there are thousands of those pics, not just a handful.
That kicked off the witch hunt for the rest of the pics — precisely why most of us are gathering here day in and day out.
Pity that the HK police had to pull up the Interpol stunt which failed to ward off the crowd anyway.
The updated uploads are probably due more to making protests to the police’s actions than to serve the public’s interest in this matter. If the photos were taken from EDC’s hard disk back in 2006, there is high chance they’ve been spreaded around for some time already. So there’s no surprise that people more knowledgeable in Internet hide-and-seek will come up to challenge the HK police.
BTW, EDC was using a Mac — running an OS with much acclaim of its security — yet won’t stand a chance with a clean boot CD to reset the admin’s password. Probably the word “encryption†is beyond EDC’s English standard, and the product “truecrypt†escapes his technical radar screen, if any.
It’s a good PR lesson. Usually PR disaster were due to doing too little too late, with an intention to hush up. Yet this saga is totally the opposite — people are doing too much too soon and in such a loud voice too.
So, what have we learned? If you’re going to make sex tapes of your girlfriends, be sure to use True Crypt 5.0 and if they’re leaked, run as fast and as far away as possible. Also, make sure you trim your bush. That part is probably the most important.
The Keypad Credit Card, a credit card with a built-in number pad. Yes, this is made for higher security reason. User can enter his or her secret PIN into the card’s keypad to receive a numeric passcode for one-time use. To authorize banking transaction, the passcode is entered into an interface and instantly validated by an authentication server. This process removes the need to enter a PIN into an unsecured device such as a web browser and provides a user-friendly defense against electronic banking fraud.
LG Philips LCD claim to have invented an LCD screen technology for laptops that resist smudges, fingerprints and dirt LIKE TEFLON. LG Philips LCD said the thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panel allows easy removal of dust, smudges, fingerprints and even permanent ink.The company plans to start mass-producing such screens in the second half of next year
Dentist training now come to more advanced. The novice dentists will soon get the practice on Simroid, a robotic dental patient. Simroid was shown at the 2007 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. The bot can follow spoken instruction, closely monitor a dentist’s performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to mouth pain. This is going to help dental trainees learn how to communicate with the patients. One more cool stuff about this bot will be sensors, she can simulate a gagging reflex incase the dentist inserts the dental instruments too far into her mouth.
Do you want to know how much fat on your body? Tanita a Japanese company has released the AB-101, a device that estimates the fat on your abdomen. Just lie down and let it check it for you, the whole process takes only 30 seconds. The AB-101 is powered by AC power adapter and also comes with a rechargeable battery. It measures 630 x 250 x 440mm (width x depth x height) and weighs 2.6 kg. The Tanita AB-101 will be available in February 2008 for ¥294,000 yen ($ 2,650).
That’s cool, looks like soon in the future we don’t have to worry about the finger smudges on our phone’s glossy screen. Guys in Norway’s Elliptic Labs are showing us the new touchless user interface technology. The system is capable of detecting movements in 3-dimensions without your finger touching the screen. Just point to the screen from as far as 5 feet away and you can manipulate objects in 3D. According to Elliptic, the technology is compact enough to be embedded into mobile devices.
Oh Great! Driver needs the GPS and passenger needs entertainment. Now, Hyundai is looking towards incorporating the dual-view LCD technology for their future vehicles. This new technology allows two different views between the driver and the front passenger from one centrally mounted LCD Display Meaning to say, the driver can check outs the GPS and at the other side, the front passenger can enjoy movie. Hyundai will be putting on this technology in its Grandeur saloons first.
In this “How it’s Made” segment, they are going to show you how the airplane propellers were manufactured. If you have been wondering how, then check it out after the jump.
Mobile phone can never leave us today, they are always with us all the time. According to researchers, in the U.S., 50 percent of children have mobile phones. And today, it can be used to pay stuff. The NFC (Near Field Communication) is a very-short-range wireless connectivity that allows quick, secure two-way interactions among electronic devices. It uses a small chip embedded on phone or plastic card and you can be simply placed it on a reader device like the pad on a debit card terminal, kiosk machine, turnstile or a portable NFC device to initiate a transaction.
WTF! Somewhere in the world, they have a special PCs working on fuel which can be connect directly to your car’s fuel tank. It is use to analyzes the fuel condition and also diagnoses the overall condition of the car, while consuming some gas fluid.
WTF! Another new high tech bra. Check out the Embedded Bra shown in Beauty World Japan exhibition in Tokyo. This bra will help to prevents supposedly harmful radiation from cell phones to invade the wearer’s body and also to improve moods while reducing stress simultaneously. Alright, that’s cool and that’s healthy. No more picture after the break. By the way, WTF stands for What’s That For, lol.
This gotta be funny, another rumors for Apple, the Macbook Nano. New rumor says that Apple will announce the MacBook Nano at Apple’s Macworld expo on Monday. No word on the specs at this time.
In the previous episode you have seen Mr. Tom driving a…I mean showing-off his Nissan GTR, the fastest production car in the world and now he wants to compare the speed of his Blectec Total Blender with his Nissan GTR… toy version.
Eazo’s new PC, a desktop made of wood, given a name called Eazo Z70 Wooden Exterior PC. It is powered by a water-cooled Intel Core2 Extreme QX9775 processor. No pricing this time but for sure it’s going to take a lot from your wallet.
Until now, there are more female celebrities have been sucked into the scandal with some of the latest pictures released. Here's one of the very exotic looking Maggie Q (李美琪).
By this time -- three weeks after the first photo appeared online -- it was too late to stop the images from circulating. Hong Kong media outlet Wen Wei Po sent a questionnaire out and found that 40% of high school and primary school kids had already seen the sex pictures. Some were even trying it for themselves. For people of all ages, there was stigma involved in not having seen the images. Japanese bulletin boards hosted discussions in which people criticized the shape of Edison's penis (too smooth, straight and veinless, thought the Japanese, with too small a head) or gave it new names (the "Edison sausage").
This obviously interests me -- a couple of days ago I was telling you how Emmy the Great's style reflected a Hong Kong ingenue mode. "What made the scandal especially shocking was that some of the female stars in the photos have built their careers on "innocent girl" images," remarked Foreign Policy.
