CHINA -WHAT'S- ONLINE

Raymond Zhong, a technology reporter based in Beijing, discussed the tech he's using :

'What are your most important tech tools for reporting in China?'
The Chinese Internet is like the small-town setting of a crime novel : Things are mysteriously disappearing from it all the time.

Social media posts vanish. News and Blog articles are taken down. Sensitive bits are excised from videos.

You can't always predict what will be removed, either by censors or by a regular person starting to have second thoughts about his or her own unfiltered utterance.

Even pages on the websites of government agencies and major corporations have a way of quietly falling into black holes.

That's why a Google chrome extension called Full Page Screen Capture is invaluable for Internet research in China. with one click, I get a screen shot of an entire page, top to bottom.

An embarrassingly large share of the files on my laptop are PDF's generated this way. I only wish a similar function were built into my iPhone, as it is on Huawei sets.

Google sometimes caches  past versions of web pages, as does the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. These crawlers don't preserve everything.

But when you manage to discover in the archives the exact page you've been hunting for, frozen for posterity at exactly the right moment, it's an incredible endorphin rush.

For capturing streaming videos, before they are taken down, I use Quick Time Player to take a recording of my screen.

There are also sites that convert videos from YouTube and other platforms into downloadable files. I won't name these services. The video sites don't like them so they are constantly being shut down.

Reporting in an authoritarian country is a struggle of memory against forgetting. But some tools help.

The honor and serving of the latest global operation research on Technology & Usefulness, continues.