Last Thursday saw the implementation of a feature that allows Alipay users to create online communities. But, as has happened with online streaming sites, content revolving around adult themes quickly sprang up and began attracting both attention and criticism.One online group, called “Campus Story”, was filled with photos of young women dressed as provocative schoolgirls, while another group, called “White Collar Diary”, featured many professional-looking women.

In just a few days, these online groups had attracted massive attention for what the Shanghai Daily called their “excessively exposed photos”.

By Sunday, “Campus Diary” had received over 6.7 million views, while “White Collar Diary” had been viewed about 5.87 million times, the Beijing Times reported.What makes the online groups so controversial is a feature unique to the Alipay social platform: if an Alipay user has a good credit rating (usually of around 750), the user is able to donate monetary funds, or “tips”, to another Alipay user of their liking. For this reason, the new social platform has been criticized for becoming an “online brothel”, the People’s Daily reported.

Alipay said in a statement that the service was still in the trial stage, and changes were forthcoming. “As an open platform, Alipay’s social networking feature hopes to facilitate interaction and communication among its users while creating values for our partners in the field,” the statement read in part.

Alipay is China’s third most-popular app after WeChat and QQ.

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Being an expat in China is hard enough when you can’t speak Chinese, or don’t have any local credit cards. Need to buy something on Taobao? Book an ayi? Order more drinking water? Set up an Alipay account? Well, now you don’t need to troll around Sanlitun looking for a temporary girlfriend who can help out. No, now there’s a service just for you: WeChat Secretary.

Everybody has WeChat these days, which can now be used to order taxis, send friends money, and so much more. So why not use the same ubiquitous platform to help clueless foreigners get things done? The service claims it will help people do things like order more drinking water, open Alipay accounts, order items on Taobao, and even do things in person like accompany you to the hospital if you’re sick. WeChat Secretary will take a 10 percent service fee for going to the trouble.

It’s already gathering some buzz in the expat community with advocates like Kaiser Kuo and Wenjing Zhu of Dentsu PR who explains it as “WeChat Secretary takes care of the things I’m too lazy or indifferent to do myself…”

As WeChat Secretary founder David Lancashire explains it, the service began out of personal need. “There were various things I kept putting off simply because it was too much hassle to do, but of course never enough to hire a PA or bother friends and partners with trivial requests. Crowdsourcing a secretary seemed a strangely compelling idea.”

As an affordable personal concierge service that can act as a online purchasing agent, Lancashire said “People can ask [WeChat] to do anything a secretary can do — if we can’t already do it we’ll figure out how to get it done.”

So if you need a rush delivery of 1,000 ping pong balls — WeChat’s strangest request so far– WeChat can help you out.

You can contact WeChat Secretary by WeChat, e-mail or phone (8403-0540).

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Large, doe-like eyes; smooth, porcelain skin; a tapered chin on an almond face—these features can be seen in the many selfies taken by China’s younger generation, especially girls.

But with the need to adhere to a standard of beauty that keeps rising, some women manipulate their images in order to look the part. They use photo booths, Photoshop, apps, and even cameras with special features to achieve their idea of perfect beauty. But now, there’s an app that does the opposite: removes the touch-ups to show what’s truly underneath.

Primo is a Japanese app that reportedly removes any enhancements to an altered image and restores a picture of a person to its original state. This means that Primo will undo the effects of eyes that have been enlarged, and skin tone and teeth that have been lightened.

READ: How to Attract a Chinese Man Part 1: A Cartoon You is a Sexier You

So far, the app is only available on iOS, but users say it helps them not feel “cheated” by images they see. “This software is simply out of this world; never again will I have to worry about being tricked by a picture of a girl,” one commenter said. Another opined, “Very useful; those people that would present a fake appearance to the world should be more careful now.”

Of course, applying this on photos that haven’t been touched up also gives interesting results.

To provide a clearer explanation of how this app works, here is an example:

Does a person simply look too good to be true? Let the Primo app do its work:

Primo is also being used on famous people:

With huge influx of selfies you have to wade through when using Chinese social media, it appears there’s finally a way to look someone in the eyes and see them for who they really are.

Photos: Xinhua, the Nanfang

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The app is called 疯狂来往 in Chinese, but loosely translates into Mad Relations in English. It allows users to play charades online by recording a video of yourself acting out before sharing it with your friends.

The game was developed for Alibaba’s Laiwang chat service, a competitor to the popular WeChat social network.

As Kotaku reports, developer Zhejiang Zhile Network and Hortor Soft apologized for the incident. They issued a statement saying once they realized Mad Relations was uploading videos without the players’ consent, they removed the video sharing function.

While some pundits suspect this is a publicity stunt, much of the criticism from the press has come from outside China’s borders.

Gamasutra said the incident “shows the peril of not thoughtfully handling all forms of player data your game may scrape and upload to servers”, while Polygon titled their story “Game caught uploading private videos to internet without user permission”, a headline some found to be “sensational”.

READ: Chinese Media Publish Hacked Nude Celebrity Photos

Here’s a video of a news report of the story:

Photos: Kotaku, Polygon

The post Alibaba App Leaks 36,000 Videos of Half-Naked Users Online appeared first on The Nanfang.

By monitoring the heart and brain, users of the app will be able to diagnose their own psychological well-being, and obtain treatment using online resources. Users can also make various inquires online and schedule appointments with a psychologist via the internet.

The project is a collaboration between the Beijing Huilongguan Hospital and the Beijing Psychological Crisis Research and Intervention Center.

The need for the app was presented very differently in various media outlets. Sina highlighted the recently publicized suicides of US actor, Robin Williams, and Chinese translator, Sun Chongdan. iFeng quoted a number of statistics, specifically that suicide was a top ten cause of death in China that claimed about 131,000 lives a year, particularly the elderly.

WSJ China Real Time noted the announcement of the app followed a recent spate of officials committing suicide in a year of frequent corruption investigations. More than three dozen officials, or employees, have committed suicide since early 2013, reported Caixin.

Although public stigma associated with mental illness may be waning in China, the public will have to wait between three and five years before the app is released. There is no word whether the app will be compatible with the next generation of the Apple iPhone.

In the meantime, the Chinese public will have to make do with the few psychologists it currently has. According to the World Health Organization’s Mental Health Atlas, China had 1.53 psychiatrists and 0.18 psychologists per 100,000 people in 2011.

[h/t WSJ China Real Time]

Photo: jyrb

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