It does not matter if 66,000 or 430,000 people turned up for the July 1 rally on Monday. It has prompted the city's embattled leader Leung Chun-ying to promise that he would "listen carefully" to the various demands of the protesters. To do this, he could turn to microblogging, but apparently the Chief Executive has not made up his mind. On Tuesday, Leung launched a Sina Weibo account which quickly attracted more than 68,000 followers. He had not posted any comments and he was not following any person. The account, on China's largest microblogging platform, features a profile picture of Leung and a yellow "V" next to his name, indicating it has been verified by Sina. The account was shut down on Wednesday. It is up to Leung's advisers to decide if microblogging is a good idea to rescue his flagging popularity. But Leung might only see it as a tool to be used only during election campaigns. In his race for the top job more than a year ago, he created an account on Tencent Weibo. That account now appears to be abandoned. His last post was on March 25, 2012, the day he was declared the winner, read: "I believe with 'unity', Hong Kong will succeed." Joshua But and Ernest Kao
It is hard to accept defeat in a cyber war despite the knowledge that it is a losing battle when one faces the might of foreign intelligent agencies such as those exposed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ann Chiang Lai-wan, an outspoken Beijing-loyalist lawmaker and the daughter of renowned industrialist Chiang Chen, was frank. "The government of the United States is spying everywhere and it might be hard to prevent," she said after a Legco question was directed to the government yesterday. "But at the same time we are using anti-virus software which was designed by US developers. Should we deploy more resources to design our own anti-virus software?" Commerce chief Greg So Kam-leung, who took the question, was unsure whether the origin of the software would make a real difference in protecting our computers. "Certainly local companies could deploy more efforts in research and development of internet security," he said. Joshua But