Lisa Evans

Two of China's most popular technology news Web sites went offline Tuesday after carrying news reports that linked the son of China's president to a corrupt African deal.

The technology news sections disappeared for several hours from major Chinese portals Sina.com.cn and NetEase.com early Tuesday afternoon, when they started redirecting viewers to general news pages. Both tech sections had carried reports on a state-owned company accused of bribing Namibian officials in the last day, but those reports were missing when the Web pages reappeared.

The suspensions appeared to be a government penalty against the companies for reporting on a sensitive political issue.

"I'm impressed by the bravery of Sina and Netease in attempting to report this at all," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a Hong Kong-based expert on the Internet in China, in an online message.

Information on top leaders' children has always been off-limits in Chinese media, though the Internet has made it more difficult to control discussions on such topics, MacKinnon said.

Chinese police heavily patrol the Internet, and Internet companies run rigorous screening to prevent sensitive information from appearing on user forums or in search results on their sites. Companies can be punished if that process fails to catch certain political or pornographic content.

"This is not particularly surprising or different from long-standing censorship patterns," MacKinnon said.

A story posted on the NetEase tech page the night before its suspension cited English broadcaster BBC as saying that Nuctech, a Chinese company, was suspected of bribery in a deal to provide scanners for airports and ports in Namibia. The BBC report had said Namibian authorities wanted to question Hu Haifeng, the former company president and son of Chinese president Hu Jintao, but did not suspect him in the case.

The NetEase story did not mention Hu, but said Namibia wanted to question "relevant" Nuctech executives.

Sina's tech page carried a similar article the next morning, hours before the sites went down. After the tech sections returned to the portals, visiting the URLs of the scandal reports returned messages that they could not be found or had been deleted.

An employee who answered the phone at NetEase Tuesday said its tech section was down for tests. Sina did not respond to a request for comment.

Nuctech's parent company, Tsinghua Holdings, controls a range of other technology companies including Chinese PC maker Tsinghua Tongfang.

Red Hat has launched a new partner program to make sure its enterprise Linux and JBoss software are core components of a cloud-computing infrastructure, and to guarantee that Red Hat-based applications will run reliably and safely in the cloud.

The new Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program unveiled this week certifies cloud-computing providers to offer applications and infrastructure based on Red Hat software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and JBoss Java middleware, according to Red Hat.

Amazon Web Services, which already has a technology partnership to run RHEL as part of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering, has signed on to become the first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

Red Hat considered the various constituencies interested in cloud computing - end-users and independent software vendors among them - and decided to set up a new program to work with cloud-computing providers to serve them all, said Mike Evans, vice president of corporate development at Red Hat.

Different Red Hat customers have different interests and needs when it comes to the cloud, he said. Enterprise customers want to know that their applications that run on Red Hat in their own data centers will run safely and reliably in the cloud, while ISVs want to ensure that the applications they've built can be extended to the cloud without too much hassle, Evans said. Red Hat believes that it serves both by ensuring that companies providing cloud-computing infrastructure can handle the technical and logistical complexities of transferring Red Hat-based applications to the cloud, Evans said.

Although Red Hat unveiled the new program this week, it won't reveal the specific requirements of the program until August, when it also will reveal other partners, he added.

Through the program, Red Hat will work with cloud-computing infrastructure providers to technically enable customers to move RHEL and JBoss subscriptions from their in-house environments to the cloud, Evans said. The company also will help technically enable by-the-hour, pay-as-you-go versions of RHEL and JBoss, and provide joint technical support with the cloud-computing provider. Red Hat wants to ensure customers will get the same level of support from Red Hat after moving applications to the cloud that they do before the move, Evans said. Red Hat also will plan coordinated marketing and sales efforts with its Premier Cloud Provider Partners, he added.

Currently, there are a handful of large companies in the cloud-computing market - Google, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM, Salesforce.com and Microsoft among them - but he anticipates there eventually will be 50 to 100 cloud-computing providers when all is said and done.

"I call this the 'goat-herding' phase of cloud computing," he said. "It's the wild West right now. We're trying to bring some sanity and safety [to the market] and give customers more options."

The list of cloud-computing providers is still being decided, so the move for businesses to take their applications to the cloud is still in the early stages of adoption. While the recession has slowed the move to cloud computing, analysts expect the market for cloud-based IT services will continue to grow. Research firm IDC predicts that spending on cloud-based IT services will reach US$42 billion by 2012 and account for 25 percent of IT spending growth that year.