Chinese film star's sex-pix leaked by laptop tech, spreading everywhere

China is rocking from a sex-scandal involving a popular actor whose laptop was plundered by a service tech who has been trickling out shocking photos of the idol getting laid by various famous personages. The Chinese government is straining to slow down the scandal, but it's spreading like wildfire.

The images - illegally copied from the star's customised pink MacBook - have prompted a media frenzy here that has eclipsed the fixation about Britney Spears in the English-language web.

As well as crashing servers in celebrity-obsessed Hong Kong, the gossip has spread to the mainland, where one online discussion generated more than 25m page views and 140,000 comments...

Since the first images appeared more than two weeks ago, an unknown culprit has uploaded dozens of fresh pictures every day, each time putting more celebrities into more compromising positions.

Link

• [Hamish MacDonald]

  Have you seen his video in response to this?

  He begs the culprit to stop, which is understandable, but the way he puts it you’d think this was a crime against all humanity and that the release of more pictures would cause the moon to crash into the Pacific ocean.

  http://theblemish.com/2008/02/edison-chen-responds/

• [phlavor]

  I am both shocked and appalled! Link plz.

• [dculberson]

  I can’t imagine letting anyone take pictures of me naked. Unless I was comfortable with them being circulated worldwide. Which I’m not.

  Why oh why would they allow him to take those pictures?

  Not that it excuses the perp’s actions – they should all be in jail.

• [BWG]

  God, I can’t believe this story has made it here.

  Much ado about nothing if you ask me.

  BWG
  Hong Kong Photographic

• [clifford]

  #6, no you are wrong. It’s not okay to have your private personal life put on display regardless if you are a public figure and/or a douchebag.

• [Hokkaido Hillbilly]

  This is appalling and completely unacceptable!

  I mean, there’s like over 1000 leechers and the torrent is still stuck at 98%!

  What is the world coming to? ;)

• [Spoon]

  I thought the official stance from commenter’s on boingboing when it comes to digital media is that DRM is bad!, copying media isn’t ‘stealing’!, and that sharing digital media shouldn’t be a prosecutable crime.

  I’m shocked at anyone disagrees with #6!

• [Jake0748]

  Who cares? The guy was moron enough for putting all his sexual encounters on video in the first place.

• [Lilah]

  It’s interesting because sex pictures coming out in America don’t really mean anything these days, but Edison Chen has lost multiple advertisement accounts and (I believe) a movie part over this. And no woman will want to be alone with him now. Though I think that last part hardly matters, because as the pictures show, he’s been with just about everybody.

• [Joe MommaSan]

  Not very professional of the techs, that’s for sure.

  Back when I was still doing service calls, a customer had me install video RAM in a Compaq laptop. The woman who used the machine was a young, pretty marketing type – certainly not someone you’d suspect was into hardcore porn. She asked that the machine be backed up before any work was done “just in case.”

  No problem. It’s your money, or your boss’s anyway, but I have to take it back to the shop to back it up. (this was before USB hard drives)

  So I’m sitting there back at the shop bored out of my skull watching files copy across the network when I happen to notice the names of some of those files are . . . odd. I’m usually not one to snoop through people’s personal files – don’t really have the time or the desire – but my curiosity was piqued. So I noted the name of one of the “odd” files and did a quick search after the backup completed.

  It was a video clip of a girl orally servicing a horse. Some of the other stuff was equally outrageous. I’d never in a million years have suspected she was into that sort of thing.

  Now, you’d think that keeping something like that on your work computer might not be the best idea in the world, but it’s better than keeping something like that on your work computer and sending it in for service so the tech gets an eyeful. Fortunately for her, she got me instead of the Geek Squad.

  Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is don’t leave your porn collection on your computer (especially your work computer) when it gets sent in for service. Even if we don’t mean to look, well, sometimes stuff happens, ya know? And you’re a lot more likely to get the Geek Squad than me these days.

• [calyth]

  It’s quite pathetic that Hong Kong Chinese thinks that because being a player justifies having their privacy breached, or that he’s a pervert (I’ve seen those arguments in Chinese). The law used to prosecute the techs that distributed the photos are antiquated, and instead, they should’ve prosecuted them based on privacy laws.

  Whether Edison Chen is a player, or what he does in the bedroom is the business between him and whoever he is with. Hong Kongers really have nothing better to do than to poke into the private lives of others, calling them perverts, but doesn’t not realize that they themselves are perverted and warped.

• [MOONBAT]

  This is like sitting at the computer and realizing it’s full of candy. Sweet candy made of other people’s misery.

• [hellhead]

  I find it despicable this could happen.

  Except when I’m at my PC alone in the middle of the night. Then I completely okay with it.

• [Yankadian]

  A pink MacBook? How gay is that?

• [angryhippo]

  Wait, Best Buy is in China?

• [Elvis Gump]

  These comments useless without pictures…

• [anangbhai]

  Its the old joke about a group of priests being so offended by a nude painting that they decided each of them would closely examine the painting in private for hours before declaring it immoral or a work of art.

• [dbsboy]

  600+ photos and counting… people are waiting for the videos now

• [MeaningOfLife]

  It’s okay because Edison Chen is a douchebag anyway. A lot of people don’t like him. He can’t act, he can’t sing, the only reason he’s famous is because he has connections in Hong Kong.

  On the other hand, the ladies he been with, some of the biggest Hong Kong movie stars, are in deep water.

  Here’s the current Wikipedia link to the story, take it with a grain of salt since it’s Wikipedia after all.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Chen_photo_scandal

• [Takuan]

  could have handled it better. People are ready to believe anything can be photoshopped – that should have been the initial disinformation. Learn from politicians: “When guilty as hell, LIE, LIE, LIE!”

• [dEFROG]

  All I can add is that the story’s been a godsend for the local Chinese language newspapers and weekly magazines, who have cheerfully and helpfully been printing as many of the pics as they can get away with (cropped and pixelated, of course) every single day for the last few weeks. Because there’s absolutely no way you can report the story without showing all the pictures to everyone.

  For the record, the pop group Twins (one of whom, Gillian Chung, is in the photos) lost a Chinese New Year promo deal with HK Disneyland over this as well. Because no one ever has sex at Disney. Ever.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGxjnjAA-OU

• [ill lich]

  Imagine being one of his past “relations”, waiting for your photo to leak.

  Which reminds me. . . when is Gene Simmons going to make his private polaroid collection into a website?

• [RacingChikin]

  “This is a very big celebrity story, but I don’t see any deep meaning except that one should beware of geeks”

  fantastic.

• [Santa’s Knee]

  Geek Squad Strikes Again!!!

• [help i cant comfirm my username themelonbread]

  This article leaves out the best detail of the story- the pics were originally leaked by someone who called themself Kira!

  Watashi wa L desu.

• [Scott]

  http://www.hollywoodgrind.com/edison-chen-and-gillian-chung-naughty-pic-scandal

• [pr0nk0k]

  Imagine if Wilmer Valderrama took his laptop to GeekSquad.