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It’s been called the largest annual migration in the world: the Chinese New Year travel rush. Every year, millions of Chinese travel across the country to celebrate the start of a new lunar year with family members; and for most Chinese people, traveling via the country’s rail network is the only way to get home for the holiday.

Historically, the only way to buy a train ticket in China has been to wait in line at a train station or ticket agent office. With tickets available only 10 days in advance, and demand running high, many travelers can find themselves waiting in line overnight in the cold, sometimes for multiple days, in order to secure a ticket. Complicating matters are much-hated scalpers, who snap up tickets ahead of the crowds and resell them at inflated prices.

This year however, the country’s railway ministry introduced a series of long-awaited reforms meant to alleviate some of the head-aches that have long been associated with buying train tickets during the busy season. Notably, travelers would be able to buy tickets online, at the Railway Ministry’s service website, www.12306.cn, or over the phone 12 days ahead of traveling. Furthermore, travelers would be required to submit their real names, much like with air tickets, in order to curb ticket scalping.

Unfortunately though, as the Chinese media widely reported today, heavy user demand has overwhelmed the bandwidth of the new booking system website and built-in time limits on online transactions have creating new problems for would-be travelers.

One woman, surnamed Duan, told the Beijing News that she tried unsuccessfully more than 10 times to access the ticketing website, before opting to purchase her tickets via telephone, which many of the country’s netizens claim is the more reliable way to get a ticket. Although she met with busy lines several times, Duan was eventually successful in purchasing transportation for the holiday. “From start to finish”, Duan claims, “I spent about an hour and a half.”

Many other travelers though have had much less success, especially those who proceeded with online ticket purchasing. According to the China Daily, dozens of people nationwide have reported that they have been charged for tickets that were not issued. Originally, all ticket transactions performed on 12306.cn had to be completed within 20 minutes. If this time limit was exceeded the user would still be charged and the ticket would return to the pool of available tickets.

According to the latest reports, the Railway Ministry is working on increasing the bandwidth to the 12306 website, and has extended the time-out limit to 45 minutes. Those who were charged for tickets that were not issued have also been promised refunds within 15 days. Despite these promises, complaints and frustration against the country’s fledgling online ticketing system continues to run high on the country’s internet forums and social networking sites.

At present, 12306.cn has more than 8 million registered users, a figure that will undoubtedly grow as the Chinese New Year approaches. Last year, it was estimated that over 2.8 billion passenger trips were conducted during the New Year’s travel rush. As wages rise and travel becomes a more important part of the Chinese economy, passenger trips are also expected to increase this New Year.

The series of mega-hacks is continuing in China, with gigantic BBS community Tianya the latest in a series of high-profile hacking cases that has affected numerous internet services and revealed the passwords of millions of internet users.

The good — well, kinda good — news for Tianya users among the 4 million whose usernames and passwords were published online is that the data the hackers published is reportedly from a backup database made before 2009. Since an upgrade in 2010, Tianya has stored users passwords in an encrypted format, so anyone who has changed their password since 2009 shouldn’t have much to worry about (unless they still use the old username/password combination for other sites). Tianya currently has over 20 million registered users.

Of course, that raises a pretty obvious follow-up question: so Tianya’s password database wasn’t encrypted until 2010? Apparently at least some of them weren’t, with passwords stored in plain text in a database. In its statement about the hacking, Tianya says there are “historical reasons” for this, but declined to elaborate any further.

In any event, as if it wasn’t clear enough already, users of internet services in China should be very careful about the passwords they’re using. If you’re not sure whether your password is safe or not, we offer some tips to keeping your accounts and personal information secure at the end of this post.

Groupon has teamed up with location-based service Foursquare to offer its daily deals through the Foursquare mobile application, giving the Chicago-based company another way to sell its discounts.

Foursquare members “check in” to local businesses such as restaurants and bars with their mobile phones and can share their whereabouts with friends. New York-based Foursquare has amassed 10 million members worldwide and recently made a bigger push into loyalty programs and rewards.

“Foursquare’s goal is to help people connect in the real world, discover new places, and save money through Specials and Deals,” the company said in a statement. “We’re excited that Groupon’s daily deals and real-time deals will now be included in our Deals platform.”

Earlier this month, Foursquare announced it had partnered with five deal providers to integrate their offers into its Specials platform. Groupon was conspicuously absent from the list, which included several of the company’s major rivals, including LivingSocial and BuyWithMe. The other three partners were Gilt City, Zozi and AT&T, which offers deals through its yellowpages.com subsidiary in select cities.

With the Groupon partnership in place, the Chicago company’s deals will appear on Foursquare’s mobile app for purchase. Groupon is the only deal provider on Foursquare to offer real-time deals through the app. These are offers that are pushed to consumers based on their location and have a shorter purchase window to encourage spontaneity.

The Groupon link-up with Foursquare represents an expansion of Groupon Now, a real-time deal service that the company launched locally in May and has expanded to 25 markets. The service delivers deals to consumers based on their location. Unlike Groupon’s traditional deals, which typically have a 24-hour purchase window and require a minimum amount of buyers to activate, Groupon Now deals last just a few hours and do not have a tipping point.

“When we think of mobile addiction beyond (Groupon Now), we think Foursquare, and many of you guys do, too,” Groupon said in a Thursday post on its official blog announcing the partnership.