Slashdot Mirror

Jeez, this is like reading Xinhua News. Just a collective ignoring of the fact that all these people are on the far left of politics, and instead pretending that "the internet community" is some sort of monolithic bloc that supports this. SOPA wasn't a divisive issue, it was something everyone could get behind. But come on, simply presenting statements like "Now we're behind Lessig to fight for citizen equality" with no context? Look at how it assumes the sale and doesn't give anyone the chance to raise objections. If you're not for these hard-leftists, you must be against citizen equality. Man, I feel really despicable being against citizen equality.

If you read a lot of Xinhua like I do, this is a common occurrence. They will simply ignore important context and call everyone to action. The obvious questions that everyone sitting at home is asking? Unanswered. In Xinhua's defense, they regularly receive instructions from the Communist Party instructing them to leave important information out of their stories. Western journalists are under no such oppressive restrictions and deliberately do such things of their own free will. Which system is worse?

Those on the net critical of the CCP are very savvy, and have come up with their own set of terms for avoiding/parodying, well, everything. It's called the Grass-Mud Horse, aka an Alpaca. The phrase translated as Grass-Mud Horse sounds nearly the same in Mandarin as “f--k your mother”. It was the title of a satyric song "originally coined to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content", and rapidly became the symbol of those seeking to outwit censorship.

As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and the ‘Song of the Grass-Mud Horse’ has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression.”

It's very interesting. A lot of it is based on Chinese slang and history, so understanding it requires some added interpretation, which is supplied at the China Digital Times. It is very interesting and cleaver, and well worth the effort.

Those on the net critical of the CCP are very savvy, and have come up with their own set of terms for avoiding/parodying, well, everything. It's called the Grass-Mud Horse, aka an Alpaca. The phrase translated as Grass-Mud Horse sounds nearly the same in Mandarin as “f--k your mother”. It was the title of a satyric song "originally coined to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content", and rapidly became the symbol of those seeking to outwit censorship.

As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and the ‘Song of the Grass-Mud Horse’ has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression.”

It's very interesting. A lot of it is based on Chinese slang and history, so understanding it requires some added interpretation, which is supplied at the China Digital Times. It is very interesting and cleaver, and well worth the effort.

First, a message sent out by the Chinese authorities to not comment on the attack.

The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.

Regarding the large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on GitHub, do not conjecture or comment of your own accord before the authoritative media have reported the case, and do not republish foreign coverage. (March 28, 2015)

Next, the two specific targets of the attack.

The DDoS attack “weaponizes” Internet users outside China who visit websites containing Baidu tracking code. As long as they remain on an affected site, their browser will quietly make repeated requests to the GitHub URLs of censorship monitoring and circumvention project GreatFire.org and its censorship-evading Chinese New York Times mirror, in an effort to overwhelm GitHub’s servers.

This is what GreatFire, the target of the attack, had to say:

When we first blogged about this attack we did not want to level accusations without evidence. Based on the technical forensic evidence provided above and the detailed research that has been done on the GitHub attack, we can now confidently conclude that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is responsible for both of these attacks [the ongoing one against GitHub, and another against GreatFire earlier this month].

[] Inserting malicious code in this manner can only be done via the Chinese Internet backbone. Even if CAC did not launch the DDoS attack directly, they are responsible for managing the internet in China and it is not possible that they did not know what was happening. These attacks have occurred under CAC’s watch and would have needed the approval of Lu Wei.

Lu Wei and the Cyberspace Administration of China have clearly escalated the tactics that they use to control information. The Great Firewall has switched from being a passive, inbound filter to being an active and aggressive outbound one. This is a frightening development and the implications of this action extend beyond control of information on the internet. In one quick movement, the authorities have shifted from enforcing strict censorship in China to enforcing Chinese censorship on internet users worldwide. CAC can launch these attacks quickly and easily and they have the technical and financial resources behind them to continue to launch DDoS attacks against any website, anywhere in the world.

GitHub is used by GreatFire as a way around Chinese government censorship by the Great Firewall. Here's what GitHub had to say about the attack.

GitHub commented last week that “we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content,” apparently referring to GreatFire’s censorship circumvention tools. GitHub’s compliance would resolve a dilemma for Chinese censors: the site’s HTTPS encryption prevents blocking its contents selectively, and its ubiquity in the tech industry would impose a high economic toll on blocking the entire site. This “collateral freedom” strategy is central to GreatFire’s circumvention projects on other platforms, such as Amazon’s and Microsoft’s.

It's very even handed of the Slashdot Pundits to support the Chinese government contention that they are just poor innocent bystanders who haven't ever censored anybody ever. Of course it's way to much effort to go online and find out what the attack victims think. Our Pundit class nev

Another way the Chinese evade censorship is to use oblique terms and references, many of which are quite funny. The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is a compilation of them. (In Mandarin, "grass-mud horse" sounds very close to "fuck your mother" and is a way of evading and poking fun at censorship of vulgar content.)

Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.

What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.

I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.

Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.

For judicial decisions, yes it is.

Another claim with no evidence or supporting argument.

No, in this case I would release everyone.

I'm not sure you really understand what you are saying. Here's an actual example:
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/02/chinese-mass-murderer-sentenced-to-death/

This guy was sentenced to death (our topic) for killing no less than 13 people. I don't know if the sentence has been carried out already. For the sake of the argument, assume that it hasn't.

You say, without having a look at the actual evidence or the case itself, that this man should be out on the street again?

Here's another:
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/serial-chinese-rapist-sentenced-death

This guy held two girls as sex-slaves, one for a year and the other for two years, and raped nine other women. Again, let's assume the sentence has not yet been carried out. Please explain to the two girls that you set this man free without so much as a look at the case because of an abstract argument regarding the meta-evaluation of the chinese legal system. I'm sure they will be really open to your argument that because of other, completely unrelated, political cases, the specific evidence in their case is also in doubt.

I wonder if the publication of this incident is meant to distract from the recent scandal of Chinese local government officials confiscating and selling children.

I wonder how feasible it would be for the Internet crowd to "make" June 4 the unofficial day of the free speech, by means of posting some small banner or a short comment on thousands of websites on that day, to the extent that it would get media coverage, and then repeating it every year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

Here's the thing though. Putting up a banner of Tank Man on your blog doesn't matter. No one in China reads it. Putting Tank Man as the background to Google doesn't matter. No one in China visits it. They use Baidu. My point is, that you have to put your message where your audience is, and the audience is predominately visits the .cn domain, if for no other reason than the convenience of the language and culture. Same reason why you don't visit the Chinese US-expat site mitbbs.com. It's the wrong language, and they don't talk about anything you really care about.

So let's you managed to pull this off. You've used enough sites that are outside of the reach of Jingjing and Chacha, that word has spread though the mainland Chinese community. What's the reaction? I suspect that it would be just like the Olympic torch protests. anti-cnn.com whips up some nationalist fervor about how the West is jealous China's progress and are just trying to tear it down. A billion MSN users all add "(L)CHINA" back to their statuses.

  those who came from China to study and may be oblivious of the fact that the rest of the world considers Chinese government's policies and actions morally questionable.

Have you talked to any recent Chinese expats? I have. It can be fucking twisted. I was talking with one about China and how the US perceives it. (I visited Beijing for two weeks before the Olympics.) I told him that it was obvious that today's China is not Mao's China. It's not a palatable dysfunctional police state like North Korea. Obviously China has come far economically in a very short time. However, it is still clear that the old guard still exists. (As the Olympic preparations sign said, "When meeting foreigners remember these simple rules: #1 Maintain the social harmony...") I told him about the English language "documentary" about 1950 Tibet Invasion...err..."Invitation" and how it repeatedly talked about how the PLA brought (I swear to the god your choice, this is a direct quote) "democratic reforms" to Tibet. No. Not a chance. Not Chairman Mao. Not in a million years. Yes, Tibet was a lot less Shangri-la than a lot of Westerns want to believe, but there's no way that the Chairman Mao brought democracy to anyone. The expat's response? "Well, they made it more democratic." "No. It doesn't even meet the dictionary definition of a democracy. Not even a crooked one." "But they made it MORE democratic. You sound like they just changed kings." "They did." "No. I don't believe that." Then he said why democracy hadn't come to China. "It is. Just very slowly. We don't want it end up like Russia." "Well, that was an economic collapse, and you've avoided that. Plus that doesn't explain how Germany integrated, or Poland, or the Czech Republic, or Romania, or really any of Eastern Europe with the exception of the former Yugoslavia."

That said, while I was in Beijing, I had a similar long conversation with a friend that lives there, and it was different.

Try this: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/08/another-olympic-secret-who-was-actually-singing-as-the-national-flag-entered-the-stadium/ and now tell me how offtopic I was?

This was already done in Shenzhen last year. I don't understand why this is such a surprise.

China already is beginning to put the slap on N Korea - they've halted all oil shipments.

First of all - have you actually read any Chinese laws? No? You can get them in translation, and they are not really all that draconian;

*AHEM*

From the RConversation blog:

"In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.)

In other words, Microsoft is scratching China's back in supporting the slaughter of innocents, and shutting the mouth of whoever tries to bring that to the public.

If that's not Draconian, my friend, then I don't know what the eff it is.

First of all - have you actually read any Chinese laws? No? You can get them in translation, and they are not really all that draconian;

*AHEM*

From the RConversation blog:

"In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all the gory details on the current press crackdown click here, here, here, and here.)

In other words, Microsoft is scratching China's back in supporting the slaughter of innocents, and shutting the mouth of whoever tries to bring that to the public.

If that's not Draconian, my friend, then I don't know what the eff it is.