Slashdot Mirror
The Great Firewall Of China
iKev writes: "Today's Globe and Mail has an
interesting story
on China's attempt to restrict Internet content available to its citizens. It seems that The New York Times is on the list of 'politically sensitive' sites, but all other U.S. papers are not. ... Porn, however, is free for all 1.3 billion people to view. Go figure. I wonder what kind of setup they have running this firewall."
"Firewall" is the wrong term for blocking political content, but the pun's too good to resist I guess. If anyone has details on the software, please post your comments below or
emailme.
>>Go figure It doesn't make sense for the Chinese government to try to ban porno sites, since they aren't any obvious threat to the party. Furthermore, these sites may not be that well known in China. I suspect that they only ban The New York Times because there were a lot of Chinese users trying to access the site. Obviously they can't hope to block all the sites they don't like, so they just block the important ones. OF course eventually they'll notice they can't keep up with the Internet, so the whole thing isn`t any real threat to anyone. -Barney
Maybe the NYT annoyed them with their required registration.
I'm not chinese, I'm an American, but my major in college was in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, with a concentration in Chinese, so I believe I tend to follow news about China fairly closely.
China is not honest. period. If you ask a mainland chinese citizen about Tianneman (s?) Square, they will stare blankly at you and say it is a lovely square. The government doesn't deny anything, because nothing happened there. Period.
China is *not* a happy place for those who care about liberty. I think that even most mainstream Americans know the troubles that Taiwan goes through to maintain the amount of sovereignty which it still possesses, despite Chinese threats against it.
The only reason a foreigner could think that China is honest about its brutal and repressive political nature is because we have information accessible to us, something which is not true in almost all of mainland china.
----------------------------
I've ALWAYS thought this idea would sell well, worldwide. Actual high-quality news content, delivered by sexy supermodels, interspliced with varying degrees/types of steamy/porn content to keep the viewers' attention. Porn News Network -- I can see the station break now:
"PNN -- with more hot girl-on-girl action than any other major news network...."
--
You misinterpret. I do not claim that all Chinese individuals think and act in the same way. To do so would be foolish. When analyzing things that affect and are affected by large groups of people, such as government, it is important to look at what is common to the people in question. Yes there are individual variations and exceptions galore. But those don't explain anything useful. We know people are all a little different. What we don't know is what similarities among large groups of people cause them to act in certain ways. That is the interesting issue here. Stop thinking about this thread as "stupid bigoted American thinks all Chinese are carbon copies of one another" and you might have something to contribute.
According to you, ONLY "the Chinese" apparently fear anarchy.
No. I never made any such claim. It's just a question of how much anarchy is feared relative to other evils.
Your attempt to be insightful thus, in claiming "It's a cultural thing. " is an exercise in cultural determinism; by essentializing China and "the Chinese," you ignore the universal, or at least widespread concerns they shared with other people and groups, outside China.
I am not overlooking this. Note that the examples I offered were not nations in a state of anarchy. But the process of changing governments from the type that the PRC has today and most of today's republics had in the past to a "free" society is lengthy and bloody. A people must decide whether it's worth it.
Your beliefs that China has traditionally been anti-democratic
I hold no such beliefs. Contrast "anti-democratic" with "pro-status-quo."
Not only do you reduce more than one billion people to a cultural stereotype, also unwittingly (I hope) help perpetrate and support the same self-serving arguments given by certain Asian/African authoritarian leaders on why they cannot have democracy-- "Oh, it is not inherent in our culture to have democracy; we have for centuries never practised or believed in freedom and basic human rights therefore, you, the Westerner/Westernized Asian or African cannot tell us to democratized because we just can't do it." Cultural relativism makes for some fantastic arguments that allow the powerful to stay in power in Asia and Africa.
I harbor no illusions about the brutality and evilness of these dictators. The excuses and rationalizations they use to remain in power are their problem, not mine. I am not claiming that democracy in the PRC or elsewhere is impossible, for cultural or any other reasons. I am claiming that it is neither inevitable nor our decision to make.
First no one government/political party/group can speak for hundreds of millions of people.
Of course they can. Whether they should is another matter.
The Chinese"/"Russians" etc are NOT a homogeneous group where supposedly fixed cultural norms and traditions have ensured that there is such a thing as a "Chinese"/"Russian" etc ways of thinking that are inherently different from "American" ways of thinking which apparently stand for freedom and democracy.
No claim of homogeneity is made. Homogeneity is not required for tradition. A trivial example: many Americans are not Christian, in name or in practice. So why is Christmas a federal holiday?
Sorry folks, but "Americans" do not have the monopoly over such essentials as freedom and basic human dignity; others like them too, thank you very much.
Including the right to self-determination. Unlike most Americans, I make no effort to interfere with that right. Anyone here remember the Vietnam War? Tell me, which side stood for these rights: Nguyen "Tyrant" van Thieu, the "commies," or the "imperialist" US? I argue that none of them did. In light of your post, ISTM that you would have supported the actions of the US. Ironically, similar actions in support of Chinese "freedom fighters" in the early 20th century were in retrospect hugely flawed and probably contributed to the current government there. If people want these freedoms and basic rights they must be willing to fight for them, just as every nation which currently enjoys them had to at some point. The severity and length of the fight certainly varied, from short, bloodless political battles to years of anarchy and death. These costs must be considered when discussing "freedom."
Ooh, the Chinese like dim sum and don't like democracy!
You trivialize (not to mention completely distort) my argument and attempt to further protect your belief that I am simply a narrow-minded bigot. It just ain't so.
THE ONLY reason for why some Chinese leaders act they way they do is, plainly stupid.
A discussion of every reason would fill volumes and is quite beyond the capabilites of this forum. I offered one reason in rejection of what has become a bromide. Nothing more.
Slashdot moderators who have given your message a score of 5 clearly agree with your views, as I am afraid, too many others.
I have no control over the moderators, or whether their actions reflect agreement or disagreement versus a genuine belief that my post is worth reading. You are, naturally, entitled to your own opinion independent of the moderators'.
What part of "off-and-on" didn't you understand?
Greek democracy was anything but egalitarian.
No claim to the contrary is made.
Face it, most westerners are descended from powerless peasants who were lorded over for centuries by absolute monarchs and an all-powerful church that would burn you alive if you spoke your mind.
No claim to the contrary is made.
Westerners made the transition to democracy, painfully, with very little in the way of democratic tradition except for in the farthest, remotest past.
Indeed. And during these transitions, what were the philosophers of the day basing their discourse on? That's right, the remotest past. History is replete with examples of the distant past being used to justify or condemn actions of the present. That's why we study it. Every now and then someone dredges up a good idea, works it over a bit, and puts it into action. That happened a lot in the European renaissance, and in many other places at other times as well. The point is that the history is there, and while not entirely continuous, is not at all a new idea.
Proof that all statements can and likely will be misinterpreted. The point I was trying to make wasn't that anyone necessarily enjoys or wants a totalitarian state, but that some may find it a lesser evil than anarchy. I don't. If you don't, great. But many people do, and there are strong reasons to believe that one's opinion on this matter, like any other, is heavily influenced by culture and heritage. Get over the idea that I'm a bigot. I'm not. Quite frankly, I'm indifferent on this matter. People get the government they deserve. The "West" is rife with corruption and thinly disguised socialism. The Chinese government is totalitarian. Russia is essentially an anarchy, as is most of Africa. Which of these options appeals to you most or least is not my business or my problem. It's a personal decision, and one that happens to be heavily influenced by the time, place, and circumstances in which you were raised.
But there is no basis for any claim, which is somehow implicit in every argument of this sort, that the subjects or citizens of a nation have no say in the type of government they have. No government can exist without the governed. This is not a principle of democracy, it's an economic fact: bureaucrats and generals aren't productive in any way that helps. Thus if 1.3 billion people, or even a sizable minority of them (see "Taiwan") became genuinely convinced that their current government was more evil than some other, and the associated process necessary to change it, then a revolution would occur and some presumably more desired form of government would be instituted. The existing government simply cannot possibly kill everyone trying to overthrow it, and would be foolish to try. Thus the power to make a change always exists. The question - the important question at the heart of all this - is whether the pain, bloodshed, and anarchy necessary to make that change is worthwhile. It is quite clear historically that most Chinese do not feel that it is. It's not a value judgment; it's a simple observation.
I disagree with the traditional American idea that it's somehow our business what type of governments other nations have. I don't much care what type of government the Chinese choose for themselves, or even their reasons for choosing it. My original post was in rebellion against this idea that we are by definition right about governments. Our successes and failures speak for themselves. If other nations choose to emulate us, we should be honored. If they do not, we should perhaps examine why instead of either going to war in an effort to change that, or blithely asserting that sooner or later, democracy is inevitable. Neither approach properly respects national or individual soverignty and both are flat out wrong.
You are free (living in the US at least) to make whatever statements you like about why the PRC has a totalitarian government. Given your apparent closeness to this matter, you probably have significantly more insight than I do. But that does not imply that my observations are the result of bigotry. It's too complex an issue for such a simple refutation of an important argument.
You don't seem to know your history very well. In the early times of China, there was great turmoil and strife and - yes - anarchy. Much like the hyperinflation in the Weimar days convinced Germans to give the Bundesbank a stranglehold on their economy, the Chinese, at least traditionally, fear anarchy above all else. Hence the dynastic system, which led to long-lasting, powerful governments. And now, the "evil reds," who are not communist at all but simply totalitarian, are free to exert as much control as they desire. It's a cultural thing. Certainly as recent events have shown this does not apply to everyone in China, but the popular support for "anything but anarchy" is still very strong. Whether this is changing and how fast requires telling by someone a bit closer to Chinese culture than I.
You cannot apply your own values and experiences to others and expect them to work. The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never. For that matter, neither had the Russians, and look what difficulties they're having with it. You (assuming you live in Western Europe, the US, Oz, etc.) have something like 2500 years of off-and-on democratic heritage of some kind or other. The Greek republican governments, the aristocrat-democracies of Europe, and the post-revolutionary American and French governments have provided plenty of fodder for your inclinations. But these are culturally insignificant to many people, including the Chinese. There is no certain inevitable victory for the forces of democracy in China. Maybe it'll happen, maybe not. Predicting the future is hard. But everyone needs to get this "inevitable triumph of the forces of democracy" out of their heads, because it just ain't so.
Lets face it. The Chinese government is many things. Repressive and Brutal come to mind. However they are not hypocritical. They insist on blocking "politically dangerous" information from coming into the country or being distributed widely.
All they have done is move that policy online. Why should they even think about blocking porn ? It has precisely 0 effect on politics if you leave it alone. It's just people looking at pictures and reading pointless stories. If they tried to block porn *that* would become a political issue and one more battle to fight against their own people.
Contrast that which the US where you have legislators trying to impose unworkable censorship on adults in public libraries. Forcing a library to install a piece of software that will essentially block a random list of sites is stupid. When that list includes the whole "geocities.com" domain you are way over into the "you little citizens shouldn't talk to each other" territory.
At least in my country the politicians don't even bother to try. They only keep the onenforced and unenforceable laws against porn, buggy and prostitution as one more way to prosecute rapists and child molesters.
I.e. It's a lot easier to prove he was taking pictures of the little girls privates than that he touched her.
Which of the three is worse is a tough call to make. However China killing it's citizens for trivial things paints them as the worst of this bad lot.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I also believe that posessing cryptographic software is a criminal offense in some countries. Is China one of them?
China recently enacted a law requiring users of cryptography to register with a government office. The office itself was a small one in a back alley in Beijing, and it is doubtful whether they'd be able to handle millions of registrations (especially over the few days amnesty they gave).
It's more likely that this law is to give the police something else to arrest people for: unregistered use of cryptography. The Chinese government loves such open-ended, selectively enforceable laws. (Take for example the crime of revealing "state secrets", which could be anything, including the weather in Beijing or what's on TV.)
So, if they view porn all the time, but can't get any "sensitive" political views, why not mix a porn site up "Monica" style. Imagine steamy pictures narrating the political events in office. Imagine porn being the messenger of freedom!
I'm almost done with a new release, which will support streaming media, HTTP Basic authentication (hopefully!), and much better anonymity (the current 1.2 release has many JavaScript holes). I'll also have an HTTPS-supporting version, but you'll need OpenSSL on your server. If you get a copy of 1.2 now, check back in a couple of weeks.
Looking for testers! In fact, I'm testing it right now by posting this.
They just forgot their password :)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I suspect that we'll probably find the words "Made in the USA" stamped on the side of their super-massive firewall...
Hahaha ... actually, they're more so. Girls get arrested for prostitution for having sex with foreigners. That's a permanent criminal record and a kiss good-bye to any future you may have had. People get thrown out of university for having sex. Producing pornography incurs the death sentence. You think the US is neurotic ??? Well I'm not saying that it's not bad, but you could certainly do worse.
And now it's being built to keep the Western invaders out. Only this time, the invasion is cultural/political and not military.
IIRC, there are forced sterilisations. There are exceptions to the one child rule, but in the end, the government decides all. And the government, after all, are not accountable to anyone.
Of course, this story was posted at 5AM China time. :)
I live in Beijing, and the Firewall blocks:
1. Many western news sites (not just the NYT!) - this includes (from my experience) the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury, The Washington Post, and the Australian newspaper that reported on the French suspicions about Windows a while back. Exceptions: The Seattle Times, USA Today, MSNBC, the Globe and Mail, and the BBC.
2. Probably the entire *.gov and *.mil domains - I've never been successful in getting to anything inside those domains. On the other hand, this isn't really surprising.
3. Xoom, Geocities, Fortunecity, Mindspring, AOL user pages - anyplace that has a large number of user pages gets blocked.
4. NOT proxies or anonymizer services (as mentioned in the article). However, even major ones like Anonymizer and Proxymate aren't blocked, so they probably won't start blocking these unless they become a major problem.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that most people here really care enough to go around the Great Firewall and read the NYT (making money is much more important to most of them). But if proxies started becoming popular and getting blocked, I'd appreciate it if someone could point me towards a few backup proxies.
I'm a little surprised by them not blocking porn, since they do try (well, make token efforts) to keep foreign hardcopy pornography from being brought in (I believe).
Hi Folks,
Crazy day for stories - I can't believe this got posted right after the censorware article. I think the last thing I posted in a thread on that article makes enough sense to cross post it here.
The whole thread is here.
And the last thing I wrote to it was:
Zico said:
something that every child should be tought in school, as opposed to the self-important dreck that comes out of the anti-"censorware" movement
Interesting point - sort of. If I ever have children, I will make damn sure that they understand the concept of censorship. I will make damned sure that they understand the concept of revolution, and that they understand their reponsibility to humanity to stand up for freedom and everyone's right to be left the fuck alone and live their life as they wish.
All in all, it isn't one group or another that I feel we have to worry about - It's not 'us' against the communists, or the religious right, it's the simple concept of freedom, the fight against the ability of one person or group controlling your access to information, of any kind.
Yes, I understand that information can be used to harm others, but I genuinely believe that if that's the way we go out, then so be it. If humanity is really so weak a force as to be destroyed by its own freedom, if some freak gets blueptrints to a nuke, builds a couple thousand, and gives the earth over to the cockroaches, then so be it - at least we lived free while we lived.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Anyone here will know that a) is simply impossible. Sites can change URL's in a matter of minutes, multiple mirrors etc etc. (We need only look at how poor some of the existing "censorship" products are in the West to realise that what China's government want to do is extremely difficult.)
It would be so much easier for the Chinese government to simply make a list of approved sites and only allow access to those ones. No more having to deal with pesky mirrors and brand new URLs or anything. They could simply go "Okay... ESPN.com is okay. Disney.com is okay, eff.org is not okay, house.gov is not okay, slashdot is not okay, ebay.com is okay." That's it. It'd end up being pretty hard to circumvent unless you wanted to start posting pro democracy rants in the item listings of ebay, or in the sports chat on ESPN.
But it completely refutes the claim of cultural affinity for totalitarian rule.
True, but no one was saying that, only that chinese people liked 'anything but anarchy'. Democracy is certanly that.
You've being naive. Talk of reunification is intended to placate China
Well, I hope so, but then, I'm not chinese. The thing is, most of the non-PRC people I know don't really care at all. I've talked with people from both HK and taiwant, and none of them seem to care at all.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hong Kong party line
There are funny tidbits like they only have 2 T1 lines for the whole country :) (they use proxies). Anyway, that's how it was in '97.
all internet connections to everywhere in China were routed through some government office that blocked "unsuitable" material. It's doubtless that people found ways around this
If you tunnel a connection to a proxy (a proxy outside of China, of course) through ssh, the censormachine won't know what websites you're visiting.
Which would give more incentive to write software that bypasses the firewall? Reading a BBC article, or visiting playboy.com?!
If they block the flow of porn, more people will know methods to bypass the firewall, rendering it useless!
Whoa! you must have forgotten about feudalism, absolute monarchies, class systems, and all the other ugly blots in western history.
Greek democracy was anything but egalitarian. The Roman republic was extinguished by an absolutist imperial system. The only European nation with a long history of Democracy is Iceland and their system harks back to the tribal gatherings (things) of the Germanic peoples - _not_ to any Mediterranean tradition.
Face it, most westerners are descended from powerless peasants who were lorded over for centuries by absolute monarchs and an all-powerful church that would burn you alive if you spoke your mind.
Westerners made the transition to democracy, painfully, with very little in the way of democratic tradition except for in the farthest, remotest past.
So what makes them so different from anyone else? We've been at it for a century or two. Not millenia.
-M
I was last on line in the PRC in mid-1997.
The technology is pretty simple, actually. There's only one supplier of Internet service in the PRC... The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications Circa 1997, there were three points of entry into the national network. One which passed through Beijing, one which apparently landed at Shanghai, and one which came in through Guangzhou (presumably from Hong Kong).
What was done was a simple (apparently) IP-based firewall. Any attempts to contact such subversive websites as cnn.com, chinatimes.com, or icrt.com.tw (old Taiwan hands will chuckle at this one) would resolve all right, you would just wait forever for the connection to be established.
Many hackers, including a few who post to Slashdot, make use of proxy servers to work around this. Better-known proxy servers are blocked, and new proxy addresses get propagated. Nobody who really WANTS information is deprived of it.
Why is all of this done? Well, I don't play golf with Jiang Zemin, but I can take a guess. China is not monolithic in it's politics. There are a few moderates in the government, and a few extremely conservative troglodytes as well. The firewall is (IMNSHO) a way to appease the more conservative members of the government that letting people have access to the Internet is OK. Does it work? Nope. Does it have to? Well... Only well enough to fool a few not-very-technical 70 year-old Politburo members.
Cheers!
J.
Its nice to know that if Russia or one of China's other neighboring countries catches fire, 1 billion+ people will not have to worry about it. How much cement was needed to go all the way around? I wish the US cared as much about us.
:)
You really need to clarify your objection; to me at least it is simply incoherent.
> What I find amusing is how /. community
But I am not "the /. community". I am a single individual. I would even go so far as to say that my political opinions are not shared by the majority of posters to slashdot.
> pretends that they really support the idea of 'freedom' when in reality
> they really support their ideals.
But which freedom does the so-called "/. community" fail to support, opting instead to support their own anti-freedom "ideals"?
> What's even more amusing is that in their arguments they use the
> same weak reasoning methods that the targets of their attacks use,
> e.g. analogies. Carry on hypocrites.
In what way are analogies an especially "weak" reasoning method? Admittedly arguments based in analogies do not display the same rigidity as the rock-hard proofs of mathematics (that is to say, tautologies.) But the deductive methods of mathematics can't be applied anywhere in the real world. In fact, whenever one "mathematizes," a problem in even a "hard science" like physics, one is applying an analogy. A physicist reasons: "By experiment, we have determined that certain aspects of this stuff in the real world appear to behave analogously to mathematical variables, that is to say, purely imaginary abstractions, in equations 'A' and 'B'. Now in mathematics, equations 'A' and 'B' in combination yield equation 'C'. Therefore it is at least worth testing as a hypothesis, that those quantifiable aspect of matter in the material world will also act similarly to those numerical variablesin equation 'C'."
But in fact I presented no analogies anyway. Perhaps where you wrote "analogies" you meant "anecdotes" instead? I'd be the first to admit that an anecdote does not constitute a proof. But I also don't feel obliged to prove yet again the self-evident fact that American politicians, as a class, are both hypocritical and notoriously sexually profligate.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Probably Chinese culture isn't so deranged as U.S. culture over the issue of sex, it's difficult to imagine another country with a culture as guiltily obsessed as this one (but then there's Afghanistan, of course) but whether or not that happens to be the case, the main reason they don't block porn is because they don't have politicians running for office who think they can get elected by making a big noisy fuss over porn.
In Tampa, Florida where I live, there is a well-known nude-dancing club with the absurd name "Mons Venus". The Mayor of Tampa, Dick Greco, used to take his business associates and clients to the "Mons Venus" in person. Despite that fact, he recently signed a bill criminlaizing nude dancing, such as that which he himself used to pay to see, in the city limits. Why? This jerk Greco is plainly grubbing for votes by presenting the public with a transparently phony display of outraged morality, of course. Votes from whom? I think William Gibson put it well in his novel "Idoru":
"...Do it and you've got yourself a job."
Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. "You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I remember reading somewhere awhile back that all internet connections to everywhere in China were routed through some government office that blocked "unsuitable" material. It's doubtless that people found ways around this, but it still puts a large portion of the country under the eye of Big Brother.
The analogy to the Great Wall of China is ridiculous. The great wall wasn't built to "keep the world out". It was built to keep the Northern invaders out, and as a grandiose monument for the Qin emperor. It in fact served as protection for travelers to the West
When watching the TV news from a Hong Kong station (in English before the handover) they used a test pattern to block stories that they did not like.
When I was in rural China (somewhere in Guangzhou) some 6 years ago, what the local TV stations would do was to rebroadcast (i.e. bootleg) the HK stations. I didn't notice that they bothered to censor stories - what they did was to overlay the HK commercials with local (usually crudely made) commercials, which would frequently overrun the alloted time slots.
We can thus harly expect that it will be familiar, or desired by most people, and anyone who thinks that democracy is some sort of inevitable future for all the world's people is smoking dope.
A little reality check is called for here. Try reading some real polictial science rather than simplistic wishful thinking from the mainstream media.
I don't recall saying that I think democracy in China will be inevitable. In fact, I've written in the past on Slashdot that I think this is anything but inevitable.
Try reading and thinking a little more carefully before jumping to conclusions about what I think.
Proof that all statements can and likely will be misinterpreted. The point I was trying to make wasn't that anyone necessarily enjoys or wants a totalitarian state, but that some may find it a lesser evil than anarchy. I don't. If you don't, great. But many people do, and there are strong reasons to believe that one's opinion on this matter, like any other, is heavily influenced by culture and heritage.
Show me someone who prefers anarchy to government and I will show you someone who leads a comfortable, middle-class and well-fed existence, who has never seen real strife in his life.
If people fear anarchy, this fear is a universal one. Not a cultural, ethnic one as you claim it is.
The Chinese people have been prepared in the past to undergo anarchy to bring about change, in the ancient past (the overthrow of dynasties during dynastic successions), in the recent past (during the overthrow of the Qing dynasty), and during modern times (Tianmen). Your claim that the Chinese people, as an ethnic group, are somehow meek and prefer totalitarianism (i.e. dynasties and communism in your original post) to necessary revolution ("the Chinese, at least traditionally, fear anarchy above all else" and "It is quite clear historically that most Chinese do not feel that it is") is incredibly offensive and displays a thorough ignorance of history.
People get the government they deserve
Yours is an idea of "fit" -- that the government people have is the ones that they deserve. I can't even begin to describe how wrong headed this idea is. The fact is that people do not always have a choice in the matter - the force of arms, information control and propaganda, often take this choice away. You may even have heard of people in N. Korea thinking that theirs is the best country in the world - because they know no better. I recently read an article in National geographic where an Albanian peasant commented that during the time of totalitarian rule in his country, he believed that his was the best country in Europe. A people cannot rebel when they know no better, and they lack the means to do so, and sometimes people deserve more than what they have.
I have a friend who went to Belgrade recently, and he commented that the people there do not realize the harm that their government has done in Kosovo. You greatly underestimate the ability of governments to control and deceive.
Neither approach properly respects national or individual soverignty and both are flat out wrong.
The appeal to soveriegnity is the means by which many governments claim the authority to carry out their atrocities, and which other governments use to justify non-intervention.
From your post, I would gather that you would be opposed to all sorts of military intervention. I would suggest to you that the issue is much more complex than that. The have been many bad interventions in the past, but they have also been many interventions that came too late (the Rwandan genocide would be an example). What we need are moral interventions.
What you will ask next is "morality, by who's standards?". Yes, the issue is a difficult one that has to be grappled with, but your philosophy of "fit" is incredibly simplistic and harmful. I would suggest that you read the classic work "Just and unjust wars" by Michael Walzer on the topic of interventions.
But that does not imply that my observations are the result of bigotry.
I correct myself. Your observations are due to ignorance.
P.S. I do not think that democracy in China is inevitable, or that the US should forcibly impose its democratic values on other countries.
I hate to burst your buble, but Taiwan has only been a democracy for four years 2000 will only be there second presidential election. There isn't a lot of precedent there.
But it completely refutes the claim of cultural affinity for totalitarian rule.
Also, a lot of the major candidates in that race are talking about a 'reunification' china of some sort.
You've being naive. Talk of reunification is intended to placate China, which is currently making beligerent noises. The Taiwanese people elected the independent minded Lee Teng Hui, and even his simple statment that relations with China would be on a "state to state" basis outraged China.
It's a cultural thing.... The Chinese people have never been governed by anything even resembling democracy. Never.
You're an idiot and a bigot hiding under the guise of an elightened speaker. It's not a cultural thing.
There exist strong Chinese democracies - i.e. Taiwan. The fact the Communists currently rule China is an outcome of history rather than any cultural affinity for totalitarianism - the Communists were most succesful at organizing the people and repelling the Japanese invaders during the war, and they naturally assumed leadership after the war.
China has had a long history of good government - the dynastic system persisted for so long because it was highly successful; China was one of the cultural capitals of the world before civilisation even arose in many parts of the West, and was intellectually freer than most of the world. Success led to stagnation of the system perhaps, but the long run of the dynasties was due to its success, not because the Chinese people have no love of freedom.
If American libraries are leaning toward censorship, we can only imagine what the Chinese ones might be like...
ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
Got Rhinos?
a) To prevent access to foreign "propoganda" sites that might encourage China's citizen's to become more resistant to the Communist Party's wishes. (It would appear that they consider the New York Times to be one.
b) To prevent the orginaisation of grassroot political groups via the internet.
Anyone here will know that a) is simply impossible. Sites can change URL's in a matter of minutes, multiple mirrors etc etc. (We need only look at how poor some of the existing "censorship" products are in the West to realise that what China's government want to do is extremely difficult.)
They do however, have a better chance at preventing b), with possible human rights implications. The article states that the only ISP in China is run by the government. Since they control the remote access equipment, it would be fairly trivial not to stop someone from sending "undersirable" material, but to find out whom did. (eg. Search google one too many times about democracy and you might have a surprise visit from the local army squad.) Presumably the use of encryption would also render you immediately suspect.
It will be interesting to see how this one develops...
I have had at least three occasions to chat with individuals in Taiwan. I thought I'd take the opportunity to find out what changes had taken place. The conversations were very short...
Every time I used the terms ROC or China, that individual seemed to get disconnected before they could reply.
My experience with US government has lead me to uderestimate the savvy-ness of the individuals controlling the filters, but it appears that the ROC doesn't share that attribute.
I wonder if PGP could make it through?
Tangochaz
TangoChaz
"It's not enough to be on the right track -- you have to be moving faster than the train." -- Rod Davis, Editor of Seahorse Mag.
TangoChaz
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Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
It really is sad that we live in a world with imposing prohibitions - just because someone, somewhere has deemed certain material innapropriate for whatever reasons, other people have restricted instead of full lives. Where is it going to end? As an individual, I dont wont a government telling me what I can and cannot do, especially when the cannot has nothing to do with deteriorating the quality of other peoples lives. I want to see porn. I want to HEAR, or read other peoples opinions. Life is so short, too short for others to restrict my scope of experiances. From the title comments we can see another form of prejudice - political restrictions are bad and pornographic restrictions are good? Not so, my friend. Other societies have no taboos with pornography unlike the English speaking societies. I was raised in a society which played full scale pornographic movies every night on public, free for all TV. No black bars or cut scenes. This is a cultrul issue, and again, who does the government think it is when it imposes restrictions on what I may see. All forms of ccensorship are bad, be they political or pornographical. To quote a fellow /.-er, we are slashdot, open source, closed minds. Ha.
Revolution = Evolution
Hence the word "claims".
i.e. they say they're for freedom, so they have an image to maintain. Not that they are for freedom.
For their way of doing government, freedom is flat-out the most dangerous idea there is.
The U.S. Gov't wants Americans to celebrate the overthrow of an oppressive regime that took place over 200 years ago, yet it's terrified that the same notions of freedom might cause the same thing to happen to them!
The solution they've chosen? Encourage a lip-service token "patriotism" that keeps the masses tranquilized and makes the thinkers too cynical to care about their country and the sad, sad state it's in.
China may seem more oppressive, but at least they're making progress, little by little. In the grand scheme of things, this "Great Firewall" is just a minor setback.
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Just imagine being in the US Gov't.'s shoes:
You represent a country that claims to be for freedom and whatnot, and your main beef with the Chinese gov't. is that they censor what you don't want censored and they don't censor what you do want censored!
Now, your challenge as a Patriotic Puritan Bureaucrat is to convince a hostile nation (i.e. one that doesn't always kowtow to the Inherent Might-Makes-Right Moral Superiority of Uncle Sam) that censoring some things is wrong, while censoring other things is somehow acceptable or even commendable!
Frankly, I don't see how we can convince other nations to embrace liberty until we drop our masks of pretension and hypocrisy and embrace it ourselves.
--
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
You can't take a billion plus people and try to control their basic freedoms without some backlash...
You can. Its quite easy. All you need to do is persuade them that they want it. This is quite easy when you point out the crime rate in countries that don't restrict freedom is several times greater than those that do.
Looks interesting, don't it? It looks like they're individually picking and choosing sites to block (since they aren't blocking porn) or any US newspapers besides the NYT. I wonder how long it'll take our friends across the lake to subcontract to one of our censorware organizations (false positives wouldn't overly concern them, would they?). Maybe when THAT happens, people will finally realize the parallel between censorware and repressive governments.
Probably the main reason the New York Times is considered iffy is the unrelenting criticism of China's human rights record by William Safire, who recently said China's leaders were double-crossers and certain political trends are "leading [China] toward a political earthquake".
When at the Jinan University, I spent some time in the computer center. The head of the networking department (who got paid $250/month) was married to one of the doctors in the acupuncture department (in the university hospital) that I was being treated at.
The university (in October 1996) had a 28.8 line that went to the filtering office in Beijing (sp?). I had ping times of over 1 second. It may have improved since.
When watching the TV news from a Hong Kong station (in English before the handover) they used a test pattern to block stories that they did not like.
As we all know, there is a way around any security. But this censorship does allow the government to keep more control.
This control will be lost over time. Some of it will be lost, some of it will be given up.
Fight Spammers!
... in the U.S., if we don't keep discussions like this going...
We have PIII chips with traceable serial nos., M$ Word documents with traceable serial nos., doubleclick.com with traceable cooking-planting nos., blah.
Looking at the article's description of a massive series of "fire-wall like" censor boxes, don't be surprised if something like that happens here.   Here, it doesn't have to be "political" to be censored   And let me say this in terms of what's happening with the discussions of restricting access to things like Napster in an attempt to not only save bandwidth but to "catch" those illegally trading copyrighted MP3s.   But it hurts those who are legitimately trading public domain stuff.   And also note that many of the pr0n web filters inadvertantly filter out legitimate medical searches and such.
I expect as long as you have a "free and open" media such as the internet (web, BBS, USENET, email, etc.), we can at least bring out the issues and keep the net unrestricted.   I think the restriction should be at the user's discretion (and at their PC if they choose), not at the gov'ts.
JMHO.
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."