Slashdot Mirror
Americans And Chinese Internet Censorship
chowbok writes: "The Weekly Standard writes that despite expectations, the Chinese Government has been very successful in suppressing free internet access for their citizens. Key to this success was the assistance of Cisco, who built a giant firewall tailored to the state's needs, Yahoo (who helpfully censors search results and monitors online chats), and other Western companies."
It always amazed me why China connected to the public internet anyways if they are going to censor everything except the stuff _they_ want their citizens to see. Wouldn't it have been much more efficient to build the network and not connect it to the public internet? All they would have to do then is place information on their network they want their citizens to see. In any even, it's pretty screwed up.
If these firewalls are so good why do I get so much porn and get-rich-quick spam through Chinese open relays? If nothing else, the spam would be a good channel for steganographic messages to and from dissidents.
I had a discussion with a (less technically minded) friend the other day. Her contention was that "someone" (ISP's, presumably) should be in control of all the porn content online. This way, the ISP would be able to offer two services: (1) all the internet in its pr0n glory and, (2) the "friendly" internet without the pr0n.
The discussion went back and forth, her perspective mainly being, "it doesn't matter how technically infeasible it is. I am a consumer. I'll pay big bucks for it." I was arguing against the idea from a technical feasibility standpoint -- the scale of filtering would be massive, and automated filtering would produce all sorts of errors (false positives and negatives).
But, the great firewall of China is an interesting argument for the other side of the coin. If something this massive has actually been successful, isn't the great pr0n filter a feasible idea, too?
Think of the commercial implications!
There was a very insightful (and long) article that I came across on the Atlantic Monthly's site a while back. Called 'Was Democracy Just a Moment', its central point was that economic development and a strong middle class needs to develop in a country before democracy can succeed. The article predicts that democracy, were it to 'break out' today in China, would at the very least cause a split of the country:
"Under its authoritarian system China has dramatically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people. My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not. Having traveled through much of western China, where Muslim Turkic Uighurs (who despise the Chinese) often predominate, I find it hard to imagine a truly democratic China without at least a partial breakup of the country. Such a breakup would lead to chaos in western China, because the Uighurs are poorer and less educated than most Chinese and have a terrible historical record of governing themselves. Had the student demonstrations in 1989 in Tiananmen Square led to democracy, would the astoundingly high economic growth rates of the 1990s still obtain? I am not certain, because democracy in China would have ignited turmoil not just in the Muslim west of the country but elsewhere, too; order would have decreased but corruption would not have. The social and economic breakdowns under democratic rule in Albania and Bulgaria, where the tradition of pre-communist bourgeois life is weak or nonexistent (as in China), contrasted with more-successful democratic venues like Hungary and the Czech Republic, which have had well-established bourgeoisie, constitute further proof that our belief in democracy regardless of local conditions amounts to cultural hubris."
Heady stuff, and something that really made my head spin -- wasn't democracy good in all situations and all cases? The author would probably assert that censorship will continue to occur in China until a stable economy and strong middle class break open China to democracy, at which point it will end.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
Of all the rhetoric in this very disturbing piece of how western companies are helping censorship overseas, I found this comment most interesting:
"We don't care about the [Chinese government's] rules. It's none of Cisco's business."
Similar to how Mercedes or BMW didn't care much for what those giant ovens were used for in NAZI Germany, because it was none of their business. Oh how the ashes fall.
Disgusting. I can say I will never think of Cisco the same way again. What if the US decided they needed to "monitor" citizen Internet communications? Would Cisco step up with one of their enterprise level solutions?
Right next to Oracle with bids for a national ID card...
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Well, eventually Yertle the Turtle will fall in Beijing and some people will remember who helped keep him there. As it is, the chinese are working hard to displace the U.S. as #1 in many fields and they'll probably suceed in a few, just out of shear determination. Maybe it's the fear of that which makes the U.S. foreign policy the conumdrum that it is with regard to China.
Any chinese slashdotters?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Almost 1/3 of the SPAM sourcees I've encountered recently have been chinese. My ids LOGS regular ping sweeps and other probes coming from chinese held IP addresses. Chinese alerts account for about 24% of the IDS alerts. Some of these sweeps even originate in chinese government offices (since blocked because I'm tired of HUGE ping packets in my network from the beaurearu of statistics)
Considering the crap thats been spewing out of Chinese controlled IP space, I wouldn't be adverse to some reverse censorship. i.e. no chinsese IP's allowed in my network. The Chinese may not like what the NET has to offer their people, but they sure seem to dish out pretty silly stuff for the rest of us (My penis is much to big NOW, no more PLEASE).
I wonder if there was an easy way to blackhole all of mainland China? I wonder if the Chinese would consider THAT censorship?
I'm not saying that anyone should do this mind you, I'm just saying what goes around eventually comes around.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Wasn't it Joseph Stalin who said (paraphrasing here), "If you want to hang a capitalist, you can easily find another capitalist willing to sell you the rope."
Thanks a lot, Cisco.
Picture.exe virus to grab your PGP keys?
Pretty damn scary stuff if the Chinese goverment is releasing this stuff into the wild. (But really no different than the FBI's key logger)
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I can see where the Chinese government is coming from here. They don't want anyone to get any bright ideas or fall for other countries' propaganda. Perfectly logical. However, the evil of the plan comes out when you see that the Chinese are terribly oppressed, and that the censorship cloud covers everything that the government doesn't like. Which would be a lot of things. Maybe the U.S. is trying to see if it works well, so they could possibly instate a similar system in the future...
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Is the PRC trying to block out ALL offensive traffic, or MOST offensive traffic? What about the use of techniques like steganography to encrypt data into seemingly "harmless" pictures, mp3's, etc.?
If I were a government, I'd never want to try to get into this sort of "information freedom" cold war. It's companies like Cisco, Yahoo and the Chinese government vs. 1,273,111,290 Chinese people, some of whom have had the benefit of an American graduate education in computer science and mathematics. I'd say the odds are slanted toward the people...
The researcher that is cited as developing the anonymizer Triangle Boy in this article is working for the company SafeWeb which is supposed to be:
1. A CIA front
2. A company that produces software that they won't bug fix and yet is supposed to ensure anonymity.
Tchah! The only thing governments and their spook-agencies are good at doing is fscking things up.
I doubt you would be able to get many people onboard for your "blackhole the chinese".
:P)
Yeh, spam is annoying, and I take mesures to keep my address out of the hands of spiders. But getting a couple ping packets isn't going to make me keep my selection of fine pornographic links from chinese citizens. (if they arn't blocked already, I doubt the CCP really cares about a 1k impression/day site run from a dorm room
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There's an opportunity for a left-right coalition in the U.S. on this. The Right doesn't like China because they're Commies, and the Left doesn't like censorship.
I can view almost all internet sites from China. I'm posting this from Beijing right now from a major Chinese University. I can access most websites except for a few free content sites (geocities) and some news sites (cnn.com). Its strange, they block CNN but not New York Times, which, IMHO, is more critical of the Chinese government. Notice that Slashdot isn't blocked and its critical of almost everyone! So there filtering is not very consistent. They could get rid of the firewall tommorow and I think it would hardly change things.
I don't know about Chinese sites, I can only care about sites in English. As for spam, surely this is just b/c the networks in China are just not that well managed yet (e.g., like @Home networks once were...).
As for Cisco and Yahoo, they are doing business in China, and they are following Chinese laws. So what is the problem? Idealism and making money are mostly incompatible.
According to the Chinese engineer, Cisco came through, developing a router device, integrator, and firewall box specially designed for the government's telecom monopoly. At approximately $20,000 a box, China Telecom "bought many thousands" and IBM arranged for the "high-end" financing. Michael confirms: "Cisco made a killing. They are everywhere."
Humm, guess its time to Boycott Cisco and IBM.
David Zhou, a systems engineer manager at Cisco, Beijing, told me flat out, "We don't care about the [Chinese government's] rules. It's none of Cisco's business." I replied that he has a point: It's not the gun but the way it's used...
But this is like selling guns to criminals, wheres the background check?
-
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. - Soren Kierkegaard
Not by charging people to see it, but by charging the Chinese government so thay can't see it.
Pure genius!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
This is scary. Given the propensity of the "law enforcement" community in the US to jump on any excuse to deny human rights while looking for ways to invade privacy, it strikes me that there is very little in place right now to prevent the US government from doing this right now. I'm not normally so paranoid, but it is obvious that near-total central control of the internet is now technically possible (thanks a whole fucking lot, Cisco). The thing to ask is, how do we stop this cancer before it spreads?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
The leadership recognises that to compete in the world the China must interact with the rest of it, but to preserve their positions in power the leaders restrict it. Keep in mind that there are conservative elements in the Beijing goverment who are opposed to many of these advances. Once the government loses more of these people and they're replaced with leaders from the new middle and upper classes, well, things should change.
On another note... I wonder if any chinese leaders have mod points on slashdot?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Carnivore and Magic Lantern, Great Firewall of China is just a child-play. Btw, they will eventually catch-up with this(especially in this area).
I am Chinese, and frankly, you don't make a lot of sense. To further extend your argument, when China becomes "free", Chinese citizens will blame the Russians for selling them tanks and warplanes that fill the arsenal of the People's army, blame the Chinese newspaper editors for writing articles that spread Communist Party ideology and blame the Chinese factory workers that manufactured the bullets that shot the democracy protesters at Tianenmen Square.
I may have grown up in a foreign culture, but I can spot someone with an axe to grind when I see one. Your disgust at "Big Business" and "Big Government" has nothing to do with the rights or attitudes of the Chinese people, but rather with you wanting to blame the what's wrong with the world on those that you don't agree with.
The Chinese nation will sort themselves out over a long time, and probably peacefully, too - that's the Chinese way, to take the long, nonconfrontational view. The best thing that Clinton and Bush have done, and what you seem so opposed to, is to allow US businesses to continue to invest in China, further stimulating the economy and slowly raising living standards for the Chinese people. With increased living standards, more power to the middle class and greater education, the people of China will ask for more freedom and representation incrementally, and the government of China will grant the inevitable.
The average Chinese citizen does not want your revolution. They want orderly, nonviolent change. The US companies are just doing business, no more and no less, and that business helps along that change.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
First of all, yes, I can luckily read Slashdot from my office & home here in Beijing. I've been living in different cities in China for two-and-a-half years now & I've seen many (kinds of) blocks come and go.
Sure, CNN.com is blocked & so is BBC.co.uk. No, NYT.com & BBCWORLD.com aren't blocked. So yes, I also don't understand the logic behind the specific blocks themselves. What I do understand, however, is that the blocks unfortunately are not the real issue.
The real issue is that the majority of people (in this case, internet users) themselves are not interested to actually access this information. If you have a peek into one of the many internet cafes around, the majority of users are merely playing games.
If they are on the internet, they are always either on Chinese news sites or chatting with each other. If I talk to my colleagues in the office, and ask them why they're not interested in information from a different perspective, they tell me that they simply don't care too much about international opinions. If they do visit international sites they'd rather visit other kinds of sites, mostly of expensive brands like BMW, Gucci & Rolf Benz, just to check out the latest styles. They are also interested in international universities, how to get their MBA & required visas.
Please remember that this applies to the *majority* of users in China. Obviously there is a group of users that is interested in the information, but I believe people on Slashdot are realistic enough to know that if you want to access the information, there is *always* a way.
For those of you in China who want to access CNN, simply go to http://robots.cnn.com
You can't have it both ways. Pick one.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I have at least 10 Chinese people on my LICQ contact list. I've already turned 5 of them. So what if Beijing contracted Cisco to make a giant firewall. If the only way they could allow access was to put restrictions in place, they still screwed up by allowing access. You can't censor the whole internet, and freedom is contagious. Get this folks: Cisco enabled information acces to 1 billion otherwise oppressed and ignorant people who would have no informational resource outside of what Beijing prints on posters and pastes on walls.
If anyone out there thinks that the Chinese couldn't have done this on their own, that only Americans can build routers... Well, the seriously need to reevaluate their assumptions.
China could have done this without outside help, China should have free speech. They don't. Not building firewalls for them isn't going to open their society.
Since Mao died, the living standards of the average Chinese person has skyrocketed. Deng Xiao Peng created a lot of reforms, economically (saying "It's not bad, to be rich"), and even in terms of free speech and political expression. After Tiananmen they clamped back down. I don't really know if you can blame them either, if you just lived through the cultural revolution, you would probably be very afraid as well. Mid-century China was a veritable case study in how 'harmless' politics and mass youth movements can cause huge problems.
Maybe Tiananmen was do soon, and the students really blew it. They should have stuck with Op-Ed pages, and built support that way, protesting only set them back, a lot. China today doesn't allow anywhere near the political expression that existed in the 1980s.
But that said, people who's lives are getting better and better every year are not going to really want to revolt.
And keep in mind that democracy and freedom of speech is an exception in all of human history. Maybe someday, but don't think it will happen anytime soon. Happy citizens don't revolt.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It really angers me to see US companies aiding and abetting the suppression of human rights. Its always happened, IBM helped the Nazi's catalog the Jews. But this is the 21st century. Freedom should be a top priority along with peace. Capitalism has its place, but when its used to destroy the the freedom of others, its just plain sick.
Is the money that important to these people?
Those "Western Companies" should be ashamed of themselves. When they get oppressed by any government anywhere, I hope that no one helps them.
Land of the Free. Home of the Almightly Dollar. Freedom for them is convenient, but they don't really care about it.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Cisco: an example of why corporations should not have the rights of humans.
They have no morals.
Seriously, they sealed a billion people behind a wall. This is... is... sick. There should be no payment sufficient to build such a filthy thing. It's like building the Berlin wall in the '40's, or creating well-designed torture chambers for some hellish country's prison. What greed!!
It's enough to make ya turn communist, I swear.
I'm really surprised the Chinese Government hasn't shut down freaking china-net. Does anyone have any evidence of any sort of steganography being used by the Chinese?
I'm even more surprised that all the users of this site haven't put together some decent specs for a smarter email server. There are a couple of halfway solutions out there but we need something good. I guess I'll have to do it myself.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Seriously, this is reaching a point where the corporate profit motive is starting to get in the way of pesky things like morals and human rights, etc.
I remember some Canadian professor going into this in great detail. Basically, the lack on morality in the pure profit motive is going to screw with the log term prospects of the planet
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The US could, by legislation, prohibit U.S. companies from assisting with censorship in selected countries. There's an analogy to the Arab boycott of Israel [us-israel.org], which led to lobbying by Israel for U.S. laws prohibiting American companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott.
You are absolutely right. Legislation should quickly pass the law to cease the operation of immoral companies whom allow keylogging software from spying citizens' activities. Also, American companies should also join the boycott of the oppressive Government who creates a big database monitoring citizens' emails.
Oh wait.
And I'll probably get modded down -1 flamebait. But anyway: what is the problem with this? In the democratic world at large we have many standard freedoms including chosing who we do business with.
I cringe when I read these posts that say "how the hell can they do this?" and "this is just another example of big business...".
Frankly that is the result of allowing all people to act as they wish. This is not a thought socialist state: you cannot command someone to act a certain way with their freedoms. Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this? I saw someone comparing these companies to BMW et al during the Nazi years in Germany. Um, as far as I know Cisco isn't using "subhumans" as slavelabor here.
Personally there are many things about the Chinese government that I don't like and I'm kind of sad that these companies helped them out. But with or without their help the same paranoia state regime will still be in charge.
Heck probably the "revolution" that everyone asks for will happen without any one of us knowing. The Chinese middle class will expand, they will wish for a) more leisure and b) more freedom to spend their money. And the government will comply to them because they are the sweet tax center. Hell, that's how all of the US Terrorism law got passed.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I've been meaning to read IBM and the Holocaust. It basically talks about how IBM's punch card machines that they created customly for hitler were "indispensable in rounding up prisoners, keeping the trains fully packed and on time, tallying the deaths, and organizing the entire war effort."
I should say that although all of this is sad, I don't think there is any malicious intent on any of the companies. Its almost as though the whole takes actions that none of the individuals would.
What amazes me, is that the censorship is very content selective and seems to ease over time. For example, in the October releaase of Harpers Index there is one statement about China. The article was blocked the instant it was published, and for the full month Harpers was blocked in China. When the November index came out, one could access the October index and Harpers!
During the APEC meetings here late last year, when all President Bush and other big wigs were in town, CNN, BBC, and other news sites all became miraculasly available! Of course, they were all immediately blocked after APEC had ended.
Will /. get blocked while running this subject?
Real men don't need signitures!!!
Is The Great Wall of China on fire ?
> That's why corporations need to be regulated.
Bah, I still like to pretend this (US) is a free country. We don't need more rules, more regulation. Granted, some restrictions on big business are needed (like environmental and anti-trust, etc), but I like to leave the rest to social movement theory. I feel like there are so many rules in this country as it is.
If a sizeable amount of society can't agree on such a movement, is it really what we as a society want?
Call me a rule utilitarian, but I don't think Cisco did anything wrong since it was not illegal. If society doesn't like it they need to elect and petition politicians to change the law.
Most modern states employ a much more effective filter than anything Cisco could come up with:
People don't want to criticize their own govt's, or take responsibility for what their leaders do.
In fact, the "Great Firewall" China is using is a sign of the leadership's political naivete.
A system in which dissenting views are allowed (limited) exposure -- only to be swamped out by flag-waving and soundbytes -- gives people the illusion that they are living in an open society and participating in an open debate. But as long as vast swathes of history and unpopular facts are not widely known, critics will seem as though they are coming from left field and will be generally ignored, if not hated. Ironically, this small amount of openness serves to "immunize" the populace from taking opposing views seriously.
Ralph Reed said it best:
"In public policy, it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."
IMNSHO, if the Chinese leadership does a good enough job in K-12 education of instilling patriotism and belief in the fundamental justness of the regime, as well as making sure that the govt. view dominates most "respectable" news outlets and debate forums, then those rare voices arguing for, say, a withdrawal from Tibet will seem like traitorous whackos. Further, pride from allowing dissenting voices to be heard will even further reinforce the fundamental belief that they are the "good guys" in every conflict.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I don't know if I've missed it, but how could noone have yet made a "Great Fire Wall of China" pun?
Come on people! Pick up your game!
But for what it's worth it:
In the long run this wall's probably gonna prove as useful at keeping things (ie. information) out as the last one was.
I did my best.
:)
I guess we disagree. Freedom of thought -- freedom of access to information so as to allow balanced and reasoned judgements -- does strike me as an unalienable right. Not everyone enjoys the exercise of that right, not even in the good old USA, but everyone possesses it. And that fact alone is enough to be an itch under the skin of any freedom-loving person, that where and when we can, we push toward the exercise of it and that we oppose its restriction.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It's silly to blame Cisco for supplying the firewall to China
Ethics aside, it's certainly not silly to give a company bad p.r. because of its actions.
Cisco spends millions every year testifying to it's goodness. It sponsors athletic competitions, art groups, etc. It fosters a corporate image, and that corporate brand justifies a portion of the mark up on Cisco products. If you don't believe this, then ask yourself why p.r. departments exist, or why a company which sells routers would air tv commercials at all.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Late 20th century: Democracy versus Communism.
Early 21st century: Democracy versus... Capitalism?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I am one of the webmasters for the University of Michigan and my servers have been blocked from China for over a year. First they blocked just the IP addresses of our main servers (http://www.umich.edu/ & http://www-personal.umich.edu/) but when we moved our hosts to other IPs they blocked at least the entire subnet we use for public web servers. We get frantic e-mail from Chinese students all the time looking for access to our site so they can come here to study.
I hope triangle boy will help with this, but does anyone know of anything more proactive *I* could be doing?
Yes, and that nation full of people wants a firewall. If the nation doesn't represent the people in this issue, it's the people's responsibility to do something about it -- but as an internal issue, not your problem or mine, and certainly not Cisco's.
there is still a role for government (non-Enronized that is) in the 21st century.
Yes, obviously. In this case it's to order equipment and services to be used for oppressing their citizens.
The market (i.e. the Chinese people) is what will liberate China.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
Those who look for profit over medium term or longer (as opposed to a quick buck) are obligated to adopt certain priorities -- honesty and quality among them. Those corporations which seek immediate profit over the long-term benefits provided by these attitudes tend to either shape up (eventually) or be outlived by their more farsighted (and moral) bretheren. Eventually shortsighted behaviour tends to backfire -- see the Ford Pinto for an example of the same; while it may not kill a company, such an event serves as a warning to both that corporation and others, and tends to put other (more moral) companies ahead in the market.
Yes, it's a slow process -- but humanity has been around quite a while, and will likely be around some time to come. Smile; be happy; 'twill all come out in the wash.
I think that they mean that Yahoo censors and filters content and chats and search results on its /Chinese/ site, not on all Yahoo sites
evanchik.net
But the US happens to have its own obsessions of what is permissible. US obsessions are about disparaging foods, certain kinds of pornography, cryptography, and anything that might step on the toes of big media companies. And in the US, the means of enforcing those restrictions are oddball restrictions on any kind of hardware that plays audio and video, throwing people in jail, sending FBI agents to foreign countries to "help" them, trade sanctions, and prohibiting certain goods from being imported.
Yes, China has different obsessions (although there seems to be some overlap with US obsessions). But both governments are throwing their considerable weight around to prohibit access from the kind of content they consider harmful. When the US abandons restrictions like the DMCA, software patents, baroque rules on pornography, and the various export restrictions on cryptography, the US position on criticizing China would get a lot stronger. Until then, one can only conclude that both countries have haphazard and serious restrictions on speech.
Our corrupt officials are elected
Which ones? Not your appointed president...
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Yes the US has done bad things, they sanctoned the killing of indians, they ignored the horrors of slavery, the put japaneese Americans in concentration camps, and even belw up a religous compound killing dozens of women and children in the name of protecting us in Waco TX, and today the US government is trying to censor us in the name of protecting copyrights, and spy on us in the name of protecting us from terrorisim.
However, US law has accountbilities built in like voteing, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech, press etc... Where are these accountabilities in China? Answer: there are none other than us rideing their butt about human rights and Tiwan. I honestly don't really want to be involved in China's affairs, but we half to be, otherwise it will eventually blow up in our faces like Hitler did, not something I want to find out the hard way.
I think the point being made was that another society full of people are being supressed by a minority that just happens to be in control. Why was it that China was not allowed into the WTO until recently? Human rights records? I have no idea where you got the idea that this discussion was about imposing American values on China or trying to change China to become more American. The discussion was about American companies willingly submitting to the Chinese government's demands that their people not be allowed to access any form of "dissident" knowledge. We are discussing the liberation of a people controlled by a Communist government that seemingly won't die. The Chinese people don't like their situation, they are just powerless to do anything about it. So by your own words, why are you trying to impose your values on me by forcing me to mind my own business? I'm trying to liberate. You're trying to control.
What are you talking about man? In the 1980's the press was almost as free as in the US. Today, well, it isn't. Yeh, protesters staring down tanks make for great photos and propaganda -- outside of china -- But it won't do shit inside. If the protesters would have waited, and moved for slow reforms rather then 'revolution' China might be a free society now. But they were impatient.
Yeh, democracy is nice, but there was no pressing need to have a revolution at the time.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sure, CNN.com is blocked & so is BBC.co.uk. No, NYT.com & BBCWORLD.com aren't blocked. So yes, I also don't understand the logic behind the specific blocks themselves
That's just another ironic thing. The Chinese Communist Party already looks more like Captalist Party. Bear in mind, the Great Firewall of China is a dual purpose technology: stop people from accessing information. But, at the same time, stop conservatives from finding excuse to block the internet altogether.
The real issue is that the majority of people (in this case, internet users) themselves are not interested to actually access this information.
That isn't too surprising to me. Put that this way, how often does an American (or British or French or Japanese or whoever), will read news (newspaper or website) originated outside his/her own home country?
The censorship nowadays is not really that bad. Their official news broadcast (usually) covers most the important world headlines. Of course, the emphasize is different. I don't think you will be too interested in whether the Chinese will get a medal in Winter Olympic, or vice versa. No worries, people know where to get information whenever they need. (It was quite clear that they got US-Sino military plane collision event well before official broadcast. Guess what had happened.)
Ok, I don't really have a problem with big-business per-se, but in the US many businesses are artificially big because of US regulations and tax laws that are hard to comply with unless your rather big in addition to artifical US govt granted monopolies like patents and copyrights that help lock out smaller competitors. These all go a long way to making sure large companies replace ethical accountabilities with bureauocratic accountabilities (eg we have no personal responsibility for the quality of this meat because it's FDA approved)
Now I don't know if this would have an effect on what's going on in China right now, but I agree with you that the more we accept people doing what they wish the more successfull we will be at promoting freedom everywhere.
Its okay for them to follow Chinese Laws and filter, but not okay for them to follow French laws.
Interesting hypocrisy isn't it ?
Steve
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Cisco and Yahoo etc. are doing a good thing here!
If every related company would tell the chinese govt. "No, we will not do such blocking system. It's impossible/immoral/bad/[insert your favourite reason here].", what do you think chinese govt. would do? It would decide that they cannot control the internet, so they won't allow any internet traffic in/out of the country. They are control freaks, so they need to have the warm and fuzzy feeling of 'controlling' the net.
Cisco & friends are providing them (at an immense cost, mind ya) a 'filtering system' that gives them that warm & fuzzy feeling that they are 'controlling' their citizen's internet access. It's an illusion at best, but they seem to want it, and are willing to pay for it. You know - the saying about fool and their money... :)
We all know that there are ways around such blocks. This is nothing but your average broken censorware application with goverment approved blocklist, built into bunch of high end routers. Having somewhat crippled internet connection to the world is by far a better option than no internet at all. You can always work around the blocks, and get what you need, if you really want it.
Longer those chinese leaders are happily smiling in their ivory towers and thinking 'the citizens have their internet, but only those parts we want - we are in control', the better.
While what you say is more or less true, let's not forget that in the hands of bad people, the US system is not as happy and carefree as you suggest. The classic example of this is President Nixon.
Now I know Nixon is a big conservative hero, but the reality is that he used his power, both political and military, to opress political opposition to further his own ends.
The best example of this is probably not the whole Whitewater scandal, but rather the Pentagon Papers. For those not in the know, this was a book written by the Pentagon designed to be a report of the US involvement in Vietnam. When a newspaper (NY Times) got a hold on it and started printing it, Nixon arranged to have the first order against a newspaper printing a story in the history of the US issued.
Now mind you, this wasn't a list of current battle strategies or logistics, but a history of the war that had been going on for 7 or 8 years at this point. The newspaper was vindicated in the end, but not before suffering attacks and threats.
This isn't liberal innuendo, it's the facts.
First off, who are you to impose your values on others? Maybe the chinese like their society, maybe they don't. But its not upto *you* to force your values on others.
Would care to explain how denouncing a brutally oppressive government for inhibiting communication is "forcing his values on others"?
Everytime china comes up every american spews their views on why China is inferior.
It's not so much a matter of China being inferior, it's a matter of China being under the thumb of a brutal gerontocracy. This isn't a mere matter of taste, you jackass. Weren't you paying attention when Deng ordered the massacre in Tienanmen square?
Got to www.tibet.org, and educate yourself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, it does... The article does not talk about censorship only. One of the applications of the monitoring is persecution of people who seek freedom. The hairs on my neck stood on end when I read this.. this is _exactly_ the kind of application that IBM was helping with, when the Germans were using IBMs to count Jews. Whether it's by race or by belief, in both instances innocent people are persecuted. The Chinese don't outright kill the dissidents, but I am confident this is happening - the world for a long time was in denial of the use of western counting machines by the Germans. Nobody believed they were actually used to label people for extermination. The Chinese application is horrifyingly close if not exactly the same!
I used to live in a commie country. In such a regime, the government uses propaganda to spread some positive.. and beatiful message. This is invariably a sophism. In the Chinese case, the message is, "we are all for peaceful change." Killing and persecuting dissidents is NOT peaceful (as some earlier post pointed out). This message is an outright lie; it is easy to believe though..
Many Chinese believe it. What's even more dangerous is that people in the Western world believe it too. They are often idealists and really like to hear declarations of peaceful change and gradual way to freedom. And that they can help those poor people in China by helping with that change.
An example of similar such behaviour is how scientists on the Manhattan project during WWII helped the Russians obtain info on how to make the bomb. They believed no single country shoud have the bomb. They gave this secret to Stalin on account of his "socialism"... That was a mistake - as history now tells us, Stalin was a worse murderer than Hitler - if they gave the bomb to Hitler, fewer innocent people would have died (maybe I'm exaggerating, but my point is that it is possible).
Further, these intelligent people who like the "Chinese way" are placed very high in Western businesses. The guy from Cisco in the article no doubt wants the good of the Chinese people, but this is a fatal mistake on his part. On a large scale (as it is, unfortunately, happening) this behaviour will lead to a China ready to go to war with the west and win.
Few want to believe this. It is easy to put it out of your mind too. This is not the Chinese way.. right? Wrong. We are talking about China with a legacy of imperialism here - just look at the way they deal with internal problems.
Forget national ID card, most free countries in the world have them; forget about big evil Microsoft, their crimes are petty. The real threat is collecting its billion people strength on the other side of the globe. This is not too far to consider.
It is every free person's duty to help the Chinese people and NOT the Chinese government. By supplying the country (and thereby the ruling government) with money, the West is not helping the people. This way, the Chinese government has more and more reasources to continue being the way it is... And this is definitely not good, because as much as they talk about it, these guys do not want to change the balance of power over there.
So wake the @#$% up!
Damn, I never thought I would sound like a doomsayer or be one, but with stuff like this goig on, it's difficult not to be.
What the thugs in charge in China don't realize is that it's internal communication that's going to enable the Chinese people to throw off their yoke.
Back when Deng and his fellow gerontocrats murdered the protestors in Tienanmen square, they had to bring in soldiers from rural areas, who had no idea what was going on in Peking. The local garrison wouldn't have done it.
Ceacescu was overthrown when the lies broke down, and the Romanian army could see for themselves that the people on the other side of the barricades were their friends, families and neighbors. (Not a handful of evil counter-revolutionaries as state propaganda insisted.)
When the thug-in-charge ordered them to open fire on the protestors in Bucharest, the army decided that that wasn't what they'd signed up for, and opted instead to kill the bloodthirsty motherfucker.
When the Chinese are able to communicate widely and nearly instantaneously amongst themselves, it's going to be all over for the Party. I missed the demolition of the Berlin wall, but I sure hope to be in China when they start pulling down the statues of Mao.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Under its authoritarian system China has dramatically improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of its people. My point, hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not.
The Chinese people have dramatically improved their quality of life over the last fifty years despite the interference of their corrupt, incompetent, brutal government.
Crediting the government that murdered tens of millions through a deliberate program of enforced starvation with "improving the quality of life" for the people they oppress is beyond absurd.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Now, I value my right to free speach as much as you, but I don't feel I have the right to critisize the Chinese way of doing things. After all, China is the oldest state in the world -- they must have been doing something right.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
I disagree. Speech and information are fundamental. They are so fundamental that The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution is Freedom of Expression. Not the second, not the tenth.
If you don't have freedom of speech and of the press, how can you spread information about corruption and violence that is taking place under the auspices of the government? Preventing that information from getting out is just a shelter for other human rights violations to continue. Speech is a fundamental and important human right that people must have in order to protect themselves from the tyranny of evil governments.
-Kevin
Let me start out by saying that I am about as capitalist as a human being can be. I love capitalism and think it's a great idea. I hold alot of respect for big business. I have a huge amount of respect for Bill Gates. I think anyone who can make $40B selling crap deserves a pat on the back. But I still use linux. Because I don't want to help him sell crap. And I won't help cisco build jails either. I'll vote with my dollars.
And as for the chinese people who posted to say "it's not so bad", it would be alot worse if you had any un-popular thoughts. The government of any country is formed by the people of said country. And all those peoples are responsible for the actions of the government. I don't know, I've never studied Chinese politics (I've got enough problems with my government), but when I read that, I've got to wonder "how many people were killed or imprisoned because they held un-popular beliefs? IIRC, I've read about at least one incident of a Chinese person being imprisoned for disagreeing with the governemt. One is far too many. But you don't care. You think it's "not that bad"?! That's a real person. Going through REAL SUFFERING! Sitting in a real jail, with bars and shitty food and not enough warmth. Dealing with real boredom and real loneliness. And you sit in your nice office with a hot cup of coffee saying "it's not that bad"!? It is that bad. I believe that compassion and empathy are a part of humanity. For you to sit there and not even care degrades us all. You can be apathetic, that's your opinion, here's mine: Not giving a damn about anothers suffering, and in fact helping it along, makes you scum. You are the lowest of the low. I hope you choose to disagree one day and rot in a cell for it.
Well, you might not care, but I damn well do.So I will now refrain from using cisco products, because I will not help them limit freedom. If I thought that I had in helped them find one more dissident to put in jail, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. If I bought a cisco catalyst, I would have problems sleeping. I'd be kept awake thinking "they spent my money to build a jail". They are capitalists, and I expect them to act in the interest of profit, But anyone who expects me not to act in the interest of freedom is insane. To that end, I will try and make their interest in profit and my interest in freedom coincide. By never using their products (and I was gonna be a CCNA).
We live in a capitalist society, and in a capitalist society money controls everything. That's good, because money doesn't discriminate, and if we want to make a change, all we have to do is with-hold our money. Fuck Cisco. Fuck their products. Let _them_ do it. I won't help. I'll boycott cisco. Will my change help anything? Maybe not, but it's a start. And 20 years from now, when we're all presenting our national ID's for minimal access to _our_ national cisco firewall, I'll look back and think " I tried". You can look back and think "I helped them do it."
"The system doesn't care because the system is you. Nothing ever changes because that's what _you_ choose." -- A//Political
Don't beg for the right to live - take it.
If they're so successful at restricting access to the Internet, why are 10% of the spam sources and 8% of the hacking attempts against my servers from .cn domains?
-a.e.mossberg
What makes you think people in China do not want or deserve that freedom you are so used to?
What is a culture that claims to have "our higher ideals" but keeps them to itself?
You WILL be troubled by this when your friends and neighbours find out about your selfish stance
I pitty you!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
My favorite paragraph from the article:
But what is "normal" in China can be altered under duress. When Chinese authorities ordered Microsoft to surrender its software's underlying source codes--the keys to encryption--as the price of doing business there, Microsoft chose to fight, spearheading an unprecedented Beijing-based coalition of American, Japanese, and European Chambers of Commerce. Faced with being left behind technologically, the Chinese authorities dropped their demands. Theoretically, China's desire to be part of the Internet should have given the capitalists who wired it similar leverage. Instead, the leverage all seems to have remained with the government, as Western companies fell all over themselves bidding for its favor. AOL, Netscape Communications, and Sun Microsystems all helped disseminate government propaganda by backing the China Internet Corporation, an arm of the state-run Xinhua news agency.
So, let me get this straight: Microsoft leveraged their power for "good", while the others all fell down and capitulated to the Chinese government to get the easy money... what is that telling us...
Because the West relies on a democractic government and a capitalist market they are often seen as indivisible.
In reality they are very much seperate. Capitalism is a system in which the purpose of business is wealth creation. Businesses make decisions necessary to make cash for their owners, and we hope that a side-effect of this is innovation, employment and general welfare.
Democracy, on the other hand, is a system for managing society and government. At it's heart, democracy is the principle that all the people of a state should have a meaningful contribution to how it is governed. No more and no less.
It is quite possible to have a non-capitalist democracy and a capitalist dictatorship.
You cannot expect western businesses to defend democracy, when it is completely outside their purview. Very few of Cisco's customers are democracies, the vast majority are other corporations - about as undemocractic as you can get.
They have no reason to care, and that is how it should be. If you want China to become a democracy, then go tell the Chinese. Ultimately, it is up to them.
Nothing is wrong with this. Similarly however, nothing is wrong with posting opinions which are against company involvement in such projects. Same logic applies.
Cheers,
Ian
What about Google? Is it blocked as well? Because you can see cached cnn.com or any inconvenient geocities content there.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
To say that X is not a right had no other meaning than saying "It's acceptable and proper that other people, at their whim, may deprive me of X and that not only do I have no say in the matter, it is improper for me to have a say in the matter."
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
You cannot expect western businesses to defend democracy, when it is completely outside their purview.
Who are you to tell me what I can expect of those I do business with? If I tell you I'm only going to buy your widgets if you dress up like a leprechaun, you damn well better be wearing green knickers and shoes with buckles next time I see you if you want to make the sale. I see you've defined capitalism and democracy nicely, but you seem to have forgotten that these ideas only apply to human societies. In a human society, such as we have here, we can influence each others behavior with a wide variety of subtle and not-so-subtle pressures, of which the law and the dollar are but two. For instance, if I see a tobacco company executive or a tobacco farmer on the street, I won't hesitate to let that person know what a worthless, parasitical waste of flesh that person is. I'd defend their right to grow and sell tobacco, but I'd think that they're scum for doing it.
They have no reason to care, and that is how it should be.
If only you were alone in this disturbing sentiment... Maybe someday you'll be in a position where you'll need help, but since I have no reason to care, why should I? Imagine yourself choking to death in a crowded restaurant, while everyone else goes about their "business", ignoring you. The chinese people are having their freedom to speak choked off, but why should western corps. care? Heck, it's a great opportunity to make a buck!
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
Corporations exist to increase the wealth of shareholders, period. All other considerations are secondary. To increase shareholder wealth, new markets are constantly sought out and developed. Once they are exhausted or saturated the search begins again. I remember reading a quote in a college textbook from a CEO of a major multinational (it may have been GM), where he basically said his biggest wish was that his company could exist outside the boundaries of any sovereign government authority. The goal of these multinationals is to exist wholly as entities unto themselves. Their allegiance is to the bottom line, not to the greater good of the country where they happen to be headquartered in. To me that is amoral - not an inherently evil or bad thing, simply a moral vacuum that exists when the overarching goal isn't tethered to any motive other than profit. This story (a great one by the way) is a perfect example of this. Its hard to blame Cisco if you look at this from the corporate point of view. What is aggravating to me is the U.S. government's silent complicity - where was the outrage when Cisco and company decided to climb in bed with the Chinese leadership?
8 bit computing - It may be 2007 out there, but it's 1983 in here!!
Do I blame the Cisco salesguy who wants to pay off his wife's college debt and send his kid to school and pay those back taxes... No.
Why not? Why is his decision to help opress people above criticism. If he was ignorant, or they had a gun to his wife and kids heads maybe your argument would have some merit. But paying off college debt? Come one!
1) Do you really want to spend your energy opposing this?
Easy question. Yes.
2) What can you do that might be productive?
A much harder question. There is not much as an individual I can do. I can let these companies know that I think they are morally repugnant and refuse to do business with them. There was an age when even businessmen had a moral sense and sought to operate within (largely self-imposed) moral boundaries. In our free society those that didn't often faced only minor or even no legal penalties but the rest of the community felt free to make and to express a moral judgement that such businessment were beneath contempt. The weight of public opinion reinforcing the dictates of personal conscience can be a powerful motivator without involving the blunt coercive machinery of the state.
3) Is it really any of your business?
This ones easy. Yes.
I mean, heck, maybe we're mainly just venting. I know I am.
See my answer to question two. If "venting" is done not just on a board full of malcontents but expressed to the company concerned, if it rises to a level of universal scorn and moral repugnance, if it is accompanied by action, it is a valuable thing. We are all told in these days that moral judgements are "wrong" (ironically this is itself a moral judgement) Bullcrap, that salesman just trying to get along did so by helping to opress millions of people - and the curtailing of their freedoms of speech and communication is not done just for it's own sake - it is done because it facilitates much more concrete abuses. In any society with even the least commitment to human rights he and his corporation would be shunned and despised and rightly so.
> Our patriotic duty would be to support such actions as our contribution to the war.
This is perhaps what the instigators of this scenario would say, but they'd be wrong. In fact, it would be our patriotic duty to prevent such a plan from being implemented as it violates the Constitution. Besides, the one advantage of a money-controlled press is that they would never stand for such wholesale blocking of information flow.
Virg
I am a overseas student in US from China now. And I experienced the censorship of China the days in my country. And I can not log on www.washingtonpost.com etc. from Beijing. I really do not think this is a good thing. however, what we have to know is that China is changing. And it is better, more open, more dermostic every day.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I've always found this a curious quote for people to cite, given the fact that Marxist economics is widely discredited and most people think Lenin is wrong about everything. People who would never quote Lenin to prove anything else seem comfortable with this quote, which clearly they've only heard second hand.
Perhaps the sentiment contains a grain of truth but in general it's probably not very accurate about the cynicism of capitalists. Both in war and peace, the United States is extremely effective in adapting its industrial might to the requirements of defense.
In so far as capitalism has supplied rope, it has been to hang America's enemies.
Speaking as someone who's dubious about the merits of capitalism, I have to say that historically America's enemies have gotten more support from anti-capitalists.
Cisco and Yahoo seem to think there is nothing wrong with the People's govt of China.
And what is wrong with this?
Imagine you own a gun store. Someone comes in and tells you "I want to buy a gun so I can shoot my wife and daughter."
No, you may thing there's nothing wrong with shooting wives and daughters. But that doesn't change the fact that if you sell this person a gun, you've done something immoral, unethical, and evil.
Cisco has chosen to help a totalitarian government which does things like lock people in jail for distributing Bibles and crush student protests under the treads of tanks. Cisco has chosen to help that government censor and control the flow of information.
How can you honestly not understand what's wrong with that?
"It is every free person's duty to help the Chinese people and NOT the Chinese government. By supplying the country (and thereby the ruling government) with money, the West is not helping the people."
:) ), but not all countries that have such liberal speech laws also have that kind of manufacturing capability.
I don't disagree with this or your opinion that what Cisco and Yahoo are doing are bad. However what you're asking for is a form of interventionism. By choosing whether or not to do business with a country for non-business reasons is an effort to try to have an effect in the internal politics of that country and how it governs itself. While interpersonal intervention has been agreed upon and codified about as far back as Hamurabi, international intervention is not.
What if we turned the tables? What if some printer manufacturer in Hong Kong decided to agree with their government on speech limitations? And what if they looked at the US and saw how such hate groups as the KKK have the ability to say such horrible things about other people and get away with it? They might decide not to sell printers in the US because the US can't and won't guarantee those printers won't be used to print things they don't think should be printed. Sure, the US probably wouldn't miss the printers (as we could probably make our own
While I feel that what China is doing to its own people is wrong, I also know that people who would try to change our trade policy because of that opinion would play right into Beijing's cries of US hegemony. And I'm also personally frightened by the idea of "Pax Americana" (if for no other reason than our reluctance and ineptitude at dominating the world).
And what if Cisco and Yahoo decided not to play along with China? Beijing may not be able to set up the firewall they feel they need on their own, and they could very well blame these two companies for their own inability to allow internet access (much like how Baghdad blames the US for their inability to feed their own people). And those who support the decision would be seen as preventing the majority of Chinese from having any internet access (and the justification would likely be ignored).
Really, when you consider it, being hard on Beijing forces Beijing to be harder on the Chinese people. While Beijing may or may not be working towards peaceful change, it is true that the only other alternative is a bloody civil war/revolution (the name depends on who wins).
To be honest I don't think this was a particularly easy decision for either Cisco or Yahoo. Consider Cisco's entire existance relies on the free and unhindered flow of information, economically as well as philosophically (after all, if there are fewer internet sites to visit then there's no need to invest in the faster and more expensive routers). And also remember that this is the Yahoo that's thumbed their nose at Paris over auctions of Nazi memorabilia. They've decided to wash their hands of the cluster-fuck that is China (damned if they do, damned if they don't) and, while we may not agree with the decision, you can't really blame them for not wanting to indirectly start a war by not letting Beijing have what they want.
The only real solution to this is to codify intervention and standardize enforcement instead of requiring everybody to go through moral hand-wringing each and every time the situation comes up. And that's easier said than done when you also want to protect national sovereignty.
There were no "secrets' to the atomic bomb. The physics were well understood in the thirties. The mechanism to ignite fission was pure engineering. The only thing remotely secret was the method to refine the uranium, which was solved three ways. But any decent engineer could have come up with a solution.
The design of the H-bomb was also pretty straightforward. Fission ignites dueterium/tritium, bomb goes boom.
For fifty five years, the myth of the Secrets has been bandied around. Hell, a few years ago, some poor schmuch at Los Alamos was put into solitary for revealing "secrets" of our nuclear research, and also for being suspiciously Chinese-American. It was a complete crock. There were no secrets, he wasn't a spy, and it was all politically motivated, pretty much as it was in the Fifties.
Hrm. Actualy, it isn't confirmed that they killed anyone with tanks. Basicaly what they did was give everyone several minutes to leave (there were about 30 'full time' hunger strikers living on the square) And then they tanked over the tents and infrestructure. Anyone still there would have died, but, they had plenty of time to get up and go... and (if they were hunger striking anyway)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I think the idea is that the Capitalists have no problem screwing their own kind. Like when Sigourney Weaver comments about the Aliens (quoted inaccurately from memory here) "at least they don't screw their own." Although one of the quotes indicated that a capitalist would sell his hangman the needed rope, I think the idea of most of the quotes is that capitalists' number one priority is profit and personal gain.
As a concrete example, consider the Arthur Anderson/Enron/Enron employee situation. It's pretty clear that Enron screwed it's own employees. Arthur Anderson could be accused of hanging themselves in the effort to make a profit.
-Paul Komarek
I believe that people's freedoms should stop when they begin to infringe on other people's freedoms.
In this case, Cisco and Yahoo's "freedom" to do business with China is taking away 1 billion other people's freedom to read cnn's website.
Like I said in another post -- it might not be illegal, but it's definitely immoral, at least by my standards.
Here here! Socialism and capitalism are not enemies, nor are the incompatible. You'd think the continued survival of several socialist/capitalist European govt's would have driven this point home to the masses, but the US masses don't seem to know that Europe is more than a theme park.
For reference, my view of Socialism is simply putting social priorities ahead of individual priorities.
-Paul Komarek
The Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs website was blocked in China sometime in 1997. The story goes that the Australian Embassy in Beijing made repeated requests for the block to be lifted only to be told that it was the result of a "technical problem" and not deliberate blocking by the Chinese government. Finally in mid-2001, a representative of the Chinese government, based in either Canberra or Sydney, was called in to provide an explanation as to why the "technical problem" had not been resolved after some four years. Within hours of the meeting (I understand that it was 2-3 hours) the website was available for viewing in China. Having lived in China for a while now, I find that it is not the fact that some international news sources are blocked, but that the only source of Chinese language news comes from official sources. It is illegal, and rigorously monitored, to publish 'news' in China that does not originate from the official Xinhua News Agency (or one of its sister publications). This means that Chinese readers get the sort of view of China that an American would get if they only watched CNN.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
The author of the article states:
"The only practical solution to this puzzle is for the Bush administration to make Internet freedom in China a high priority".
That's just plain naive. All the Chinese people I know would take that as just another example of American arrogance. It's strange, the author sounds like he's never been to China... maybe he just never got out enough.
How about before making Internet freedom a priority in China, we try making it a priority in the US? Any one ever heard of the DMCA?...
golem1024
Oversaturated pictures of people laying on the street!
That really doesn't seem like much evidence of a massacre to me, the only blood was on the pavement... and most of those people don't look like they were run over by tanks.
Photos without much context on a fundamentalist Christian website don't mean anything. How many people do you think died there? What resources do you have to back yourself up?
Revolutions can happen quickly, but you should make sure that you are actually strong enough to carry them out. Scaring the government shitless is not a good way to improve your freedom unless you can actually take them over. And winning sympathizers on the outside who don't fully understand the situation isn't going to help you if 90% of the population supports the government. And I can assure you that "four billion" people don't consider the Chinese government evil, the vast majority of people probably don't care.
And was what happened in Tiananmen really that worse then what happened in Seattle or Genoa, committed by capitalists?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Why not? Why is his decision to help opress people above criticism. If he was ignorant, or they had a gun to his wife and kids heads maybe your argument would have some merit. But paying off college debt? Come one!
Cisco is a common carrier. They don't oppress the Chinese people any more than Napster shares MP3s -- either both are responsible for what their customers do with the equipment (or software) they sell, or neither is.
Personally, I don't want my business to have to be involved in policing our customers. We make sure our own actions are morally correct; the morals of others aren't our responsibility (and the thought that they are is what leads to such things as the Christian Coalition trying to keep same-sex marriage illegal).