Slashdot Mirror
The Great Firewall of China - Samples of Filtered Sites
Loligo writes "Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has released a study listing some of the sites filtered by Chinese internet connections. Sites about Taiwan are maybe understandable, but Red Lobster?" We've mentioned the ongoing Berkman study before; one of their interesting findings is that the list of blocked sites is a moving target, and some sites are blocked only intermittently. Here are summaries from The New York Times and MSNBC, by way of The Censorware Project. Update: 12/04 21:03 GMT by T : Seth Finkelstein points to his report "Searching Through the Great Firewall of China," which "describes a simple technique which can be used
with some search engines to bypass censorware bans on searching for
forbidden words. Particular emphasis is placed on the situation of the
Great Firewall Of China."
The Chinese govt doesn't want to embarass their citizens... so they are blocking sites like RedLobster.com to keep them from trying to say words like Wed Wobstew!
E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
well is it?
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I don't think the Mongolians will be able to get through this wall anytime soon....
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
They don't want their children seeing prawn.
Tons of sites get 'filtered' by Slashdot every day.. for instance, thanks to the slashdotting (after 10 whole comments!), the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is also inaccessible to me..
Probably because of your secret connections to Red Lobster.
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The day I see a red lobster waving its claws is the day I start oiling my chainsaw garlic butter: "Evil Dead IV: Undead Lobster Grooviness!"
From the report : "He generated this list by collecting all 797 results from Google in response to an October 2001 web search using the search criteria "free adult sex," less two pages removed because they were found not to include sexually explicit images" Wow, poor man had to check 797 sites to make sure they had pr0n. Where do you sign up to help?
And why wouldn't they?
Lobsters are commonly found in cold waters. This is symbolic of the cold war that the communists lost. Communism was founded by Marx in Vienna. Notice that Vienna is the same shape as a lobster's claw. Turn the first letter of the founder of communism's name upside down and you get a W - two V's. Just like a lobster.
In addition, when a lobster is boiled they turn red, and then are consumed - by western capitalists.
It's obvious that the communists saw through the thinly veiled allegory to the slanderous attack on their party and beliefs. The Red Lobster site is the western equivalent of 'We will bury you - in butter and lemon'.
You would have to be a fool not to see it...
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
To say nothing of the great feared automatic censorship site "slashdot.org" in america, which halts the free spread of information by bringing to their knees, in a complicated technique of distributed denial of service attack known as "linking" or sometimes "the slashdot effect", any and all websites that dare to discuss the subjects of internet freedom or SF/F movies. For example, witness what happened to cyber.law.harvard.edu itself because they have posted this study on the Great Firewall of China; slashdot.org has neatly removed it from the internet.
Compared to american forces like slashdot.org, china's Great Firewall is no affront to freedom at all. After all, china's censorware can be circumvented; the slashdot effect cannot.
"...whoever is moderator of Slashdot, please post an article comparing China and the USA's censorship ..."
Oh no. He has summoned the moderator John Katz.
RUN!
>> they must have good hosting =)
one of the nice side effects of running a for-profit business.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Perhaps the advertisements for "All You Can Eat Shrimp" are, in the eyes of the censors, indicative of Western excess... :)
Even the most powerful despot is helpless against the power of mockery!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Having read the article thoroughly, this startling news shows the flaws in the brewing Open Source Zeitgeist that is gripping the software community. Have you considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes?
Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. The bureaucratic overhead previously allowed activists enough time to flee the country. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. Consider putting that little thought in your mental resolv.conf file.
If that does not concern you ( which it probably doesn't, since the slashdot.org paradigm is publishing articles about how not to pay for things ), consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. Thanks to GNU/Lunix, Taiwan will be on a collision course with the mainland in the near future.
Which throws into question Mr. Stallman's motives. A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies. Could it be a back door to Stallman's dream of an über-Socialist United States? We may never know for sure. Next time you consider contributing to an open source project, ask yourself this question: don't you want to make sure your work isn't used for nefarious purposes? Will you risk having blood on your hands?
His response made sense seeing as the original poster took the word "understandable" out of context. As a response, the word "filtering" was taken out of context. Get it? Somebody should now take something I said out of context.
Sex - Find It
His response...made ...the original poster..Yer Sex Gateway
My Sex Gateway is private, and in no way is it "understandable" for the that guy to offer himself to me like that.
Never confuse volume with power.
You sure do excel at taking things out of context!
OK, help me put a little context on the statement
"Filtering is bad, PERIOD."
I thought I'd covered just about all the angles. I guess the only one I left out is
"China filtering outgoing web request is bad, PERIOD"
, but I got the feeling that was not what the original author meant. Maybe I'm wrong.
It turns out that I think our speech is a little too unfettered, as well, so I'd probably disagree with that assertion too. See also cases of the French government banning/blocking/whatever Nazi sites...
Are you in politics?
No; I tend to state my mind. It also bothered me that TE's 2 line post with no seeming thought to the content was rated "Insightful".