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SMS, SARS, And Censorship
angkor writes with a link to this article about "How SMS messaging in China forced the government to acknowledge the 'fatal flu in Guangdong.' And the steps the Chinese government is taking to make sure it does not happen again."
..we'll see encrypted SMS? On the other hand, if it's not already, it'll probably soon be a criminal offense to send any encrypted messages over there as well..
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
Typical chinese government really, cover it up and silence those who speak. Abuse the power they have for their own benefit. Actually, sounds like pretty much most governments
"In March last year it required all websites and domestic and foreign internet providers to sign a "self-discipline pact" obliging them not to disseminate "harmful texts or news likely to jeopardise national security and social stability, violate laws and regulations, or spread false news, superstitions and obscenities"."
I love the references to rumors, superstitions, etc. When will the Chinese government take into account the lessons of history and realize that the best way to cultivate rumors and suspicion is to have a population as in the dark as the one they have created. You let your media report freely, and rumors will be quickly shot down with reliable references. You control your media, and you lost the trust of your citizens, who, not knowing any better source, trust the equally-uninformed rumors which then spread like wildfire.
In addition, I read with utter amusement China's wish to maintain a huge telecom and information infrastructure. Would someone like to explain how a nation so inhibiting of communication and information expects to make use of such technology... It's hypotrical, China would love to look Western while keeping its citizans controled in this fashion, and they'll never prove sucessful.
Guess who one of our major customers was ... the Chinese Government!
Luckily it never got off the ground...
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
"The Great Firewall of China" is China's most spectacular cover-up? What? That doesn't even remotely compare to when 62 dams in China failed in the course of one night. No news of these dams collapsing came out of China until years later despite the fact that this huge catastrophe caused at least 20,000 deaths (some estimate as high as 230,000 but really nobody knows) and over 1,000,000 survivors became homeless or famine-struck as a result of the floods.
in the San Gabriel Valley... someone began circulating an email stating that several cases had been found locally and named specific restaurants and markets that had been closed.
The first time I read it I thought it was a hoax, but then a friend who worked at a local hospital called me and told me they were distributing it as a general alert at the hospital.
I ended up going to the Police Department, scared, to find out. Turns out the email was a fraud, and that the PD had been recieving 500 calls a day about it. The establishments mentioned had seen a decrease in business of 50% as a result of some A-HOLE playing a joke. This is similar to what happened in China, I think. I would applaud if they caught the originator and put them in prison.
SECOND EMAIL.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
The German magazine "Telepolis" (from Heise.de) has an interesting article about SARS in the USA.
I'm in China using a Chinese free mail service. There isn't much spam (2/week), but 70% of which is about FaLunGong.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstech nology/134994939_esiod14.html
I had to find a Google Cache, as the government-owned proxy I work behind blocked access to the original article. I love the smell of irony in the morning!
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The same is happening in China. Various news agencies are not reporting actual news worthy events in China, as it would get them kicked out. There is a tremendous market in China. CNN would rather skip the truth than report what is actually happening.
The biggest human rights abuses occurr in China. Millions die in accidents there every year that you never hear about. Local communist organizations still kill people routinely.
Economic reforms have occurred in a vacuun. Without political reform, all of this investment and wealth will be for nothing. The leaders of China still believe they are communist. The local communist groups still kill people and oppress the rest. People are still disappeared for talking to reporters who want to report what is really going on.
China is a nation that murders its citizens. It denies the most basic of human rights. It is still ruled by incompetent men like Jiang Zimen. China is a disgrace to the world community.
I would use my real name, but I am afraid for my fiance's family, who still live in China.
I mean, what's the deal. So there's a sickness going around that's a little more fiesty than you average 24-hour bug.
Why keep it a secret? No one's going to blame you for it, every country goes through this stuff all the time. Is Communism so fragile that a few extra-heavy-duty flu cases will destroy it?
Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
...
1. A disease breaks out and spreads rapidly.
2. The news spreads across SMS, the internet, etc.
3. Authorities use the information gathered to avoid future epidemics.
How China handles a medical crisis
1. A disease breaks out and spreads rapidly.
2. The news spreads across SMS, the internet, etc.
3. Authorities use the information gathered to suppress communications so that future outbreaks can spread quietly and unchecked.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As a matter of fact, yes, it is.
Authoritarian regimes are strong, but brittle. In an environment characterized by slow technological change, they can last indefinitely, because the tools used to control the proles change slowly enough that leaders can keep up with them.
Rapid technological change upsets that balance. Such change is typically driven by technology - witness the printing press, the rise of the "freethinkers", and the eventual topplings of the monarchies of Europe and Russia. (And the despots that took their place - Robespierre in France, Lenin in Russia, and so on.)
Authoritarian regimes typically rely on controlling the means of communication in order to maintain power. Technologically-driven change in the area of communications is one of the most threatening things an authoritarian regime.
If the Communist Party lies about SARS, then maybe... *gasp*, they lied about the day the dam broke in my village. I've gotta call my brother who was 1000 miles away with the army when it happened and ask him if the Party told him his village's dam was the only one that broke that night. And my cousin who works in Hong Kong now, I remember him laughing when I first told him it was only our dam, maybe now I know why he laughed. And my grandfather back in my old village who remembers the times before the Party.
When nobody believes the Party ("Pravda and Izvestia - There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia"), the regime shatters.
> Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
Any government's first duty is to perpetuate itself; "building trust and credibility" is a useful goal (from the government's point of view) only insofar as it enables the government to perpetuate itself and/or increase its power over its subjects.
Telling the truth through the various Party news outlets doesn't serve the goal of keeping the Party in power, because the forms of media that can be controlled aren't set up to deliver truth.
And the forms of media that can't be controlled... well, one day you're talking about SARS, and the next day you're talking about what life was like without the Party.
And that, if you're a Party official, is a fate far worse than the deaths of a few million of your subjects.
I think your classifications are a bit oversimplified.
E.g., Stalin was hardly a liberal of any stripe, yet he was the leader of putatively "communist" Russia. Since that is one of the few countries to have become communist, and one of the major ones, it's plausibly fair to take it as an type definition.
If I were to look for an analog to Stalin, the one I would pick would be Ivan the Terrible. So, then, Stalin is closely similar to an extreme autocrat.
Another of the early communists was Trotsky. He more nearly qualifies as a Liberal, or at least he appears to. But he also shows signs of desiring to be an autocrat.
Perhaps then, the real difference is between those governments that are ruled by autocrats, and those with a more dispersed power structure. The US has traditionally been an example of a government with a dispersed power structure, though it has been centralizing over the centuries, and esp. since the civil war, and extra especially since WWII. Perhaps we are now mid-way between an autocracy and a civilization with a decentralized government. I'm not certain. We may be much closer to an autocracy, depending on just how honest the electronic voting machines are. In at least one case they have been proven to be covertly manipulable to a degree that was noticable by the voters (i.e., they couldn't directly tell that their votes weren't counted, but they could tell when the precincts votes were tallied that some large number of people had had their votes switched). Most, or at least many, of these machines have no audit trail. None of them have source code which is open for examination. So we may already be in the late stages of conversion into a covert dictatorship, or at least oligarchy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.