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Chinese Internet Censorship Proves Difficult
An anonymous reader writes "BBC reports that despite incredible efforts by the Chinese government, online dissent and distribution of censored information continues and even influences government policies."
How can we help?
Good. Now can we guarantee that we can dissent in the uk?
I always find Communism funny. How can any government of the people be responsible for censoring the information they receive?
Email me if you need any dangerous info; be sure to include your public key and encrypt to mine/a.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It is true, to a certain extent, but the use of strategic "choke points" on the network infrastructure can put a serious dent in the ideal...
It's only really true when you have high connectivity across all nodes - even in the US/Europe this is rarely significantly true...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just post the censored sites as links in Slashdot stories.
Censorship via the slashdot effect.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
"Filters are used to screen out items containing certain pornographic or politically sensitive terms"
See, if they had stopped at stifling free expression and political opinion exchange they would have been allright. They went after porn, and in technology, porn ALWAYS win. An army of horny men will find a way through their defenses like a knife through hot butter.Reminds me of back when most of my friends in highscool had two floppy disks with them at all times. One to disable netnanny, one to put it back. Oh the good ol' days.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
outside-of-China business the more China will have to adopt to it. It's basic market principles. Sure, the average Chinese citizen will have a harder time accessing it but it will filter down, eventually.
Yes indeed the censorship in china is quite ineffective, they dont run any filtering of content at all just various well known webaddress like cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, wenjiancity etc however this can be easily bypassed by using an oversease proxy or bouncing the web pages through akamai. I was shocked to find thay they dont even block taiwanese news sites! I guess all they can do is go after a few unlucky people and try to make examples of them.
Maybe they should start working on propaganda - China rules and the rest of the world sucks. Non-Chinese news sources are fallacious and biased against China, that sort of thing. I've been kicking around the idea of fascism in our post-industrial world, but as yet I've not come up with an idea that would truly work. A closed media system is impossible to achieve, esp. in a country as large as China.
This is all, of course, for fun; the intellectual exercise is more interesting to me than applying my ideas to reality.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Does anybody know how much involvement the Chinese Government has with Red Flag? It seems to me that the principles of open source software sit uneasily with censorship.
well the best thing you could do is to not buy items made in china... of course thats just a good idea anyways
Yeah, don't buy their products, deny them benefits of global trade, nothing like condemning a nation to poverty and sustaining a disceptive self-sustaining government (rather than rewarding the transition China is in).
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Lots of people in the US subscribe to these guys for Internet censorship: N2H2
I know it's not quite the same as "Communist Country" censorship, but the US isn't without Government-influenced information suppression. Just google for CIPA. You filter, you get funding. You don't filter, you find funding elsewhere.
"False-positives" anyone?
The Hacktivismo group has been writing software to help the Chinese and others that are being censored. I was very interested when I heard about the "Six/Four" protocal that they were writing for anonymous browsing. Has anyone heard any news on the development of this or any other projects like it. (I'm aware of freenet) Anyway, here is their project page. They're an interesting group that seems to be pushing for free distribution of information.
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If you want to get an idea on just how bad it is over there in terms of filtering, check out this article about a 2002 study by the Hardvard Law. There are about 19,000 sites listed there. Pretty much anything that has to do with the US and other western governments, "smut", anything even remotely related to Taiwan and so on.
If this Chinese gov't attempts to block access to IP addresses that run web proxies outside their control. I can report my own servers to China, so their Big Red Firewall can block all the spam I get from inside China!
2) Profit!
-Charles Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think it would be interesting to employ some form moderation system that is currently in use on /.
The citizens could vote on which sites are offensive and the appropriate sites would be blocked.
Although a conflict of opinion would surely surface as it seems to be already
But this would essentially take control of the internet out of the hands of the government and put it in the hands of the citizens which is an oxymoron for communism.
Those who trade in their freedom for security, deserve neither.
I lived in China for six months last year teaching English at a University. What I found particularly amazing, was that the culture has taught people not to question things. Even my PhD students largely accepted whatever was told to them. So even though there may have been forums online for them to learn about political dissent, most wouldn't particularly have been interested (a few seemed more aware than most, but only a very few).
Add to this the location of these forums. Online. China does have internet cafes in the larger areas, but the bulk of the country is too poor to even go into them, let alone find their way to some hidden forum.
I'm all for more individual freedoms in China, but I think most westerners really don't have a clue about how our cultural upbringing has affected us, and how their culture has affected them.
If it becomes increasingly hard to block "objectionable" messages, (which by the way the Cubans have effectively done - Cuban Government Toughens Internet Restrictions) would it come to a stage the Authoritarian Governments try to drown the messages.
The Govt could itself start sending out so much propoganda messages that they will drown the "rebel" messages, and most people will be unable to develop personalized filters to get to the "rebel" information. (A conspi-racist may think that the real purpose of the CAN-SPAM legilation was to pre-emptively acquire these capabilities.)
After all, if this is supposed to be the attention economy, all the govt has to do to prevent mischief is to keep your attention - almost like in Clockwork Orange. Does it really matter if the attention is directed to something worthwhile, or towards just delusion and deception - I mean from the Governments point-of-view.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Does anyone know if Slashdot is blocked or at all censored in China? A huge variety of news goes through here, as well as new technology (some of which could even prove helpful in evading the various filters...)
When I worked at GTE the company got the contract to lay the fiber optic cable around the border of China and put in the network centers that setup a ring around China. Total control of all the traffic in and out of the country, or so they hoped. A career limiting move came when I wrote Chuck Lee, CEO of GTE, and said we were helping the same Communist government that gave us Tianamen Square and would continue to repress the Chinese people using this technology. But Bean Counters only care about profit and damn the people that get get screwed over in the process.
As a side note, I knew a lad working near me from China who had been at Tianamen Square the day before and then the day after the massacre happened. When he saw what the army had done to their own people he went home, packed and left for Hong Kong and then to the US.
Censorship is only one way the Communists will use to stay in power and shooting another bunch of college kids can happen again.
Too lazy to create a sig...
I seem to remember stumbling across a web site a few months ago that had a list of "black market" ISPs that would allow a Saudi citizen to access the Internet in a non-monitored/non-censored way. Apparently accessing the Internet using "normal" ISPs means excessive content blocking, etc.
There may already be such ISPs in China for all I know. But it's interesting to see groups of people band together to circumvent the restrictions put on them by their governments.
Nothing in particular is communist about China. It's Confucianism dressed up in Marxist clothing. China is always Chinese and always has been, even when conquered. The "conquerers" always end up "going native."
However, Confucianism is based on a concept of society as being more important than the individual. An essentially commun-al idea. Kind of a fuedalism with an innate sense of ethics and true noblesse oblige.
If you really want to understand China today and have a lot of fun doing it read some of the Judge Dee mystery novels of Robert van Gulik. Set in the Tang dynasty (the golden age of ancient Chinese culture) the society it depicts is still very much relevant.
Then read the Little Red Book.
Overlay Mao's peculiarly Chinese "Marxism" with the tradtitional Chinese culture and there you are. Modern China.
It has more factories than the old China, but that's really the biggest difference.
KFG
No, you are supporting a country in transition (remember censorship doesn't have to be 'paid' for). If you don't buy Chinese, will the country change (compare the present leadership to the Shanghai Brigage 10 years ago or that of the Great Leap Forward when China was under sanction, if you think they are the same you are believing a fallacy)?
Likewise if you think a government will change into a lets-hug-each-other one from a totalitarian one over night (or even in 20 years) you are seriously deluded. Change takes time to feed through, or else there is volatile coup after volatile coup and everyone gets screwed (or nuked).
Not that I say you should buy Chinese specially, but denying buying Chinese for some up-in-the-clouds-political-fairyland ideology is madness. Global trade is great for sharing wealth and generating more wealth (read wealth as standard of living) amongst nations, and in terms of the trickle-down effect China is doing damn well compared to any other country's development (eg Agricultural Land Rights, mobility of labour and class, etc).
But if you would prefer to condemn the worker to starve as a serf on a farm rather than work in a factory getting a better standard of living for themselves and their family that is up to you.
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They're a Fascist Dictatorship with Communist Rhetoric. Communism makes for great posters and propaganda when you're nearly starving and working 16 hrs/day. But given that people at large in China seem to have very little say in how "their" resources are spent (if they did, would they allow sweat shops to exist?), I don't see how you can call them Communist.
That said, I don't think Communism is a viable system. You can never get past that whole "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" thing. China didn't, Russia didn't and neither did Cuba. I'm a Socialist myself. Violent or at least forceful revolutions like Communism is usually associated with almost always end with a brutal, Fascist government. I better solution is for the poor and disenfranchised to control their population so that the value of their labor increases (kinda like what happened with the Black Plague but minus the Plague). As funny as it sounds, I think birth control is the best hope for mankind. Now if we can only get those pesky religious and cultural factors to go away so the poor will use it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here is an article about how the Chinese have been blocking content from their citizens. What's interesting is how some American companies, like Yahoo, are cooperating to do business with them.
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No, wait...
And the brethren went away edified.
communism was a big flop.
Have you visited a monastary or a state sponsored public school lately?
Communism is alive and well and living amongst us.
You'll find very little Marxism though, as Marxism is an industrial theory, not a social one.
KFG
Try controlling radio frequencies never mind speficially laying pipe for conventional net access.
Jonathanjk.com
to all oppressors of the human spirit, your end is at hand.
... We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."
The forces of freedom and technology now walk hand in hand.
There now exists the most powerful weapon in the war against ignorance since the printing press.
A weapon that has evaded, and will continue to evade, every attempt to control it that has ever been made, including by the country that spawned it.
Those who desire freedom will not stop until they attain it.
You can not stop them.
You can not slow them down.
Kill them, and more will rise in thier place.
Try to silence them, and they will whisper in secret and be heard the world over.
Stand in their way, they will go around you,
over you,
under you,
and eventually, through you.
Try to make criminals of those who wish only to think and say as they wish, and you will be exposed to millions as the criminal that you are.
Try to keep secret your evil actions, and you will fail miserably.
As someone said long ago " This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.
No government whose survival depends on the oppression and ignorance of its people deserves to exist.
How long to you think you can keep your iron grip on your citizens when they begin to learn how much better thier lives can be and they rise against you?
This is the Information Age. The truth can be spread to all corners of the earth in the blink of an eye. How long can a nation survive which relies on disinformation and lies?
Technoli
I might be risking my karma here, but how can you say that the people in China have the ability to choose the government they want?
I might be mistaken, but isn't their government COMMUNIST. The people of China have no say in how their government is run, they can only cower and hope that they don't say something that displeases a government official enough to throw them in a prison. You need a clue pal.
Also shame on the dope who moded his comments up as insightful.
Platinum Networks Hosting www.platinum-networks.com
Let's see...what's wrong with this sentence (for those of you who didn't read the actual article):
But despite the help of several major international corporations and the use of the most sophisticated equipment, the Chinese government is finding the worldwide web much harder to censor than traditional media.
This seems to me like the most interesting point. If major American corporations weren't helping out, the large scale prosecution that appears to be happening wouldn't even be going on.
As to another comment regarding boycotting international corporations: sure, but that may mean living without television, soft drinks, cars, computers, and clothes. Let's face it, every single product which consists of more than five components has something, or some ingredient that was made in China. And most of the clothes - to pick a random example - which get imported to the US from Europe, and which are made by European manufacturers, are either too expensive or too weird to be worn constantly. The regular clothes (sweater and jeans type stuff) they make over there are pretty bad. That's why they don't send them over here. I know, I lived there for thirteen years.
Also, are you really prepared to start paying three times as much for clothes as you currently are? Every american consumer is at least partially responsible for this situation. The "evil corporate giants" are partially trying to increase their profit margin no matter what the cost but, currently, those profit margins are pretty tight as is.
I had a dream that I was dreaming about recursion.
If rulers take too much grain,
people rapidly starve.
If rulers take too much freedom,
people easily rebel.
If rulers take too much happiness,
people gladly die.
By not interfering the sage improves the people's lives.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
I'd love to read about how censorship is failing in China but I can't access BBC from Beijing.
Yes, it likely would have helped the US free slaves faster. In fact, a simple embargo of US farm products from the South would have very likely removed the economic incentive for slavery, and as it was primarily an economic institution, it would no longer have made sense for it to exist.
As to the question of economic strength today, I don't know. But the economy would likely not have been one of slavery for nearly as long as it was.
Not to be too harsh since your heart seems to be in the right place but.....
I think here GTE has helped free speech in China more than you have. A fiber system in and out of China which the government tries to censor is *far* better than no system at all. One reason that China is finding much harder to censor the internet than Cuba or North Korea is that there is so much traffic going back and forth that its impossible to monitor it all. Putting in fiber helps increase internet usage and makes it much harder for the government to censor it.
Something to keep in mind is that on the same weekend that Tiananmen happened, the Burmese government also shot a whole bunch of students. No one remembers or even knows about it, because there weren't a million television cameras in Burma that weekend.
The Internet is the most important invention/discovery/whatever in the last 100+ years. It is more important than landing on the moon (overrated to begin with), invention of transistor, electricity, etc. Prior to the Internet, the most important discovery was the printing press.
Both of these are similar and will end up accomplishing similar things. The Internet will result in massive increase in the spread of knowledge. Most importantly, the Internet will shift power from the authoraties (usually the government) to the individual. It is already happening and this is just the start.
I have this theory that the internet will allow future generations to overthrow the government. I'm not talking about just China--I'm talking about ALL countries. It is THAT powerful! It is more powerful than any military; it is more powerful than having a billion dollars; it is more powerful than the Pope; and so on.
Needless to say, there are several threats emerging on the horizon. Hopefully the threats will be dealt with but it remains to be seen. The threats I have in mind are money/capitalism, and the government. Governments of all stripes have been trying to hard to control the Internet. The naive would say that it is impossible for the governments to control it but one should not be so confident. Already some governments have total control over the Internet. China probably doesn't because of its size. But smaller poorer countries have total control. This is mostly because there are only a few ISPs and the government monitors them. Even in larger countries, the governments are getting ever more smarter. Some countries already have tax laws passed. These laws are not enforced but the govt can do so at any time. There is already censorship against freedom of speech. Countries like China come to mind but there are many more which are worse. Some countries, like USA, already spend billions attempting to sniff through e-mail and websites. Let's also not forget that encryption technology is heavily controlled by governments. Sending encrypted e-mail is sure to land some in jail. It hasn't happened in countries like USA or Canada yet but it won't be very long before USA start jailing people because Al-Qaida or some other dark shadow is using encryption.
The other threat on the horizon is capitalism and its excesses. In particular, the greed and the power that comes with any new technology. The original Internet was largely controlled by the government. Even then, it was a scientific environment. Therefore, it was mostly free (in more than one sense). There is no doubt that capitalist entities, like corporations, helped the Internet, but there are some downsides too. The push towards profits can already be seen. One just needs to mention Verisign, which is attempting to control the most lucrative elements. Other companies are pushing proprietary technologies which will result in monopolies. Companies are also more likely to shut down websites for "offensive content". I suppose one can also count the actions of RIAA and others as a threat. It is within the right of RIAA to crack down on pirates, but some of their methods are highly questionable (eg. forcing ISPs to disclose people). Good thing similar organizations in other countries haven't cracking down. It would be worse in other countries because privacy laws are much weaker in other countries (compared to USA). Who knows what else will emerge from the brains of the corporations?
Having said all that, I am hopeful that the Internet will surivive with my vision. I think it will. The reason is simple. Just like the printing press, the Internet is too simple to be manipulated. Regardless of what the monarchs and the priests did with the printing press, they couldn't control it. I think the same thing will happen with the Internet. It is just too simple and too many people are involved for it to be controlled.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
It is always good to remember, and to be informed about the present situation.
Here you have some recent news.
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
One of the things I've learned from traveling to 20 different foreign countries and living in about 10 of them over the last 25 years, is that democracy DOES NOT work in every country.
For whatever reason, some people prefer the strong hand of a dictator. Some people prefer a democratic solution, and some people prefer socialism.
To have the arrogrance to dictate that everyone wants or is better off as a democracy is committing the very thing you despise.
There are geographic, sociological, as well as biological reasons for the various political systems around the world.
It is high time we in the West get off our high horse, and let the rest of the world deal with their own countries as they see fit.
North Korea, China, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq et al are not the way they are because ONLY one person acting ALONE got them into their current political system. A lot of people were/are involved, including the complicity of the general population.