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China Blocks Typepad, Prompts Weblog Blackout
dcm writes "As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet, democratic dialogue, religious expression,' the regime continues to block discourse.On Friday, China began blocking access to Typepad, a paid weblog hosting service in San Mateo, California. The communist regime previously blocked access to BlogSpot, Blogger's free hosting site. Yan Sham-Shackleton filed a report on the Glutter weblog, mentioning China is '...now using blocking software to stop information from leaking into the county via personal sites, an increasingly vibrant China Internet community, and a place where users are slipping in banned information. Some sites in the blogging community are turning black in protest of this event while others are reporting the incident.'"
Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism?
A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.
It's not the security of the country tyrants desire, it's their own security. It's unfair to call them leaders.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've got to think that anyone with the will and some time would easily be able to bypass the blockage, either by using underground ISPs, satellite, or other means.
It is technically very hard to block information on the net, without dropping connectivity. Of course, attempting it might provide a major impulse to AI research :)
This is not a signature.
Sadly, the gap is closing from the US side, for the good of the country and all that rot.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does anybody know how they go about blocking "unwanted" internet site from the public? I am sure there is a way around it. I mean, unless they don't have any lines to the outside world (and yes, they do have lines to the outside world) it would be impossible for them to absolutely block content.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
women's nipples.
Which society would you rather live in?
Sounds like FCC / Howard Stern to me.. Congrats FCC, you are now offically, on par with Chinese Commi quality filtering.
It's totally understandable that China's gov't will be overthrown if people are given free access to information, but it is totally unacceptable to see the FCC pulling these moves.
Mod +5 Drunk
I suppose someone could just ban any and all downloads of Freenet-related software so that's not going to solve anything. For anyone who ever said the mantra "Information Wants To Be Free" -- THIS is what it is meant to be.
Government-sanctioned censorship isn't anything new, though. We try to protect children with things like CIPA and the like. We've got watchdogs all over that won't allow us (folks in the US) to hear foul language over public airwaves, are looking to restrain violent video games, and in general trying to police what we do.
I'm not saying we're communistic, by any means. Just saying that censorship is censorship. Not as extreme, but the seeds are there.
In the end, it unfortunately comes down to "censorship is only bad when they're censoring something I believe in."
I disagree. At least the American people can change things, the fact that the people want to be ignorant and not change things is their choice.
As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet
Somewhat ironic given that U.S. companies are profiting by selling censorship software to China. And of course, the U.S. requiring (or trying to require) libraries to censor the Internet, for the children, of course.
Here come da fudge!
these are the perpetrators of the Tiananmen massacre. do you really think they would hesitate to block a few websites?
sulli
RTFJ.
It's not just the nipples. I believe it's the titty as a whole.
(paraphrased from a great obscure movie)
Just other day the WTO said that USA had to allow on line gambling. China has just joined the WTO. Typepad is an for profit company, why not they also can't make WTO force them to allow access to Typepad? At least this shitty globalization would give a little help to free speech. At least by now USA and Britain aren't trying to make WTO become irrelevant as they did with ONU.
The most troubling thing about this is that PRC is using US companies to write and implement the software and hard technologies that permit all this censorship. It seems to me that if our government is willing to prevent easy export of offensive military weapons, it should have similar strictures for the export of defensive weapons designed to promote closed minds in populations that want open minds.
Wireless blogging is going to be a way to get around many restrictions. Of course this doesn't help if they are blocking the servers. Fortunately these days there are a vast number of hosting companies which provide blog hosting. And wireless net is huge in China, with hundreds of millions of WAP-enabled phones. I think that the government will at some point just give up on this and realize that free expression is not that much of a threat. They should look over at the example of Singapore, where the government is very strict, but it tolerates a little joking commentary. The PRC will realize that people complaining is not the same thing as a real challenge.
That's not really the point, however. The point is, everyone claiming that information = insta-revolution well...I seriously doubt it. A lot of people left Hong Kong before PRC took it over...and then moved back when they saw that PRC didn't really change the system at all, and things were peaceful.
Seriously, they didn't really keep out outside information before; that fully explains the Tiananmen Square protests, as people knew that Communist leaderships everywere were falling appart so they wanted to try in China too. If people wanted a protest/revolution it would happen; I honestly don't think they do, and I don't think the internet will change that, blocked or unblocked.
Agreed.The citzenry should take notice of how the US is constantly told to rejoice, based on the fact that there are places on Earth that are worse. Basing a society's standards on the worst of the worst isn't aiming very high.
The US is hardly one to lecture others about hindering unpopular political speech. This country just does it with fancy words and lawyers, and later, guns. China just skips the smoke screen and goes straight to the guns.
U.S. news agencies stopped broadcasting Bin Laden's speeches at the request of the U.S. government.
The U.S. government made the absurd claim that Bin Laden was "sending secret messages to his supporters" through his speeches, when it was blatantly obvious that the U.S. was simply interested in suppressing him.
Understandably in fact. Bin Laden was making a whole lot of sense and sounded extremely reasonable when compared to Bush.
The U.S. does not have the moral standing to criticise other nations. To do so is the height of hypocrisy.
I don't know which is more mind-boggling - the fact that this was seriously posed as a question or the fact that it was modded insightful.
Kindly go to a strip club, get HBO, google for "nipple", or buy a magazine in a brown wrapper ALL LEGALLY and THEN tell me how terrible the US is just because most people who live here think it might be smart to not allow nudity during the Superbowl.
the gap is closing from the US side,
It's occurred to me, too, that the government/corporate system of the United States and of China are a lot closer in practice than people might think.
Yes, in China you get these weird laws where "slander of the state" and "revealing state secrets" put people in jail for expressing dissent.
But, in the US, if you criticize a business, eg, make disparaging comments about the healthiness of eating beef or provide a web link to a DeCSS site, you can get slammed with heavy legal action.
In China, the government powers have become corrupt as they hand out valuable contracts to cronies and have tolerated cheating bosses not paying their workers.
In the US, the government powers have become corrupt as they accept money from special interests to craft legislation favorable to those interests. Substantial growth in non-unionized workforce has meant stagnation in wage growth for blue collar workers in the US.
Government policies are not far apart between the US and China; corporate influence will tend to drive them even closer together.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
First of all I find it very unusual any US politician would have anything to do with the UN.
I remember on CNN after two planes, of the anti-Castro group, were shot down by Cuba, a US polictican ( Helms...Burton? ) said that all the more reason to continue the economic boycott of Cuba.
The next story was on China and another politician speaking about China said that keeping dialogue open with China was the only way to make progress.
If the Internet in China, and also keeping dialogue open, is so important, why not do that for every enemy or the US?
China is so huge I wouldn't worry about the government controlling the Internet. They seem to be where the USSR was in the late 80's just before Communism fell.
As long as China supplies lots of cheap labor and plays ball with the world's corporations nobody's going to impose anything on them. The world's governments could care less about human rights and all that. They just want cheap stuff and big profits.
What?
Geez. I suppose you are the only people who are informed about the worldly events. All Chinese people in China are blind and stupid, therefore are totally brainwashed by Commie doctrines, and has no idea what Western countries are like. If you are truly interested, you are more than welcome to travel to China and ask people on the street their opinions, do a fact check yourself for once. Private bitching about government is allowed and goes on everyday in China. Thats why corruption is dealt so severally by the government, because it is the most discussed topics among Chinese citizens.
VOA, Voice of America, was a primary propaganda machine to China. Government had local efforts of jamming the signals but it was never effective. University students in China listened to it loyally, as a medium to learn English and learn about the world. But the fundamental problem with VOA was that being an American radio station, it broadcast contents to China as if it is the CNN. Feeding incredible biased "news" that people in China know aren't true. You think people will continue to listen to that bullsh#t? Thats why almost nobody listens to it nowadays.
Look, I'm not saying that the Commie Chinese government is an angel. It has done some pretty nasty stuffs and the people in China knows it. But they still approves because overall the government has done a lot of good things, for Chinese of course. Don't think that the Chinese people are not capable of another revolution if they don't see the government acting in their interests. The commie knows that too. Thats why changes are happening, steadily. And people like that instead of big bang solution that hurt the Chinese people's bottom line.
then why does the CCP have to spend so much energy to prevent people from getting information uncongenial to it? If the CCP's decisions and methods are correct, won't an open discussion of them reveal that? If so many concur, then the agreement would strengthen the Chinesse government, and give it the far stronger backing of >600 M people. Instead, the CCP spends its time trying to prevent uncongenial information from getting to its people and keeping an army to suppress them, moves which cost it both resources to build itself better and standing in the markets and the world community upon which its future rests.
This isn't the behavior of a stable government in concurrence with its people, but a government perched on a pinnacle, which can be toppled with just a few of the right words. The US tolerates a lot of hypocrisy, but it endures because the availability of information allows people to judge their government (somewhat openly); thus while there is dissent on a daily basis, the dissent doesn't destroy the gov't system. The US has many small cracks, but it doesn't fall apart because it isn't brittle and the cracks don't spread - people have enough confidence in it that dissent doesn't coalesce against the system. The CCP doesn't behave as if it were confident in its correctness - dissent not expressed hardens into rebellion, and threatens the entire nation. The Chinese gov't behaves like a brittle structure - the CCP has to prevent cracks (dissent) because their disagreement with their people means that cracks will propagate and break the structure. If your structure can tolerate cracks and still stands, you don't worry about them because it's a waste of time and money. Cutting off information that disagrees with the CCP implies either 1) the people aren't smart enough to succeed (which means China will go nowhere anyway) or 2) the people would rebel against the CCP if they read the information. 1) doesn't concur with experience (the large number of successful Chinese graduate students in America), so 2) is pretty likely, which doesn't agree with your initial statement.
A gov't in the right doesn't need to shield its people from the truth.
A properly constructed communist state would only require the dictatorship of the proletariat for a generation or so. After this time, no one would own any goods any more, and the only formalized government required would be for lawmaking and policing. The "communist" societies of the former Soviet Union and China are not really communist at all, as the parent poster said. They're really just state sponsored capitalism, and there are still people hoarding the wealth.
Communism, as true idea not as it has been implemented, is a wonderful idea. It was summarised best in a quote which goes something like "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Basically everyone works at doing what it is they do best. But they don't work for personal gain, as we do in a Capitalism, they work for the common good. Everything is then distributed equally, so everyone has the worth. You don't get tons of stuff just because you act in movies or struggle to make ends meet just because you work in a factory. Everyone is treated fairly and equally, and everyone works for the greater good.
Of course that rosy ideal has almost nothing to do with how Communism is actually implemented. It also utterly fails to accomidate basic human nature. Though there are notable exceptions, and varying behaviour in each individual, when you take humanity as a whole for economic design you have to regard them as lazy and greedy. Communism fails to provide any reward for hard work, since it doesn't appeal to greed (you get the same no matter what you do) so laziness sets in. Most workers do the minimum needed. Also all actual implementations of Communism have been combined with a very totalitarian government, which leads to corruption.
Capatalism isn't the most fair or best economic system we've come up with, it is the most fair and best economic system we've come up with that works in the real world. It deals with the objective realities of humans and tries to reward them (it's been accurately called a system of controlled greed) for hard work and risk taking. This leads to inequities, but it DOES work and makes economies work efficiently in the real world.
So Communism DOES look good on the chalk board. It's a wonderful idea, but it makes assumptions and requirements that don't exist in the real world. So it looks good on the chalkboard, but fails the real world test.
Wow, a straw-man argument! Would that those were rare on /.
There is NOT an order of magnitude between the US and any dictatorship in history. In point of fact, not only do we have more of our population in prisons than any other country in the civilized world... we have more of our population in prison than ANY country at ANY time since Stalin's purges.
Praise be the Republican War on Freedom.
The pragmatic (Communist with Chinses characteristics = not Communist) government of China is, for good reason, DEATHLY afraid of a civil war in China. Anyone who looks at the facts and cares about human life is all for the current government SLOWLY evolving into a more democratic government.