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.'"

Comments

Holding Back The Inevitable

[ackthpt]

Block the web or not, information still floods into the PRC and it's like the dutch boy trying to hold back the north sea with his finger. Newspapers and magazines flourish which the CCP have been hard pressed to stop. It's like swatting flies with a hammer.

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.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[LostCluster]

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.

That's exactly why communism looks great on chalkboards but never pans out in reality. It becomes hard to avoid eventual corruption in the leadership... a stable government requires a way to overthrow the leaders with a fair election.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[RadGeekAuburn]

Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing. The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed, so was the Russian revolution which supported Lenin's oppression and later Stalin's.

This seems like an odd tack to take in the argument--since neither China during the Cultural Revolution nor the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin had substantive democratic institutions. In point of fact, Lenin and Stalin and Mao each in their time took deliberate actions (such as the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, the dismantling of the Workers' Opposition, the creation of the secret police and the gulag, and, well, the Cultural Revolution) to crush local democratic power, concentrate power in the hands of party bosses, and create a totalitarian environment in which people do not dare to express dissent for fear of hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

(In such an environment, by the way, it also seems to me to be rather tendentious, to say the least, to claim to have any clear knowledge of what people thought about the rulers -- since part of the purpose of the totalitarian apparatus was to keep people from honestly saying what they though about things.)

I thoroughly recommend you read some of the descriptions of the power struggles in post-Revolutionary Russia, such as Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia or The Workers' Opposition.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[sysopd]

Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing.

It definitely is. A democracy is, simply stated, a majority-dictatorship. The framers and founders of the USA created a Democratic Republic, that is not a democracy but rather a Republic with liberty and choice. Our republic made up of the populus, voted democratically by the populus.

Many people misinterpret the US government as a democracy when in fact it is a democratic republic. One of the strenghts is that people are believed to have unalienable rights, rights given to them by their creator that cannot be taken away by any law. The point of this is not religious, but rather that no one can take away unalienable rights. Thus the formation of a body (the US goverment) to protect these rights, versus in the case of many systems (ie a democracy), a government that grants rights.

This is truly power in the peoples hands, rights that one cannot give nor take away, rights that we are created with. Thus the freedom we have is innate, not a privledge or amenity.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[4of12]

When did communism ever look great on chalkboards?

During the design phase, before it was actually implemented, communism sounded great. Utopia here we come! Not that it hasn't suffered from lack of trying. Kind of like Death March programming projects.

To be fair, capitalism, also great looking on the chalkboard, grows warts over time. And much for the same reasons as communism does; the actual implementation involves Real People that care zero about other people. It's hard to program around that.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[Chibi Merrow]

a stable government requires a way to overthrow the leaders with a fair election.

And a fail safe for when "fair elections" aren't, as well.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[STrinity]

"Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing."

I really don't care to take pointers on democracy from a guy that's been dead for 2 millenia AT HIS OWN HAND because his government told him to drink the kool-aid. Gimme a break.

And I don't care to take pointers on anything from a guy who doesn't know the difference between Plato and Socrates.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[spood]

Communism does not preclude fair election. Communism is just socialism in the extreme. There are plenty of contemporary democratic socialist countries. At the same time, democracy (traditionally the "enemy" of communism due to Cold War propaganda) is not immune to corruption, either. It wouldn't be hard to argue that the "politician for sale" lobby problem is not evidence of corruption in the United States.

The problem with "pure" communism (the reason why it doesn't pan out in reality) is that it doesn't provide personal incentives to produce - all production is seized and redistributed by the state. Similarly, there are incentives only to demonsrate need in order to obtain an undue portion of the redistribution. Under such a system, the dishonest are rewarded by not having to work according to ability and obtaining more than fair share of "need". The honest are punished.

Even the U.S. has adopted many socialist programs (Medicare, Social Security, welfare, public education), but it's difficult to determine where the balance between socialism and pure capitalism lies. Allowing the market free rein implies that there is no such thing as a public good, which is difficult to argue.

The more power in the central government, the more corruption, no matter what form of government it is. This is one of the reasons our founding fathers intended to limit the power of the fed, a lesson that not even the current Republican party seems to have taken to heart.

Not surprising

[LostCluster]

This is just the latest front in China's attempt to try to stamp out any form of anti-government speech. Say what you want about the present US Governemnt, the fact that you're allowed to say it here is something that makes us very different from them...

Re:Not surprising

[Locky]

'At least we're better then China' isn't really something to be overly proud of.

It's akin to a murderer claiming at least he didn't kill more people.

Re:Not surprising

[ackthpt]

Say what you want about the present US Governemnt, the fact that you're allowed to say it here is something that makes us very different from them...

Sadly, the gap is closing from the US side, for the good of the country and all that rot.

Re:Not surprising

[4of12]

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.

Re:eek

[typobox43]

I think this is more like the government blockading the door to your bathroom... of course, there's nothing stopping you from relieving yourself on the front lawn. ;)

China is blocking information, but US is blocking

[PetoskeyGuy]

women's nipples.

Which society would you rather live in?

Ultimate Power... almost

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

They've implimented a system to block free exchange of ideas about religion, politics and current issues through blogs and the internet...

But even they can't stop spam.

Interesting.

Re:Technically impossible

[LostCluster]

However, it's very trivial to firewall out specific sites so long as you have control of all paths between the user and the site. The Chinese have such firewalls installed at every ISP that leaves the country.

Turning your weblog black?

[SweetAndSourJesus]

Oh, that'll show them. I can just see China's head of information management saying to himself "I never thought it would come to this! Black weblogs! Damn those clever bastards!"

Webloggers have always had a hugely inflated sense of self-importance, but this is just ridiculous.

Freenet?

[Eberlin]

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."

Re:Freenet?

[LostCluster]

The US brand of content censorship is more about truth-in-labeling than anything else. Offensive material isn't totally prohibited, just limited to be exhibited where kids and people who would perfer not to see it won't stumble into it. You'd have to try very hard to get access to the Playboy Channel without knowing what you're doing...

As long as FTP works,

[TheLoneGundam]

They can send their info to some FTP server and their US friends can copy it to Typepad. If FTP gets blocked, there's always e-mail.. and if I recall (can't find the link) there was actually a service that you could e-mail your FTP requests to. (wow, wish I could find that again, it was a list of about a zillion different services which were e-mail enabled)

Re:As long as FTP works,

[LostCluster]

It's a cat-and-mouse game. The Chinese will block any server being used to coordinate anti-government activities of any type. They're always a step behind, but this leads those who oppose the government to constantly be looking for new ways to communicate. Then, once they start communicating over a government honeypot site, they send the spooks and that person is never heard from again.

Re:Chinese Technology?

[DR SoB]

It is blocked by the main routers the government owns, which route all internet traffic. It simply checks the TCP header for the destination IP address, if it is bound for a blocked subnet, the packet is dropped.

How to get around it, well the CIA didn't like those commi's blocking information, so they set up Anonymizer ( www.anonymizer.com ) that would allow a type of encrypted proxy so you could get around that. CoDC also set up some sort of browser that could get around it, but I didn't really investigate it much (Same guys who made Back-Oriface)..

Oh, bitter irony

[WarPresident]

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.

really, guys, what did you expect?

[sulli]

these are the perpetrators of the Tiananmen massacre. do you really think they would hesitate to block a few websites?

Why not the WTO instead of ONU?

[neves]

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.

Could Gopher be used to defeat Censorship?

[Sensitive Claude]

Do they only block the http ports?
Or do the block by IP or what?

Yea, Gopher is dead, but don't be insensitive.
Gopher was pretty cool, especially considering some of the terrible backgrounds and colors you sometimes get in http.

Or is this just like suggesting lynx?

Maybe it is a good thing that Apache 2 supports Gopher.

Stop laughing, I'm serious.
It wouldn't suprise me that the communist bastard politicians wouldn't know to block stuff outside http.

p2p is another possibility, but that's been discussed before I'm sure.

WTO: Casinos and Information Services

[G4from128k]

If the WTO can force the U.S to admit offshore online casinos, perhaps the WTO can force China to admit offshore information services. The Chinese consumers should be able to access any commercial internet site (including a paid weblog service like Typepad) as a free trade issue.

Free Trade does not apply to China.

[DAldredge]

Chinese government policies that favor Chinese companies over foreign firms are driving some U.S. tech companies from the booming market.

This month, chipmakers Intel and Broadcom said they'll stop selling wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi, chips in China. A new law requires that the chips include a security technology licensed by Chinese companies.

The technology can hurt chips' performance and compatibility with other devices, says Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. And implementing it requires U.S. chipmakers to share valuable intellectual property with Chinese companies, says Semiconductor Industry Association President George Scalise.

The Wi-Fi dispute is one of several being waged between the U.S. and Chinese tech industries.

Semiconductor taxes. China slaps a 17% value-added tax on computer chips sold there. But it gives rebates of up to 14% to domestic chip plants. That makes it almost impossible for foreign chipmakers to compete, the SIA says.

This month, the U.S. trade office filed a case against China's semiconductor tax with the World Trade Organization (news - web sites), which China joined in 2001. China must abide by the WTO's decision or risk censure. Friday, China said it would enter talks with the United States.

Proprietary standards and practices. China is developing its own standards for 3G cell phone networks and DVD players. (The Chinese version is called EVD, or extended versatile disk.) If the standards are widely adopted, they will allow Chinese manufacturers to avoid paying some licensing fees to foreign companies and force tech firms to make special products only for China. Officials also have taken steps to keep government agencies from using non-Chinese software.

U.S. companies urgently want to do business in China because it's a huge, growing market. China has a $1.4 trillion economy and gross domestic product growth near 10%, according to the U.S. State Department. Political changes in recent years have increasingly opened the once-isolated country to foreign companies. U.S. tech firms are eager to sell PCs, DVD players and other products to China's 1.3 billion citizens.

Chinese officials talk about fair trade, yet "behave like a protective dictatorship when it serves their best interests," says Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group. Chinese officials deny that and say they're working to understand U.S. concerns.

Nearly every country has some policies to boost and protect domestic industries. The U.S. gives tech companies a tax break for research and development, for example. But trade groups such as the ITAA say China's policies are so extreme, they infringe on free trade. In 2003, the USA exported $28 billion worth of goods to China and imported $152 billion.

--00--00--00--

Philippe Lacoste, director of French retail giant Lacoste and grandson of founder Rene Lacoste (L), gives a brief history of the company during a news conference in Shanghai March 29, 2004. French retailer Lacoste, frustrated over what it calls widespread piracy in China, may pull out of the market if it fails to stop a Singapore-based rival from also using a crocodile logo. REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV

Would information really cause a change?

[metroid composite]

A coworker of mine in a largely undergrad programming group, student at the University of British Columbia, was from China and fully convinced that her government was downright awesome, way better than the Canadian government, and that the reports on human rights violations I talked about were just western propaganda. Come to think of it, I've never been to Tibet, I suppose she could be right ...theoretically....

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.

Re:Oh the outrage......

[wibs]

It's totally understandable that China's gov't will be overthrown if people are given free access to information

Why do you say this? Have you been to China, asked anyone there what they think? Of course China is oppressive, and of course its views don't fall in line with those of the US. But that doesn't necessarily mean people would instantly overthrow it given the chance.

As an architect, I've been keeping a very close eye on growth in China. Quite simply, China is where it's at. The growth rate there is just insane, and with the Olympics coming up there is now intense international pressure on very accellerated modernization. Remember the dot com boom? China is like that right now, except their economy is based on tangible things.

I'm not saying that giving up freedom is worth some prosperity, but I am saying that if China were to all of a sudden take down its Great Firewall there is no guarantee that its people would want to risk destroying one of the largest economic expansions in history just because they can read the whiny ramblings of a 13 year old girl on Blogspot.

I understand the Chinese government

[karmaflux]

...and I understand why they're blocking journals.

It all started when Hao Feng Xi submitted a request for unemployment support:

hay doodz i just wanted 2 let u no i didnt hav a job!!! n so i n33d $$$ (lol, ¥¥¥) so i can f33d my babigurl and kidz!!! n e way, hope u can coff up the ¥¥¥ soon 4 food coz were hungri!!! ^_^

This, of course, infuriated the whole fucking country, and now they're on a mission to stamp out this new form of "viral illiteracy."

Re:Pot and Kettle

[Bull999999]

As far as I know, you can always get Bin Laden's speeches from non-U.S. sources. The blame goes to the news agencies who agreed to the request of the government. If the government forced the agencies to not to air the tapes, you can bet that there will be a legal battle over it.

Give me a break.

[Rostin]

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.

Re:Chinese Technology?

[Tackhead]

> It is blocked by the main routers the government owns, which route all internet traffic. It simply checks the TCP header for the destination IP address, if it is bound for a blocked subnet, the packet is dropped.

That's the part I don't get.

Why not let the packet go through, and simply log the session?

Chen Sixpack: Goes to www.freetibet.org, is disgusted by what he sees, and the only thing in his logfile is index.html
Jiang Sixpack: Goes to www.freetibet.org/index.html and spends six hours reading 20-30 pages of material.

If I block both of them at the router, I don't know who's the greater threat to domestic security - because I can't target everyone. If I let the packets through and log session information (particularly if I can aggregate Jiang's web traffic with his IM traffic, for instance -- thereby exposing Jiang's entire social network. Great data mining opportunities :), I can use that data to have a better idea of who's worth targeting.

By blocking at the firewall, the Chinese government is missing the point. A properly-configured Internet is like a self-registration system for domestic security threats.

It gets worse

[The Bungi]

If you want to take a look at the pervasive, active content blocking by the PRC, take a look at this.

The breadth of censored content there is simply amazing.

Re:Please help us

[iminplaya]

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.

i have been reading a lot about china lately

[Britz]

And I would like to share a few things to anyone who is interested:

First of all: China is changing a such a rapid pace that no Cisco routers that are used to block a couple websites will have any major impact.
We are talking of about 100 million people rapidly moving up the social ladder. The communist party just aknowledged that they have to do something about the rest (more than 900 million btw), many of them on the way trying to get on board with the first group.

That said I would like to share some insight into history. Even though we know oppresive regimes are bad and the usual American only pokes at Communism with a 9 foot pole the regime served the majority of the Chinese people pretty well in the past 40-50 years. The cultural revolution was a major setback and the party says it was very wrong. Apart from that they had some great success at poverty reduction during the 70s and 80s.

Compare that to what You know about India, which has had a stable democracy during most of that time or South America which has been under US influence since the infamous "Teddy".
IMHO India lags behind China on the rights of the woman (in practial terms, theoratically all Communist coutries should be heaven for women, which never was) over all for example. I am sure You will find more.

At the moment the US govt. is using the "human rights tool" to apply pressure to China on the international diplomatic level. You know it, they know it and everyone else knows it too. (Saudi Arabia and human rights ... US allies ... )

Still we have an issue with free speech in China, since a corrupt govt. that has nothing left to justify its hold on power (they promote market economics for heavens sake) is trying to keep the country out of major shakeups. Remember what happened to Russia after the change? Live expectency is still going down there. Anyways, there are people in the party that try to move towards democracy, but that is not easy and they don't want civil war.

That said the most important problems that China is facing at the moment are corruption and trying not to loose the 900 million people on the way to wealth and prosperity. That is what the party is saying. IMHO the biggest problem is for the officials to stay on top of this huge moving mass that China represents at the moment. And it is gaining speed.

Exactly because of that the central government is trying to promote free speech to get more accurate reports from the various parts of China, since the official channels are slow and always change facts around so the local govt. looks good.

Re:What's wrong with this picture

[duck_prime]

[Iraq gets punished by U.S. for naughtyness, China doesn't] Am I the only one that sees a double standard here?

Not so much a double-standard, but a realization of what is possible. When the US sees drastic human-rights abuses in country X, certain questions have to be asked before any intervention is made:
1. Should we intervene? That is, are the Xites being really, really offensive?
2. Can we intervene? That is, does X have a massive nuclear arsenal? (Note: China does, Iraq didn't but wanted one)
3. Is our interest being served? That is, does attacking X serve national strategic goals? Does X have it in for us in some way?

Your mileage may vary on how to answer these questions for Iraq and China, but my readings suggest that the US executive branch does think this way.

In a Platonic world of Good Smiting Evil, question #1 and #2 would be the only ones considered. But in our world question #3 must also be considered. Note also that the extent to which #3 outweighs #1 is the distance we are into the Gray Area (tm).

China's internet censorship not as bad as it seems

[toogreen]

Hello there, I am a Canadian and I'm now in China teaching English and doing some freelance web development. I've been in China (Shanghai) for about 9 months now and to be honest it is VERY rare that I can't access any particuliar website. I remember just when I got here I did have some problems with a very few sites but then they seemed to have really cooled down lately about it since now these sites are easily accessible. Same thing with Google, they un-blocked it long time ago. I just tried both of the supposedly blocked websites (blogger and typepad) and I have absolutely no problem accessing these sites. I don't know where this information came from but they surely didn't block it for me! ;) I'm also pretty amazed by how easy and cheap it is to go online here (compared to Canada). I'm on a very fast cable connection, with no restrictions or quotas at all, and I pay about US 14$ (splitted between me and my flatmate). In Canada I have to pay over CDN 35$ for a cable connection that gives me like 6 gig max of downloads and a crappy 15k/s upload speed limit... Anyways I just thought I should share that information with you guys as I feel sometimes we westerners tend to bitch a lot about China and its government without really seeing how things really are in the real world. China is under very heavy and fast transformations right now, as much economically than socially, and I think Shanghai is probably the best place to actually see that LIVE in front of your eyes. Shanghai is definately opening up to the world and its a pretty cool and fun place to live in (and party!) nowadays. You should see how fast skyscrapers are growing like mushrooms around here, it's quite unbelievable. And I haven't said anything about the amazing transportation system and its modern facilities... I still can't believe they can put these flat LCDs and huge plasma screens about every 5 meters in the metro, when I can't even afford one of those myself (Grr). Oh btw, I saw those terminals reboot once or twice, and yes it runs under Linux ;) The cultural changes are there as well, as the younger generations seem not to differ as much as westerners anymore... But at the same time it's a bit of a shame cuz with McDonalds and KFC invading China (There's a famous street in Shanghai, Nanjing rd. where there is a McDonald's or KFC about every 100 meters!) I see SO many very FAT youngsters, which is something almost impossible to see amongst the 20+ and older generations... Too bad, I guess the amazing fact that chinese woman are all very thin and healthy looking will be something of the past and to remember... sigh! ;) There's a lot more to say but oh well, that was just my 2 cents about China...