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China Blocking Access to Google News Site
loconet writes "BBC and Reuters are reporting that China is blocking access to the Web site Google News according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. The organisation also accused Google of being complicit by filtering its Chinese-language site." From Reuters' version of the story: "The Paris-based group said the government had been blocking Google's English-language news Web site for about 10 days, after the company launched a Chinese-language version that removed politically sensitive reports."
Ahh the great leap forward kinda sounds like the Chinese equivalent of the 90's tech bubble (although the tech bubble didn't have that whole widespread famine thing)
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
If you are in China, use the following link to read the stories: Link
For the chinese web search, they remove listings that are unreachable from China. China's internet is filtered, regardless of anything Google does. Google simply saved the chinese users' time by hiding the links to content that they can't access anyway.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
Actually, we did have international inspectors for this last election. And they found no real problems.
Leave China alone and pay attention to the problems in your own country.
So no one can criticize another country until their own is perfect? Which perfect land do you live in?
The whole idea of of soverignty started with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It attempted to end the holy wars by saying that the local princes/kings had the right to decide what religion would be practised inside their own borders. If the notion of soveringty holds through today, you could say that China has the right do decide what information makes it inside its borders. The WTO is seen as a threat to soveringty because it doesn't allow nations to enforce laws that could be barriers to trade.
Right now, Google is playing by China's rules, since it is a market with an incredible potential for growth. It woudl be interesting to see google take on China in the WTO, saying that censorship is a barrier to trade.
Google is now a public company though, and I don't think shareholders would be happy if they stayed out of the Chinese market for philosophical/political reasons.
I'd love to see a more open society in China, but the political reality is that it isn't going to happen.
sorry 'bout the mess...
I'm in China. Google News is working fine at the moment. I had never tried it from here before, so I can't verify whether or not it was ever blocked. BBC NEWS is, as always, blocked. BBC World News however, does work.
It was blocked for a week or so, but is fine now...
/. for a few months about this time last year.
Par for the course. They blocked
No big deal, if you ask me. Just annoying.
Max.
Reason why they hate the Japanese? Rape of Nanking.
You say that China's education is crap, let me ask you:
1. Have you seen the Japanese schools' version of the Rape of Nanking????
2. Have you read what actually happened????
I suggest you google it before you make such statements.
As a hint to how the Japanese view this chapter of their history:
"The Nanjing Massacre is a lie made up by the Chinese." - Ishihara Shintaro, former Japanese Cabinet Minister, interviewed October 1990.
-- what about the USA's view on nuclear bombing Japan? Done to stop the war???????????????
I'm sitting in Southern China, about an hour north of HongKong, in Shenzhen, and I can surf Google news all I want...
The breaking up permenantly of China is very unlikely given the history of China. For over 5000 years, since the Xia dynasty, China has been united and split apart over and over again; but it always manages to come back around and recover. Of course, the times spans we're talking about are 100-200 years, but then the racial memory is over 5000 years.
China proper has been unified by a common written language and a national indentity for a long time, and even most of the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong still long to be part of one China, despite what the American media may report about seperatist movememnts there. Recent Taiwanese polls indicate that most Taiwanese resent intervention by the mainland, but believe eventual reunification is good and inevitable.
*Taiwan's own constitution calls for eventual reunification of the mainland!*
A short break-up is possible, but China will once again unite, just like in the opening paragraphs of "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" - as applicable as it was today as hundreds of years ago.
I live in China. Google news was blocked for about 4 or 5 days, but it's been accessable again for the past week or so. I noticed that the news of Russia granting a visa to the Dalai Lama was out around the same time that the block was in place.
It should be remembered, however, that several states have laws that prevent non-voters (including U.N. observers) from entering or in some cases even approaching the polling area. One state found a way around it but Florida and Ohio, the two most contested states, were for the most part not observed.
Cao ni ma, Ji bai
It means FUCK YOUR MOTHER.. VAGINA?!
eek!!!!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I live in China - I'm a Westerner but I work here.
Google is accessible. The cache is not. They filter based on the 'cache' construct in the cache URLs - and send an RST packet if cache accesses are detected.
So the grandfather post is correct: even if Google didn't censor, the sites would still be inaccessible.
And, again for the record - google.com shows me everything, including the censored links - but I can't get at them (without creative use of onion routers, that is). Only in google.com.cn searches are links truly censored.
I'm in China, and I can read a tons of news sites (yeah, including /., if that counts as news site!). There are some famous sites not accessible (e.g. BBC, except BBCi), sure, but most are ok, including:
...
- CBC
- Globe & Mail
- Radio Canada
- Le Figaro
- Le Monde
- CNN (garbage news anyway...)
- Liberation
- Le Devoir
- Washington Post
- New York Times
- The Economist
- Radio France
- Groklaw
-
- too many to list from my bookmarks
If I can access to so many news sources, I'm sure I have access to a pretty good range of perspectives on any issues.
I've never used google news, but if what google news is about is to index news from other sites, I don't think I would miss anything.
So, what's the big deal about this? Oh, and I have short-wave radio too, and I can listen to a shitload of stuffs out there.
Get your head out of that sand, and come to live in China for a while, and see if you miss anything here.
And another thing, there are a few underground proxies that allow you to get out without any filtering, if you really want. And yes, it works. I don't use it, because I don't need to.
I suppose if you ran google, you'd turn it into a morality-of-the-month kind of business, taking stands on irrelevant issues, and getting your site blocked from the largest market in the world. Good business plan, that.
It may cheer you to know that the U.S. has sharply decreased the number of Chinese it allows to enter the country. China, in return, has increased visa fees for Americans, and heavily restricted business visa holders, which has caused me no end of problems.
I like the dollar sign thing, though. Are you parroting that back from a website you view, or did you think that one up yourself?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Jesus I've never heard double-speak like this. Who gets to decide what information deserves to be opressed? Al-Jazeera is a widely respected news source that would never bow down to government pressure the way the US media did. Even if it's a terrible rag, you seem to imply that it's OK for the US to censor, just not China.
Honestly, I'd say that at LEAST a majority of Americans knows the truth about these things.
To quote the PIPA, "Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found." No reasonable person could come to these conclusions without a press that has more interest in politics than the truth.
The government is filthy rich while it's citizens are starving to death in record numbers each year.
You really show your ignorance here. Perhaps you are thinking of North Korea circa '94? How many people do you think are starving in China right now? It isn't fucking Africa. What a joke. And you think Hu Jintao has a palace made of marble?
"How many Americans still think Saddam had an active WMD program? ... Al queada links? How many of you think most of the world support your actions?"
Honestly, I'd say that at LEAST a majority of Americans knows the truth about these things. Contrary to YOUR ignorant belief, most Americans are NOT un-educated or un-informed about domestic and world issues.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Here are the results of a survey taken of Americans right before the election:
As you can tell, the majority of Americans *are* ignorant and un-informed about world issues. It might be an unpleasant surprise, but there it is in cold hard statistics.
Forgive me my cynicism, but I just lost whatever faith I had in my own countrymen about a month ago. There's always Europe, I suppose...
*shrug* I Could of listed off all the countries as well, but it would seem like I was trying scoreboard by who went to the most countries. I can only assume when you mean living you never actually bothered to check into more about the country you were living in.
Full of shit? Hardly. UK for example, Stories about the royal family (eg. Charles gay incident) and Blair (eg. childs suicide bid) are routinely censored despite the tabloid nature of the press there.
Ireland censors stories too. For example electronic voting was cancelled in Ireland because it couldn't be proven to be reliable. What wasn't reported about (but mentioned in a dail hearing) was that the company that won the contract to supply the machines was an ex member of the current party in government who won the contract which was millions over expected cost, not the cheapest quote and the company only existed a few months after it was announced they were going to use the machines.
". The USA has the free-est press in the world, full stop."
Total BS, unless you mean free to lie. Just check out Media Matters to see how screwed up the US press is.Any press reporter asking the president a question he doesn't like and they won't be invited back or allowed ask a question again.
In some cases it even gets petty like Bush being interviewed by RTE who went on to tell RTE they would never be allowed interview Bush or anyone again because he was asked a question he couldn't answer.
"I repeat: PRISON."
I REPEAT *DIFFERENT WAYS*.
Just because you don't get thrown into prison doesn't mean you can't be screwed over in the US for reporting something that the administration or media don't want you to. The same applies for other countries as well.
The US is the only country I know where a News Channel can sue for the right to lie and win.
"literally millions of alternatives out there and at the end of the day you're welcome to start your own blog and report what you will."
Having alternatives doesn't mean that your press is free. Generally the alternatives you speak about are outside of the country in question. As for blogs, they are hardly media outlets. Certainly a place to start researching a story for yourself but I wouldn't put them that far above say Fox as reliable sources of information.
Some cultures for one reason or another are not ready to embrace American style democracy.
Look at the people of Iraq, and how they have embraced their liberation. It makes you wonder if they want to go back to days of Saddam.
It has nothing to do with that. You invaded their country under false pretences, killed over 15,000 innocent people (non-combatants), god knows how may combatants as well.
Their hatred has nothing to do with their thoughts on democracy. The US has completely destroyed their country. You've turned it into a relavively sane state in the middle east, into a hotbed of racist and religious violence. There weren't any Al-Qaida in Iraq prior to the war, now it's a magnet for anyone with a desire to fight.
As Bush said, "you're either with us or against us". And from the Iraqi in the street, who's lost 50% of their family, who's lost what little facitilites they had (even health care is still much worse than it was under Saddam), who's lived in a war zone for months, who's had friends sexually molested and raped by soldiers; are you really going to consider the US a friend?
9-11 was mainland America's only taste of what it's like to be attacked by a foreign aggressor. Why can't you see that others, such as the Iraqis', feel the exact same way when YOU attack them? Honestly, it's fucking unbelievable how stupid this is. I don't care who the leader of my country is, if you start chucking explosives at me and my family, I'm going to come hunting you. And as you'll have the superiour manpower and weaponry, it'll be hit & run insurgent attacks. This was all so predictable, even in the early days an attack being discussed.
Acting surprised is not an option. Your leaders either knew this was coming, or they are moronic. Read some history; nothing that has happened in Iraq came as a surprise to anyone. War is not a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
Were you schooled in the PRC?
Ask any of China's neighbors what "People's Liberation Army" means to them. They've fought against and/or "liberated" land from Vietnam, Tibet (and India after invading Tibet), East Turkestan, Soviet Russia, ("Inner") Mongolia and Korea.
They're keeping both Tibetans and Uighurs under genocidal military occupations to exploit their natural resources. Isn't annexing one's peaceful smaller neighbors and systematically destroying their culture and national identity a crime at the level of those Stalin conducted
They continue propping up brutal dictatorships in both North Korea and Burma and supported the Khmer Rouge's murdering of large proportion of Cambodian population.
They also helped Pakistan to build nuclear missiles and to proliferate missile technology.
They're also supporting numerous Central Asian dictatorships under the guise of "war on terror", to kill and capture Uighurs seeking to end the Chinese occupation or just escaping from it.
Tell me again that "China doesn't have a proven track record of aggression and meddling in other countries' affairs".