Slashdot Mirror
Taking My Freedom With Me to China?
Solo Han asks: "I'm considering a move to China next year, and while I have just as many problems as y'all do with the government, I still like the freedoms afforded me, especially when it comes to access of information. Chinese citizens, however, do not have the same freedoms, as we are constantly reminded here on slash-o-dot. Pr0n, mp3z, and games aside, what are the things that those of you in the Celestial Kingdom know you cannot access, and specifically, what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material? This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Does that answer your question?
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Somehow I don't think it's wise to do such circumvention if you want to stay there short-term/long-term/permanently.
What would US officials think if a foreigner, who is planning to move to USA, talks about how stupid the whole security thing is, and asks for advice to get around it?
If USA can attack another country "Just Like That"(tm), I would consider Chinese's censorship a godsend given it's only imposed within its own country. If you decided to move there, respect its laws; if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice.
At home I have unlimited access to the internet, but at work I can only access port 80, and I would never try to get around company's security policy because it's restricting my freedom to surf, although others might still try that.
And remember, when you get caught, it's going to be ugly no matter where you are.
So in my opinion, if you want to go into other's territory, make sure you find out what can and cannot be done there, and stick to the rules.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Have a good time!
WTF? Over?
This may be obvious to most people (I sure have missed obvious things in the past), but some background as to why you're thinking of moving to China might put your question into proper context.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Maybe you can access a proxy and view through it?
I think I'd rather get caught running drugs in Mexico and end up in a Mexican prison than attempt what you're suggesting and get caught.
I wish you luck, but do keep one thing in mind.
Be very cautious when tormenting a power-structure that has few qualms with making you vanish in the dead of night.
The Chinese government is not going to send you a polite subpoena and meet you in a clean courtroom some months down the road like the *AA where you will be given access to effective counsel and a more-or-less fair shake.
Instead, if they catch you circumventing the Great Firewall of China they may descend upon you in the night and drag you off to a dank prison for reeducation.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
> I'm considering a move to China next year.
Sorry, I stopped reading after that.. Good luck, you'll need it!
Must-not-watch TV!
No sir you are wrong. There is NO censorship here in China, none at all! Yes siree, everything is free and open. As we say here in Chi
You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.
...they don't care. Nearly all of this censorship is only aimed at chinese citizens, and then only those that happen to be a convenient PR target. Unless you start actively trying to overthrow the government or anything daft like that, they're not interested.
Just so you know, the US won't fight to get you out of prison like other countries do for their own nationals. Have fun!
Unfortunately, you will likely get few responses from anyone in China, as Slashdot is a news site, and news sites are forbidden.
So basically your question is stating "I'm going to China and expect to be able to break their laws as I was fortunate enough to be born in a more free society."
Don't whine to the foreign media when you're jailed as a subversive influence.
Trolling is a art,
and if it's not, you're going to be making people living in china talk about restricted sites... which will probably be monitored by the chinese government since we're not over ssl, and great, you just made the chinese govt more suspicious of those people.
Do you really want to consider "getting around" the censorship. It's not like they're playing a game over there. They're not setting up challenges for the techno-elite to figure out how to access Slashdot from being the Great Firewall of China. It's not like "Gosh, I can use a proxy! I can tunnel... they'll find this very clever and I'll be able to do whatever I want."
You'll be breaking the law.
In China.
Are you a big fan of breaking the law in general? Are you a big fan of spending days, weeks, or years in a Chinese political prison? Do you like having your legs unbroken?
I would highly recommend against going to China with a plan of "Getting around" the censhorship. It's not just a technological hurdle to overcome, it's the law. And as a general policy, you don't want to be breaking the law in foreign countries. Their jails aren't as nice as ours.
--
RumorsDaily
What kind of problems? Did you sell military secrets to the Chinese?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
[..] what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material?
Well, slashdot.org for one.
As an American, I'm not familiar with living under Communist rule, but I'm pretty sure that the penalties of trying to circumvent Chinese government-controlled limitations are probably more severe than those of the United States.
Same black-suited guys emerging from black vans. Where they take you and what they do to you/treat you is a whole, 'nother thing.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
1. Dress up like a Dragon and sneek into the public square.
2. For deeper infiltration you can dress as a woman and climb the wall with a sash.
(See Mulan for more information).
Why do you think China has some of the best hackers in the world? The "necessity is the mother ...." comes to mind.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
"Please give me instructions on subverting the most populated country on the planet."
Talk about attracting attention.
What you call censorship is relative depending on who you ask. But one thing I can guarantee you is that China's most expensive city (Shanghai) is way cheaper than a comparable US city.
China wants a part of the tech. world. They've gained the respect of being the largest bootleg and spammers in the world, and the censorship will give them some credit to a bright tech china. Or just a Japanese wannabes. All considered, it's needed.
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Easy: Stay in the fucking USA.
Why don't you move to China and do all of those things while maintaining a blog of your adventure. Thus, if your blog suddenly disappears or is abandoned, then we will know for sure what happens in China when you do those things..
Try freenet .
Whoa! Did he just ask for people to openly admit what technologies they're using to bypass a strict government firewall? Granted on Slashdot you'll end up with a lot of theories, but actually phrasing you question in a way meant to try to get Chinese law breakers to not only admit that they're breaking the law but to also share the method being used to break the laws......the mind boggles.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
To help fit in when you go to China, I suggest you participate in one of their native religions. This will help you get along great in your new home.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
what is the point of this, seriously? It appears Solo Han is asking for advice on committing illegal activities in China.
People ought to obey the laws of the country to which they are moving to. If you don't like the laws, don't move there.
Is the danger of getting around the censors worth it? Do you have a family? How do you feel about going to a Chinese prison?
I do not know what the legal climate in China is but you may want to think about about it very carefully. What risk will you be putting yourself and or your family if you get caught? It could be as little as a polite warning or getting run over by a tank.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
pay no attention to the fact that i'm writing down all these techniques on bypassing our - i mean their security and finding ways to make our - i mean their censorship more difficult - i mean easy to get around. nevermind the fact that the people providing these services will all be dissapearing soon...
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China
I'd tell you, but then they'd have to kill me.
-geekd
If you've got ssh and access to a server outside of china the rest should be pretty obvious...
I wonder if tor works from inside the great firewall of China. Any Chinese folks who've tried it and care to comment?
"This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it?"
If you're going to ask this, shouldn't also be wondering about the consequences if you do any of these things? Otherwise how will you make a reasonable judgement on whether it's worthwhile or not?
Here is a comprehensive list of sites banned in China: http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.ht ml
There is a very strong anti-Chinese movement within the US, in particular, that tends to dramatically misportray the way things are there.
And as another post, that bizarrely got moderated funny, said... its targeted at citizens, not at foreigners.
So you're asking Chinese citizens that break the law to post how they do it? Not only does that put them at risk, but it makes it easier for the government to stop, depending on their method.
to the poster: You really think that asking that...here...will get you reasonable advice...that will still work in one year?
to the answerers: You really think that responding will help anybody? This is one of the few cases where security through obscurity is a very good option.
If you're still going to answer, make sure to Post Anonymously.
No offence but really you should NOT be trying to break the law in China. Despite what you may think, the US consulate is not going to try to come to your rescue.
China's pretty swift with punishment and you could either be rotting in prison for a very long time, or your family could be stuck with a 5 yuan bill for the bullet used in your execution.
Probably the only way you could get around it is to NOT use the Chinese system for your internet. Which would mean something pretty drastic like a satellite phone if those even still work anymore.
is to not move there for good. Visits are okay, but live there... no thanks. (yes, I've been to mainland China many times... it's a wonderful country and wonderful people, but a shitty government)
"Freedom is on the march".
Har har har.
While I've never been to China and never directly experienced their security, I cannot speak on it. However I can speak a little about respecting other countries laws- and its not so much respecting it because you agree with it, but more respecting it because you will find yourself in a nice chinese prison if you don't. Simply put, while the US justice system has a lot of problems- its still a cake walk compared to many countries, things you may take for granted, i.e. right to a trial, right to an attorney, etc may not necessarily hold true in another country. In addition to that, its very american of us to goto other countries and expect the same standards. We do that a lot, but thats not really the point- overall I am just saying 'sure you could probably get around it, but we are also talking about a country with gross human rights violations so you must consider which is more important to you, sims 2 or your life'. Nevermind if you are religious or anything else.
I haven't tried this myself as I've never been in China, but I've heard that searches via elgooG would effectively bypass "the great firewall". Just a rumour for me though. Could anyone verify this?
If you have a problem with Chinese policies and laws, moving there with the express intention of breaking them is probably not the best solution.
Perhaps you should reconsider moving to Hong Kong, or Taiwan or some other place in Asia where you can get a similar cultural experience without having to go against the culture's laws, values and mores. While you may value freedom of foo above all else, it's culturalist and wrong to try to impose that on all others. What if Chinese immigrants to America held your same principles to heart, and tried to remake your society, through illegal and covert means, to resemble theirs? Would that sit well with you?
Obviously some people break the rules, use outside proxies not yet blocked by the government, and get access to prohibited information. I've been there, three times. I know some of this. And I don't recommend it. If caught, and lucky, you'll just be thrown out of the country. It can be worse.
The question you should be asking yourself is: Just how much do I want to have a long, happy, and enjoyable time living in the PRC?
Why not try living like a real Chinese citizen for a few months just to see what it's like? Why else go, if you're only trying to live your Western-style life just in a new location?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Try Middle Kingdom you insensitive clod!
Instead of moving to Mainland China, move to Taiwan?
...now /. is banned.
If any Chinese citizens can post here to tell you how, then the Great Firewall isn't really a problem, is it?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You are dumb.
<End pause>
YORKLE!
Having lived there, well
a) hope you know chinese
b) public interenet, cds, etc. is OK, and there may be more there than is let on. Note: they banned this because it's already out.
c) there are proxies that will let you circumvent, but they will know you did that. It's a moving target game.
other notes
- self censorship challenges; Americans (I'm one) are loud and boisterous. Like to challenge boundarys and assumptions. That's not their culture and frowned upon.
Basically, it's going to be different, and depends entirely where you are in that vast ranging country.
It is also imposed outside of China's borders: upon Tibet.
I am concerned for your safet. I wouldn't recommend circumventing anything. When you live in a PoliceState (Communist or Fascist) a Western style prank like hacking will land you in prison for life. They will lock you in a room and throw away the room. If you want to read the news I recommend you move to a place with even a small bill of rights.
what are the things that those of you in the Celestial Kingdom know you cannot access, and specifically, what are the websites, search engines, news sites, and other sites that are classed as potentially 'dangerous' material?
If you even have to ask these questions, you're hopelessly naive, and will be eaten alive by the place to which you're headed. What, did you think that all that scary talk about being arrested and jailed for your opinions (or for even visiting web sites where you can read someone else's opinions) was just Republicans trying to make socialists look bad? It's real!
I'd be astounded if there's a single "legal" reader of this web site in China at all. Now, while it still lasts, you might consider moving to Taiwan.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Stay off Michael Sims' shitlist.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Circumventing the limitations will lead to you being deported as soon as possible.
That is if you are caught.
I myself have been avoiding detection for many years. The best way to access the outside is by connecting to oiu2513sf
and dont use the people's explorer of internet. But i hear the chinese food there rocks (or as they call it there, 'food')
I recently spent the better part of a year living in Guangzhou followed by a few months in Chengdu. As for Porn, it was being sold on the streets. I found there to be no real enforcing of any of these "bans" the central government keeps talking about. The conry is actually very free on a day to day basis, as long as you don't bring religion or something similar into a School you're teaching at, you're ok
When you're in a foreign country, you're obliged to obey their rules. Accidentally violating some custom/rule and winding up in jail is one thing, but when you go to a country and violate their laws willfully and with premeditation there is no reason at all why the US should expend its diplomatic resources saving your sorry ass.
If you don't like their rules, don't move there.
I regard the government of China as being in a situation like Iraq and Afganistan; democracy won't work there. So, 'freedom of speech' is not a viable concept. The Chinese have to be careful about what they allow or chaos will result. Example, they were on a path to overpopulation until their government imposed some rules. I'm sure this will start a bitter debate, but I think the Chinese should not be interfered with, especially not the way we destabilized Iraq.
Best regards.
Just be sure to talk about Falun Gong wherever you go in China, and they'll love you.
If you really want to try and circumvent their firewalls, Good Luck. Remember you would be in their country and from what I read, their record on rights is not the best. But, its okay, I'm pretty sure nobody would recognize any of your organs when they show up on the black market for surgeries.
Wow, this has got to be the worst ask slashdot question ever. First we make cracks at the US government for no real reason other then to do so, then you go on to talk about wanting to move to china.
Come on lets get real and discuss the news and something we can do something about and know about. Normally ask slashdots are interesting, this just has troll spelled all over it.
Phil
a basic freebsd jailed server or UML server for $20 /month, log into text mode brower via ssh, assuming your using very slow connection. For broadband, could even run remote X11 brower via ssh -X
If this "other country" launches hundreds of unprovoked attacks against your peacekeepers (as Iraq did against UK and US) over several years, refusing to stop, then retaliating against it after a long period of warning is not "just like that".
In the US, it's rare for Christians to be beaten or imprisoned for reading the Bible, gathering in fellowship, singing worhsip songs, giving sermons, or sharing their faith.
Like most Chinese nowadays... get a job... China's high tech sector booming. A lot of Chinese high tech workers have left Ottawa, Canada after Nortel started their layoffs. Why stay in a country that doesn't have any jobs that suits your education?
Better luch next time
You know the saying "you can't fix a social problem with technological means"? Well, a government convinced that it deserves to survive by any means necessary, including censoring its citizens (and that's if they're lucky), might be the best example of a social problem. You don't fix that with anonymous proxies and l33t pr0n-over-ssl.
I'm not denying the importance of free speech, either in the absolute sense or as something important to bringing about the downfall of dictatorships; I'm saying that your assumptions about the utility of "getting around" the firewall are so very, very wrong. What good will your laptop do you when your door is kicked in at 3am by the police? Or when you're hauled before a judge, charged with crimes against the state, because you were looking at a non-approved news site? Why do you think that when They've got guns and police and armies and courts who will do what They want, that it's not that big a deal?
Carousel is a lie!
You asked:
... Uhmm... Do YOU have any affiliation with the Chinese government? A spy perhaps? A bad one at that ;)
"... This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
So you're asking effectively how we would go about breaking the laws in China?
I'm actually reading your post from China right now, and I'm not entirely sure what you're asking:
Do you really want to ... play ... a game. Are you a big fan of ... the ... general? Are you a big fan of ... Chinese? Do you like ... your legs?
I would highly recommend ... going to China. Their jails are ... nice.
moving to the UK. Anyone know where I can go to make fun of the Queen and scream "Beckham sucks!" at the top of my lungs? Oh, wait, that's Ireland. My, err, bad. Umm ... yeah ... LOOK A CHICKEN!
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
It's been said many times, but the idea of trying to break the law in a strict state is a bad idea. Would you go to Tehran to give out Bibles? Watch a video of Tiananmen Square. You'll change your mind.
Leave a globally accessible server running in the western world, and run VNC on it. You can VNC into it and access all the the net you want.
What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Since the IP this question was posted from belongs to the following net block I don't think I would like to help you con people into helping you catch them, dear Commerade Hu Yu Hai Ding.
Yours truly,
Wai Noh Ping (I think your firewall is blocking ICMP traffic)
Taking my freedom with me to jail
On how to take his limited Chinese freedom of information searching to Chinese prison.
Legal issues aside, what I would do is rent a box on the internet, and connect to it using openssh. Redirect whatever ports you need to your local machine and you have an encrypted tunnel.
You can circumvent, break and twist as many laws/rules (and other such stuff) as you want, and nobody would bother you.
99% chances are that you will survive with all these, 1% chances that you will be caught, but that would take another 10 years or so.
well first off...
*this message has been censored by the chinese government, have a good day*
That's all you need to remember.
Hope that helps, enjoy your trip!
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
I know someone in China who is from the U.S. He has been there for several years now. He has found that they censor a LOT of sites, many that don't really make sense to censor. So he uses proxy servers to get around this limitation. A lot of people over there do that. Supposedly its not a big deal.
BBC News - news.bbc.co.uk is blocked. As is Google.
8
But as reported last month in NewScientist, you can use elgooG - (an impressive perl script that reflects Google, results and cached pages) to get past the GFoC.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn276
http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
It's also mentioned in the article that there's a relay server in China run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society that can be used to test what gets in through the GFoC.
Taking My Freedom With Me to China?
Taking My Cocaine With Me to the US?
Taking Kiddy Porn With Me to England?
Taking Salman Rushdie With Me to Iran?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
USA can attack another country "Just Like That"
Thank god.
I could grumble about how all the legitimate stories I've submitted have all been rejected, but I won't.
I've got a solution for you!
Call your travel agent before it's too late and cancel your plane ticket.
You've offically had your right to travel abroad revoked because YOUR A JACKASS.
Unless your entering a country with the direct agenda of working towards overthrowing their government, I don't see how your question is even remotely legit.
Otherwise, I would expect that you'd just obey any local laws and ordances. If you issues with the laws, the best solution is not to go.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I'd be more worried about freedoms that you're not going to have other than information... Travel, personal protection, due process, other stuff that is taken for granted, especially in the USA.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Probably inspired by the fact that the last China article (okay every China article) had nothing but flamefests for comments.
:-)
Someone In The Know
How can the government know what traffic is flowing in an SSH tunnel going to the States or Europe or whatever? Or do they have restrictions against that too? Even if they do, as some other poster pointed out, they really don't care. This other poster was modded funny for some reason, I would call it insightful. They don't care what information foreigners get hold of/release, as long as they don't try to overthrow the government. So if you plan on doing that, I suggest you dig yourself a spider hole á la Saddam first :)
Since you'll be going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison for the rest of your life for attempting what you want, it's good to keep in mind that the Asian male has a demonstrably smaller penis size than his Western counterpart.
First rule of Wikipedia: never trust it on controversial issues. For Georgw W Bush, Maryann vs Ginger, and Tiber? look elsewhere.
A simple unencrypted squid proxy. I live in China, and some sites are blocked (BBC News, Miami Herald, etc). I set up a proxy on a linux box in the USA, and I use it whenever I encounter a blocked site (hit F12-x in Opera to toggle).
It's also useful when there's simply a bad connection or slow speed. Often, I can't get a good connection to some site or other, and it's not blocked, I know it's up, but the crappy infrastructure here drops my packets. So, even if there were no Great Firewall, I'd still have my proxy handy. The Great Firewall isn't too concerned with English language websites. As far as I know, only Chinese and English language sites are blocked...any other nationalities get off scot-free.
And don't worry about getting clubbed in the head by the cops, or anything stupid like that. China is just like everywhere else...you mess with the bull, you get the horns. Hell, we smoke joints openly on the street. Nobody knows what it smells like. We went out on a lake, and the boatman asked, "why are you 6 people sharing one cigarette...you don't have enough money to afford cigarettes for everyone?"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I cant help but bite anyway.
there are perfectly legitimate reasons for moving to china for some period. I considered moving there myself for a year or two to study kung fu. Would that make me a traitor?
thats just unreasonable
ssh -L 3128:some-good.proxy.com:3128 some-ssh-host-outside-of-china
Set your proxy server to localhost.
Problem solved.
So let me get this straight: You want help circumventing the laws of a nation you intend to visit. And this isn't just any nation, but a nation where it's not unheard of for dissidents to be dealt with via a bullet to the head. I'm trying to figure out just what combination of arrogance, foolishness, and pr0n addiction made you even consider this.
When in Rome, do as the Romans. Or just stay the hell out of Rome.
1. Don't brag about how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China.
You can do it, you can talk about it in private, or semi publicly. But if you try to publish an article about it, you may get into trouble. But of course YMMD.
2. Keep your head down.
Try not to get involved into politics. Talking about it with friends is no big deal. Don't mix politics and foreign money, and avoid contacts with people disagree with the communism party and get money from foreign country, either goverments or some foundations.
Other than these rules, you will be fine, and you will find cheaper games, moives and musics. Did I mention Chinese food?
Are you Han? The goverment may treat you differently if you are ethnic Chinese.
Where are you planning on staying? Coastal cities such as Shanghai are much more open.
From my experiences in Shanghai, Porn, Warez and MP3's are easy to get. Heck, there is an open air market around Shanghai University that's filled with Warez vendors. Most video shops also have a porn section discretely tucked away. What will get you in real trouble is critizing the goverment or advocating "anti-goverment" policies. As long as you keep your head down and don't make waves no one will care what you do.
I think I would rather be gang raped in prison by a band of evil satan worshiping midgets than get caught breaking the law in China. Then again I was always kind of partial to the idea of midget prison gangs. ;)
Have a Linux box setup in the states and SSH from China to it. I am sure they have not stopped SSH though there firewall.
This is not that L33t really I am just a sad old man!
WORD OUT!
"The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin, American author
Go ahead and get around the pesky censorship thing - get caught, no lawyer, no rights, go to jail go straight to jail do not pass the embassy. Next, hope you don't need serious medical treatment fast. You don't have enough priviledge to get it. Hope you like working for the military because their general staff runs most of their large companies directly or indirectly. Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there, need medical there, or piss off the authorities.
Our company has employees in China, and their work requires that they be able to access our corporate systems. So, they've got a VPN connection through the GFC, that VPN connection also includes unfiltered Internet access. From what I'm told by our Network Admin, unfiltered access is something of a status symbol over there.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Global Warming! SUVs!!! Hairspray!! Microwave Popcorn!!! OH MY GOD!!!
I've taken a few trips to P.R.C. since my wife is from there. I had a few problems trying to upload photos from a digital camera to a server back home (yes, I used disposable passwords). First I attempted to FTP the files directly to the server. I found that the FTP connection was dropped after transferring about 8k bytes. Next, I tried http put to my web server with a similar result. Finally I tried to send each picture as an e-mail attachment. This also failed. It seems that China does not want any unauthorized information going OUT of the country. I finally tried running an FTP server locally on the dynamic IP (163.net) and connecting to it from outside (after telnetting to my US based server). Amazingly enough it worked! Files can be moved out of China from an internal server but not from a client.
As far as free access to information goes, good luck. They seem to have several layers of control. The first layer is DNS. Just about any US based radio or TV domain name will not resolve. You might be able to get to the site if you can get the IP address (perhaps using a method similar to above). Many sites use the hostname in the http query to determine which site to serve, in these cases you're out of luck. There may be DNS and web proxies that you can use but these are fleeting.
--
Sigs are a waste of space
When you don't get any meaningful replies from inside China, you'll know that the answer is really "No freedom here, move along".
--
make install -not war
There are two Chinas, and the one you defend is one of the worst empires left in the world. They are threatening to trash the other China (Taiwan) for no other reason than "we want it!". Tibet never attacked mainland China, yet the PROC trashed it and holds it today. Why? "We want it!".
I'm not sure at all what sort of security the Chinese government uses to stop you from accessing forbidden hosts, so i can't be of much help there. But even if you do get caught by someone you could most likely bribe them to shut up.
It was also interesting that my normally digital phone connection had a new icon I'd never seen, indicating that the connection was unencrypted. So my advice would be to find someone to host a VPN endpoint for you from the west, email, surf and Skype though it.
I for one welcome our chinese censoring overlords.
Posting anonymously so as not to jeapordise any future trips :-)
I hacked the Great Firewall!
When I went to China, I found that a few sites that I visit regularly, such as BBC News, were blocked, so I set up an SSH tunnel to a box back home running Squid, and did all my browsing through that. Worked fine.
Well, first of all their control is mainly aimed at Chinese citizens. For example the newspapers available to visitors are uncensored.
Secondly, China is not as bad as you might think generally but can be much worse than you might think specifically. In other words, people in general are fairly free there but if you get noticed and listed as an enemy of the state you'll be in very big trouble.
For example, I personally never take pictures or even carry a camera within China because they're always a chance they'll accuse you of spying. (Like what we'd do to an arab taking pictures of tall buildings).
Best bet is simply not to stand out, or if you do stand out do so as an obvious outsider. The worst thing to do is stand out as an insider.
I spent three months in Beijing in the early part of last year. And I did quite a bit of web surfing. I experienced very little problems. But I kept mainly to news sites and such. Supprsingly I find more sites blocked at work when in the States. All in all I would say you have little to worry about. P.S. Just don't got to MaoSucks.com
Just get an account with a hosting company located outside of China that has ssh access and use links to browse anything you want from there. mutt or pine could take care of the mail.
Alternatively you could use something like tor + ssh + port forwarding.
Most stuff isn't blocked anyway - I think it mostly to supress the falun gong and similar pro-democracy movements.
I think Solo Han may be chanelling Mao. You are basically asking people to explain how to circumvent their government's controls, when that government is known to do some rather painful things to those that subvert the government?
I call Shenanagins, the question is either just troll BS, or the the guy asking it is too dumb to utilize the answers.
Face it, would anyone comming to the US really ask, in a public forum, how do I get around the US's stupid drug laws? (Please don't answer this, I'm trying to nurture a little faith in humanity)
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I lived in Shanghai for 2 1/2 years, having returned about 4 years ago. I still return frequently as part of my job. The Chinese really don't care much what westerners do in China as long as you stay away from the Tibet issue, Falun gong and such things. I had dial up access and it appeared that foreigners and chinese went through different connections. I was never certain if I was being blocked or not. I could never get anything that was geocities. If you are going to connect rhruogh hotel DSL you will likely be blocked as the Cinses would be but there could be exceptions. I have never had my baggage checked going in or out of the country and I have come and gone many times. They know Westerners know the score and simply don't mess with them. I lived in a 30-something story apt building that was not set aside for westerners and I was stuck with Chinese television only. If you live with the laowai you can even have a sattelite dish. If you just go about your business you won't have any trouble. Just don't do things you obviously should not be doing. Magazines and such are censored as far as what you can buy locally. But you can bring in pretty much whatever you want. They just don't want the chinese to have access.
(This sig has been removed at the request of the patent holder for Sigs.)
Mod that guy up.
though I'm in the USA for the moment..
You probably will not notice a substantial abridgement of your freedoms when you get there. However, due to the developing nature of China, many processes are highly aggravating.
Sure, you cannot access porn online- as easily as in the USA. It is still there, and you can find it.
One thing that really has pissed me off was that I left my computer at home in the USA running a server registered with DynDNS- I'm guessing all the domains with DDNS are blocked by china. I justed wanted access to my own stuff at home, not to start an insurrection.
All I can say is, feel free to express yourself at the right time, but use discretion.
If you want access to all your files, buy a 1GB flashdrive and copy all your important stuff on to that. Buy 2 or 3 if you need, or take a laptop.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
such hackers aren't viewed upon kindly.
A year ago, i was in Saudi Arabia, in Mecca. I met the manager of the hotel i was staying in, and we just became friends during my stay there. I told him i was looking for an internet cafe, and i wasn't able to find one anywhere. He was aware of only one in the whole city, which surprised me as Mecca is a big city, and it was pretty far from where we were. He mentioned that the connection was really slow, and that it's really a hasle to get there, so he invited me to use the only connection the hotel has, which was from his personal machine. :)
He explained that they weren't able to access certain international news sites, and that everything was monitored by the government. I tried the sites he requested, and I wasn't able to connect. So i decided to Remote Desktop to my office's server here in the US. I was able to connect, and from there, i accessed all the sites he wanted. It made him pretty happy, and from then, he allowed me to come in anytime and use his machine.
Moral of the Story: Have a machine outside the country (at a friend's house, or business) that you can access anytime, from anywhere. You can make that machine your internet gateway, and it will allow you to access almost any info you're looking for.
Anyone has a better solution?
Are people really this naive?
Setup a VPN connection using IPSec, or if your machine will be running windows, L2TP of IPSec is an options. You will of course have to maintain a computer in the US to terminate this.
Setup your VPN connection to route all your traffic over it. You will seriously slow yourself down, but this will blend in with all the other traffic generated by US business men. Lots of companies won't allow their remote machines direct Internet access when connected to the VPN, and China isn't going to tell the US businessmen they can't connect back to the home office to do work.
Don't try to do anything too non standard, it might raise a flag.
Hello, I know it is possible to circumvent the Chinese Firewall and such, but exactly how do you do it? Who is your contact in the Network Administration Administration? Do you discuss these issues with other people inside the firewall? What are their names and do you know where they live? No, I am just curious. I do not work for the glorious and envied government of PRC.
After reading what you have said, I feel you are just looking for a way to break the law. There is no other way to put it. Circumvent, avoid, being surreptitious, clandestine, stealthy. It does not matter. As other people have posted, do not do it. There is no "Please stop that" letter or email, if you piss off the wrong people, you will not be happy. My advice, with that mentality, do not move to China. Good luck either way.
ourney weaver
Make sure it's still working on your Falcon, and don't forget Chewy. Chewy might actually like the Yetis in the south.
I suspect this guy's just yanking your chains.
Couldn't stand the weather
South Korea that is.
Highspeed internet access without borders.
And the food is great too.
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
Yeah, um, what's the "Celestial Kingdom"? China is "Jong-Guo" meaning "Middle Kingdom". I'm pretty sure even in Chinese, "Celestial Kingdom" refers to the afterlife.
Kind of interesting is that in Chinese, the United States is called "Mae-Guo" which means, "Beautiful Country". Pretty complimentary of them, eh?
Well, just came back from south China, so I can tell you my real experience.
:)
Despite we had a fast internet connection (I don't know the details, but we had a network cable coming out from the outside through a wall!) it was terribly slow to surf the web on European / American web sites.
I could get to almost all the news/technical sites I wanted (slashdot was fine). The only address I had problems with was www.ogre3d.org , a LGPL 3D graphics engine. I really couldn't figure out why...
For chinese web sites the speed was really fast, so I believe the slowdown for western web sites was due to a deep checking by some government proxies... and it's not true at all that you can't find mp3 and games. Despite of my poor knowledge of written chinese I could download a lot of cool stuff (just to check if it was possible or not, looking forward to a slashdot post, of course!)
About Pr0n I can't say anything... didn't know how to delete all the temps on the chinese version of internet explorer and I was at my girlfriend's parents house!
It's well known on slashdot that there is little freedom in China, while most of the readers here draw the conclusion based on other/media/etc. You have a perfect chance the testify. I hope you don't draw the conclusion so fast.
Great wall of internet is here, for sure. Hay, you are slashdotter, you know how to setup proxy. It's easy to bypass it. Nothing special.
Other freedomyou mentioned? you can feel it.
1. You can pretty much take anything in China, custom officer rarely check your bag. Nothing like US custom.
2. Pr0n? Go to any style shaloon/hair cut/night club/Karaoke/etc/etc, that is all for you. They are all real, why do you still care those stupid pictures and videos?
3. MP3? Buy pirated CD on the street. Nobody care you. No MPAA, RIAA, or whateverAA.
What you can NOT do in China?
Post a big banner of "Down with the CCP and Chinese government" in Tiananmen Square. That's it! You can do probably anything else (as a normal person). Oh yeah, don't smuggle drugs.
> China, Cuba, Soviet era-Russia, etc. There aren't too many happy stories to be heard.
There's no need for hyperbole here. Offhand, I can think of friends from Soviet-era Ukraine and recent China whose childhood stories are fairly happy, so suggesting these countries were/are unremitting hellholes isn't useful - it just undermines your (very valid) point:
> kids were used to clear minefields. He wasn't lying- check Wikipedia
We live in a relatively safe and progressive country, but not all parts of the world are so gentle. Be careful.
(And work to preserve the freedoms we enjoy, as well as assisting others in obtaining them for themselves.)
I was in Shanghai last year, and had no problems with web surfing. There were no obvious restrictions/censorship (no more/less than what we get here at home) of sites. Nobody asked for ID before or after web surfing. Nobody baby-sat me while web surfing. I was in Hong Kong yesterday using FREE WIRELESS internet surfing in the airport. No obvious restrictions/censorship. Simply put, the amount of Chinese web-censorship is over rated - sure, it exists, but, then again there's just as much corporate sponsored censorship here. That stated, I wouldnt test my luck by repeatedly probing the edges of what sites were considered 'black listed'. It would be asking for trouble - sort of like peeing on a street corner here. You'll get away with it for awhile, but, sooner or later you'll piss someone off.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
um... have you ever been to china?
i have. i've lived there for 5 years, and it's not like you portray it to be.
if an american moves to china, you might have trouble accessing certain sites directly, but there are ways around that. i've done it millions of times and i'm not in jail.
it really irritates me how people can have such uninformed opinions and still get modded up.
Get a laptop with a DVD/CD burner. Stuff the hard drive with as much material as you can, then burn it and distribute as much as you dare. A stack of personal encryption tools, a couple of Linux distros and lots of applications. Maybe some banned music or political literature, if you dare.
But whatever you do, don't tell them the Bush administration is trying to spread democracy throughout the world. They're oppressed, not stupid.
Although I agree laws should be respected to some extent when you travel.
But polictical censorship need not be respected. Free speech is a fundamental human right.
I am happy to be living in one of the man freedom loving Democracies that that can say "This law is Stupid" or say "This leader is stupid" and not be silenced. And if our arguments are strong enough we gain support, and if our arguments are stupid we are ignored. And we choose better leaders and write better laws.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I guess it is OK to be young and not know that once in a lifetime.
1. Buy a cheap collocation server based in the US ($50-$100 per month).
2. Ask for an additional IP address (free).
2. Install OpenVPN on the server and your desktop (free).
3. Connect to your Chinese ISP and connect to your VPN.
All your outbound desktop traffic is now encrypted and passed through a UDP tunnel to your collocation server. The collocation server decrypts the traffic and passes it to the internet. Return traffic is re-encrypted and passed back to your desktop machine through the encrypted UDP tunnel. Looks just like traffic from corporate travelers connecting back to their home offices.
Extra bonus points for configuring your Linux firewall to encrypt all traffic from your home office and block any stray packets.
Yes *chinese* people are arrested... But I wasn't arrested for telling Chinese their policy on Taiwan was utter bullshit. Then again, I was not making a public spectacle.
I've lived in china, and though it is not quite a utopia, I'll be living there for a few years more.
Taiwan is cool too; Taipei is a happening place.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
You can start by watching the movie "Strip Search"
...in jail. That is because China takes the matter of foreigners flaunting Chinese law very seriously, even to the point that you will face harsher punishement than citizens. If arrested and tried, you will be charged for the cost of the trial, your stay in jail, et al, which could amount to hundreds if not thousands. And don't expect the US State Department to come galloping to your aid: You knew better.
Before it gets /.'ed... here is a little more information about the project that spawned this list:
"The authors are studying Internet filtering in countries worldwide, including restrictions on Web access in China. There is no master list of blocked sites that we (or, from what we can tell, anyone else) can access. Rather, we test "twenty questions" style, asking about individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.
To date, we have obtained lists of sites to check via web directories, search engines, and other automated data-extraction systems. To help broaden the list of pages tested and to provide the general public a means of finding out whether particular pages of interest are filtered, we have created the form below, which will run a realtime query via our methods. We consider this approach an experiment in "open research"; we are as yet uncertain whether sites submitted and tested using this system will in fact broaden our pool of tested sites, but we will analyze submissions and publish results when available."
Proxy services, many are free.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Having traveled often in China as a foreigner, I can assure you that while the Chinese government *can* do whatever they feel like to you ... they aren't likely to.
... don't write a letter to the editor about how dumb the policies of the current party leader are. :-)
They don't really give a damn what porn you surf or what political sites you read through a foreign proxy / ssh tunnel, so long as you don't pose a threat to the regime. i.e., read what you like via a foreign-hosted proxy. So long as you don't get local citizens involved, even if they find you, they are extremely unlikely to care.
As broadband is quite commonly available there, you won't have problems.
Just don't plan to engage in any sort of public dissent
What people in the west don't realize is that the Chinese government is interested in just two things: self preservation and prosperity. So long as you don't threaten the former and may contribute to the latter, you'll be very welcome.
But, why on Earth any one would spill their guts here is beyond me. If someone has a specific personal methodology that works, the quickest way to fuck it up is to talk about it.
Luke, help me take this mask off
But . . . but . . . I thought we Americans lived in a fascist imperialist warmongering state led by Bushitler who sends his Ashcroftian secret police to raid the homes of those who dare to defy the RIAA and MPAA's edicts! Or something like that. You mean the United States might *not* be the worst place in history to live in?!? Impossible!
If you're moving to a new country I do not think that breaking their laws is a good way to get started. If you are going to move to China then you have no right to complain about the laws. We'll leave that to those born there. If you beleive that a country's policy on *insert problem here* are wrong then you have a choice... you can either suck it up and go by their rules or you can go to another country. Stop thinking that because you dont like thier system you can ignore it. Next thing you know they'll come over here and start thinking they can censure our newspapers.
Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776:
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
in bed.
In many countries, the government also restricts access to some things, but it's very narrow and with at least some attempt at justifications (whether you agree with the justification or not). In fact, off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of that is really off-limits in the west is kiddie-porn (though Nazi stuff is also nearly as taboo in some parts of Europe).
Forget the details and look at the big picture: you're getting yourself into a situation where there is no social contract. The Chinese government doesn't feel the need to justify anything and is simply unaccountable to its people. The list of what is restricted can change, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. You can try technical workarounds, but you'll live in fear of being discovered.
Nothing is worth that.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't know that much about China but I suspect that all totalitarian regimes have a lot in common so my advice is that if you have or read prohibited materials, you probably won't be bothered. But of you try to distribute them, you are getting into trouble. And remeber that in totalitarian country everybody can spy on you.
Freedom is not an incompatable world view.
Democracy is not an incompatable world view.
Human rights are not an incompatable world view.
Equality under the law is not an incompatable world view.
All of these are basic rights for all human beings. The fact that the Communist government of China has refused to recognize them is not due to "an incompatable world view," its due to a small nomenklatura of Communist elites denying these rights to their people. The ideas themselves are no more alien to China than they were alien to Japan in 1945.
- Crow T. Trollbot
You are wrong, sir, I can indeed waste my day away reading slashdot in china.
Many news sites in English are not blocked...yet, who knows.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
....what is difference?
the best option is to go via a private server (don't use a commercial anonymiser that will just attract attention) outside the country and encrypt all traffic to it.
encrypted tunnels to private networks arent anything unusual or suspicious and what is inside them is pretty damn secure.
...that, as a foreign national, you will probably attract twice the usual level of suspicion given to typical citizens?
Isn't this like asking how you can get easy access in the USA to 14-year-old pr0n or Al-Quaeda meeting sites? It's possible, I'm sure, but you're going to be buying a new front door sometime in your future.
I would really recommend using your own laptop with full file system encryption. And I generally agree with other posters about that old saw: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
I got tell you first of all slashdot.org is not banned in China.
.Additionally , the situation of game and mp3 sites are not that bad.
In fact , most of the english websites is not banned in China, except playboy-type sites.Sometimes you may face inconvinence but don't worry to much you will soon get used to it.
For news sites , I think the only one still banned is news.google.com
As long as you move to China not for political purpose , you can use the internet as you like
What about Instant messaging? Does the firewall block any ports related to personal chatting? You could just have a friend tell you the news, or even transfer you a localized version. It's not exactly circumventing the firewall if someone just describes the gist of a few news stories to you over IM.
freeminimacs, just becau
VE RI
TAS
use knoppix
spoof your ip
netcat
change your mac address
It's probably not too hard to get around it from in there. Of course, the consequences might be a little harsher than you'd like.
And yet it is probably not too different from our government(s) blocking sites that *it* thinks is unsuitable for *us*.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this happens more than we'd like to know.
I've kinda done that. I used to work for Motorola. They have a
corporate firewall that blocks bad content, and possibly keeps notes
on what bad content individuals ask for. I learned to avoid those
sites.
For e-mail I always ssh into my basement server and use mutt. At
Motorola we weren't allowed to ssh out, so I parked an ssh server on
port 443 (the secure web port) and did my ssh on port 443. (Because
Motorola has a user/password routine for getting out, that part was
actually kinda complicated on the client end, but China probably isn't
so nasty.)
Note, China might insist upon your going through their
man-in-the-middle with all encrypted traffic.
I also don't keep e-mail on my notebook, it is all on my server.
For surfing forbidden web sites I would suggest something that
wouldn't attract attention with a lot of encrypted traffic, such as
the text-only browser lynx.
Mostly I would keep my nose clean and not do things they don't like.
Remember, doing fancy cryptography on your local hard disk can easily
backfire. Say the secret police grab you, place you notebook in front
of you, and ask you to type the encryption key. What are you going to
do?
As a foreigner I would try to act like a foreigner, access the
internet as a foreigner would, only be as crafty as a foreigner would
be. I would also be a geeky foreigner, I would try to buy more with
that. Were I doing anything vaguely political while visiting China I
would try extra hard to stay clean in their eyes--no ssh software, no
way.
-kb
from China?
i have 3 domains that don't have anything whatsoever objectionable to the chinese government, however i am told by friends they cannot be reached from china, probably because the folks i am hosting them with are also hosting something objectionable.
tips for travel in china:
take few clothes and only one nasty old pair of shoes, and buy shoes and clothes there. (note this may not be a great plan if you are particularly large)
a cyber cafe is a door that is ajar through which one can see a computer.
everything is delicious
have fun!
You usually cannot bribe your way out of trouble here--any attempt to do so will likely land you in a great deal more trouble. You can buy influence (campaign contributions, public policy ads), but for the most part you can't buy judges or police.
...the Firewall circumvents YOU!
Bad jokes aside, as is the common practice in communist countries, you as a rich(?) foreigner are more privileged than Zhoe Average. At hotels, for example, you can have CNN and other 'dangerous' news sources, possibly even non-blocked internet, too. Not sure how this works when you're an individual, though.
The guy asked a specific question and probably knew the risks. You don't need to inform him of how despicable he is. He asked how to get around it, not what are the moral and ethical implications of said subject. That is his decision to make. i say give him the information, let him make the decision to break the laws of that country.
Think encryption, or secure tunneling. I would set up a server here connect to it through secure tunneling and have it as your web source sending the requested uncensored internet data to you through the secure tunnel. Learn how to do it and i am sure it would be possible.
...you will be rewarded by being able to purchase almost any piece of software known to man for around $3. Any movie for about $1, and game for about $3.
There are malls there that are huge, and hold nothing but pirated software. Also, they copy EVERYthing, even entire cars. Honda in fact hired them for some parts manufacturing because they copied theirs so well for a much lower cost. If you can't beat them... They even introduced a complete copy of a "GM" car before GM even announced it. They are absolute masters at copying everything, manufacturing those copies, and even industrial espioniage. And the speed at which they do it is amazing.
It's a bootleg economy. Enjoy it I say!
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
It seems to me very few of you have actually been to China or even understand how the system there works. For the same reason why Europeans think we're a country of hicks driving around in a pickup with shotguns who elected a idiot to office is why you think the Chinese is some sort of omni-present superpower that oversees all of the minute details of its citizens' lives and takes sadistic pleasure in torture. You're taking in media hype and a fear of the unknown. China has its share of problems: freedom of speech and freedom of religion come to mind. These are serious issues that need to be addressed but that doesn't mean everytime you commit a crime in China you will be sent into "reeducation." That also doesn't mean if you use a proxy to surf the web that they're going to break your thumbs. The Chinese government are too busy with the same serious issues that the US is dealing with to be bothered by these minor offenses.
While it may sound like the Chinese police force operate a Gestapo-like regime but that's far from the truth. Believe or not, China has laws and 99% of the time, they are followed. They also have lawyers that will free an innocent man. Some people vision of a totalitarian society governed by "The Party" are just too far fetched. Do they honestly think that the police operate on whatever laws they please and the people live in constant fear? I'll tell you from actually lived in China that it is hardly the case. People are way too reoccupied w/ making money to give a shit. Just remember the same media that is telling you to be afraid of China is the same one that ran the special on 20/20 about the wide-spread dangers of drier lint fires and the world-wide SARS epedemic.
Yep, thought so.
SOCKS Host: Localhost
Port: 8080
So now all connections go Firefox->localhost:8080->[remote-host]->www
All access (e.g. apache logs) will show things coming from [remote-host]. The connection between your localbox and [remote-host] will be encrypted using ssh.
-Jeff
Looks like Def-Con's famous game made it to /. cause I just found him! Great article Agent Smith!
I cant beleave someone would use slashdot to dig up ways to get around the Chinese Web Security, Shame on you!
Don't do it.
I tried to put one over on them once, and it cost me 4 years of my life in the worst rat infested shithole you could possibly imagine.
If the guards don't like you, they beat the crap out of you.
They force a few litres of water down your throght and then bounce you up and down (very painful).
They isolate you from everything. The only thing to keep you company is the rats chewing on your flesh. The only thing you see is a hand that shoves a bowl of food through a little hole in the door, and the rats won't even touch it.
If you survive and get out, you will never have a decent nights sleep again.
Trust me, it's not worth it.
And they change daily. When I was there for a few months last summer, all British news sites (BBC, Guardian, etc.) were blocked. Google groups are blocked. The SF Chronicle would be up and down depending on the day, as would Yahoo news. In general, web access is completely problematic. Earlier posters are correct - unless you are trying to do something to educate the masses, you'll be fine. They aren't after knowledgeable individuals or foreigners, they want to make sure it's not easy to join an emerging movement. Even if they were, it would only result in a bribe unless you were to be made into an example. By the way, China is lovely. The people are very sweet and warm. If you can, learn some Mandarin or Cantonese before you get there.
So sourceforge is banned? No wonder RedFlag Linux is taking so long...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How pretentious and hypocritical.
chances are the answer would be, "censorship? What censorship?"
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
You'll be wondering why 127.0.0.1 is unreachable!
You mean like that Russian cracker who hacked the Adobe e-book format and even had the gaul to come to a conference here and talk about it. And wow did the slashdot community whine.
I was living in central China (Zhengzhou) for 10 months. Chinese people, and the Chinese government are actually really laid back, especially when it comes to foreigners. Unless you are actively trying to incite some kind of social unrest, they will treat you extremely well.
;)
The only thing I ever had accessing on the net was Google's cache.
On the plus side, I paid $7 USD per month for a nearly 2Mbit dsl. Bittorrent all day long without fear of MPAA/RIAA. Maybe you could set up a supernova repacement while you're there?
First, how does anyone know who you really are? You could be gathering info on people here or learning how people circumvent things to bypass controls and tighten the noose harder.
Second, if you are heading that way, would you really jeopardize your own safety by posting to a public forum?
Third, and last, what s the reward for turning in someone who would fink on their peers or try to subvert the country? I could win this one either way! The bottom line, exercise more caution and discretion for your and your family's protection.
Dictatorships are what they are and I have seen many executed because of lesser infractions.
Semper BS-us! He has a wife you know...
lol, this is hilarious
Do not respect the laws of China, as one poster said. As if your government will let China imprison a US citizen on political crimes. Fuck the Chinese. On another note, I was reading John P. Barlow's blog...he was talking about VOIP phone conversations with girls in China. He said he tried out a few Google queries (and websites) you might expect to be blocked by China. He said they were not. I imagine the Great Firewall of China is actually a piece of sh1t, a lot like other goods made in China.
Don't go to China.
Remember the kind in '94 that was caned in Singapore for Chewing Gum (or was it Vandalism..) and President Clinton had to ask the gov't to lesson the penalty....
/." *WHACK*
Caning is real... hope you've got thick pants.
Go ahead and break their laws... you'll be on the 6pm News here in the states... with your pants around your ankles..
*WHACK* "I just wanted to read
I have. It really opened my eyes to the freedoms we enjoy versus the freedoms they enjoy.
I have family in Shanghai (huge city), Xi'an (pretty big city), BaoJi City (Medium-sized city), and a small villiage nearby. I have travelled to all of these places and stayed wih my relatives. As a native-born American, I was thoroughly impressed with the freedom that they enjoy.
Many Chinese never even come in contact with a Policeman. Judges and government officials (my cousin is a Provincial (read: State) Supreme Court Judge, and her husband is a high-ranking government official, BTW) live like common "folk," and people do and say almost anything they want. My nephews all play Counterstrike on-line against their classmates, and they all surf the internet. You have to understand that Chinese people are just not into Pr0n and such things like we (Americans) are. So, for them, not having access to Pr0n just isn't a big deal.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Go see for yourself.
Oh, and the one baby thing is only enforced in the big cities. Again, don't take my word for it. Most of my family in the smaller areas have several children.
One is: http://www.findnot.com ($6.21/mo)
Then you can do whatever you want, and tell the chinese goverment to fuck right off... but don't say that outloud, they might hear you.
infact, disregard this message entirely.. ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
you will have all the freedom you want if you are going to Hong Kong and Mocow. You probably wont go into any trouble unless you are starting a campaign against the Chinese government. By then, you would not have to worry. The local will be angry enough and start their own compaign against you anyway. While some of the people may not have much love to the current government, Chinese, other than Taiwan, are very supportive for a united China. As for China itself, it is relative free nowaday. You can ever talk about politic and religious as long as you are not trying to spread your idea. The problem is the law is much stricter. There may be a time they want to enforce those laws and you will be get into trouble. By the way, do not expect US can get you out. In certain situation, the Chinese are expecting their government to act tough. If you are bringing Bible or such, just bring a copy for your own use. There were people who bought Bible to undergroud church and were put in prsion.
For education purposes, the PRC uses the pinyin romanization system.
I'm not familiar with your spellings of chinese words, maybe they are wade-giles.
Anywho, china is zhong guo, USA is mei guo, England is ying guo, Japan is ri ben(which whimsically can be translated as "fuck one's self"), South Korea is han guo, France is fa guo.
Many of the chinese people i met hold america in high esteem. Thank you, Backstreet Boys.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I can't believe that the poster is serious about moving to China of all places to enjoy more freedoms.
Good luck pleading your "rights" when you get caught reading a website you're not supposed to, or even receiving anything resembling due process.
You may take your freedoms to China, but they will promptly be stripped from you at the door.
What was her crime? He wanted to mail copies of publicly available news articles to her husband residing in the USA. The articles dealt with the plight of women in Chinese society. She is serving an 8 year prison sentence, starting in 2000.
Is anyone angered by this incident? I was infuriated when I received the documents from AI. Visiting China may be "safe" for foreigners, but should we not express our moral outrage by boycotting China and its products?
When I was there in September, SSHing to my shell account worked just fine. Tunnel through that, and you'll be fine.
If you're going to do human rights work there, that it's probably best to do one illegal thing at a time. So, don't look at porn when your issue is Falun Gong. And likewise, don't look at Falun Gong sites if your issue is porn.
If you're just on vacation, consider spending your time seeing the sites rather than surfing the net. It'll be there when you get home.
Ignore all the idiots on this site who tell you to obey unjust laws.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
It is illegal for someone under the age of 18 to surf pr0n in the United States. How many kids go to jail for surfing pr0n? zero.
Just becasue its a law doesn't mean its going to be renforced.
I'm not saying you should break the laws, but you most likely won't be sent jail if you go and surf some potentially dangerous website.
sheesh this is pathetic.
neither slashdot nor sourceforge, nor google, nor yahoo groups, or about HALF the lists or names of sites I've seen are banned or blocked in any way from china. even CNN, etc its all accessable.
I just came back from china after being there for almost a month and I was quite happily surfing these sites from every place I visited, even remote small towns with little internet cafes. everywhere.
the censorship BS is just that, BS. heck, even playboy was accessible... sheesh.
how pathetic. no wonder the US is doing so bad. china will walk right in and scoop up control.
sigh....
Is still remembered and mourned in the US. Tiannamen Square is a "non-event" in China.
And when we're talking on the phone, she won't even let me mention or joke about things like Taiwan independence, Fa Lun Gong, or Tibet. Most Chinese are like this because they know that the phone lines are all listened to, and they don't want to be mistaken for troublemakers.
This is the main reason why China has 1 billion+ people under their control... most Chinese don't want to cause problems and would rather live in the system than defy it.
If you go to China with the intent of breaking rules, and stuff, you will probably be ratted out by a fellow co-worker, and the local cop (of which there are a lot of) will probably be notified.
You probably won't go to jail or tortured or anything like that, but you will most probably lose your computers and be extradited.
This isn't the United States, this is China and you have no rights whatsoever. If you go there with plans of subverting control, your are risking causing some really unnecessary problems for yourself.
To stomp out violent protest, or terrorist acts is fine, every government has to deal with that forcefully.
To silence nonviolent people who simply dissagree with the way things are and argue for change is a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
I'm sure your commie asses are going to claim the USA does the same thing. To prove you wrong I say the following
George Bush has the diplomatic skills of a mentally retarded badger, and His daughers are way hot and I hope they show up in Playboy Magazine!!.
I have every confidence I will still be alive and free tomorrow despite just saying that stuff.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Guess you don't want to ever have more than 1 kid, without state sponsorship, eh? Trying to work around their measures to keep freedoms from happening, can ultimately result in your imprisonment or worse....
You buy a product with known specs (moving to China, you know what you are getting into), you live with it. Laws are laws. There may be no country on the planet where the laws are just, fair, and sensible, but there is sufficient variation that if you can afford migration, you can pick the one most like your ideal. That said, once you get there, expect to be stuck with it until you move again.
If you don't like the rules, play a different game. If you want to change the rules, have a good strategy and don't whine if you get crushed in the process.
In practicality, if you are caught breaking the law, you'll either be deported or treated like anyone else that broke "the rules" (which, by the way, is your responsibility to learn; even in the US where it's illegal to eat peanuts in church in some states). If you are deported. Well, let's just say you better like where you came from, because you won't be leaving there...
+3 Insightful? Have you really READ the post? Or did it only sound good when you "read" it diagonally without thinking? Other replies to the parent (obviously an AC troll) have already pointed out his BS...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Of course, with the right connections you will have the freedom to pirate as many copies of Windows XP as you want - what's there to complain about?
1 297106X/qid=1106863068/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-100 7484-7830549?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
But: Looking a for a good answer to the original question: How easy is it and to what extent are the internet and more generally freedom of press restrictions, evaded in China.
A good analogy is "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/08
which is a book about how and by whom the restictions in Iran are evaded by those who the regime in Iran has tried to crush, and probably by sterner measures than those employed in China.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I'm trying hard not to flame anyone in particular, so bear with me...
I am embarrassed by the majority of the responses to this post. I understand that there will be a few "Chinese prison" jokes as well as a few "follow the rules or go somewhere else" posts, but I think it is sad that nearly every single response to this guy's questions falls along these lines.
It is perfectly legitimate to enquire about ways to circumvent an oppresive government. It's part of the set of freedoms that we should all be demanding, especially if they are not afforded by said government. It's also perfectly legitimate to give such information, FIPO, of course.
It's perfectly depressing to read a bunch of sardonic "best of luck to ya in a Chinese jail" comments. I can only suspect that the vast majority of these are uninformed. How many of these posters can actually speak to the conditions of Chinese prisons or the fairness of the Chinese legal process? I'd wager a lot of them couldn't even have an informed discussion about such conditions in their own countries. What's certainly true is that no one who made such a comment backed it up with any facts whatsoever.
I question the likelyhood that trying to circumvent the so-called Great Firewall is going to get this guy into any real trouble. I could be wrong, but a gorvernment with 1 billion plus citizens would seem to have bigger fish to fry (or at least a million or so eqaully large fish, so what are the odds). He's not asking Slashdot how to use technology to shoplift; he's asking Slashdot how to use technology to read Slashdot.
So, how about we cut the juvenile crap and answer this guy's question?
My other
Rent a virtual server outside China, eg. Germany. You can get those at $10 a month w. eg. Debian. Install Apache with above modules and you're set.
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Wouldn't it be the RED Screen Of Death in China? :-) I hear it's a special localization by MS.
--- Ban humanity.
Any attempt in bypassing the Great Firewall of China will result in sudden cerebral hemorphage induced by a bullet in the back of the head.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
How-To (Score 1)
by SumYungGai (1234567890) on Thursday January 27, @29:78AM (#0000000000)
Hi Solo Han,
you ask an interesting question. It's not always easy to break the law here in China, and most people don't try because there is the danger of severe treatment if you get caught. The government takes this kind of thing very seriously, and has been known to make "examples" of people. Or not, if they just want the person gone. But anyway, how I get my porn and anti-communist news is basically that I use a satellite phone to dial into foreign dial-up services. It's not really fast, but as long as the government doesn't know about my sat phone, it works great.
//end sarcasm
I'm surprised this story even got posted. I mean, come on, even if we were talking about oh say, england instead of china, your asking how to break the law... majorly. Shouldn't this discussion be conducted on IRC in some "dark alley"? More to the point, shouldn't the real topic (if any) have been "W007! China it teh suck! let's laugh at their firewall! h4wh4wh4w... google firewall piercing.." (p.s. I am not 'elite')
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
I suggest that you setup an encrypted VPN with openvpn.net on a host in a (more) free country. And then tunnel one or more IPs to china. You tunnel EVERYTHING, all traffic..
As I got one myself I know it works well. But I got it because my ISP refuses to give me 32 IPs with my own reverse, all ports open. And I dont want them to know what files I xfer over BitTorrent or other P2P.
One that comes to mind immediately is to stay on this side of the firewall.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Of course, considering that she's your ex, you may just be wanting that to happen ;)
The over-rated post it is referring to is misinformed.
I have yet to see a privacy, filtering, large firewall that has been able to prevent "our freedoms" without compromise.
With the advent of so many online anti-privacy resources such as anonymous cloaking (the-cloak.com), tunnelling connections to a another unfiltered location and all the other tricks like masquerading URL's and what have you, I do not believe that the IT literate people of china would be truly prevented from doing as they please.
If i have said it once, i have said it a thousand times - no "protection" can be 100% secure whilst being 100% functional.
I would worry more about physical security from Chinese Forces if you are truly wanting to push the imposed limits.
I somehow didn't expect slashdotters to give up their slashdot that easily. I'd think there are a lot of you who aren't following their own laws to the letter. Copyright laws, for example, and do you all stop for a red traffic light? I'm afraid I've broken quite a few laws. Some because it was more convenient to, others because I simply disagree.
The analogy is flawed though, the risk of being caught for the laws I break is zero. The risks in china seem to be unpredictable , which isn't very promising. But I cannot find any information on how they treat non-chinese. I would expect them to be mild, especially if you're not involved in political activities but reading slashdot. Maybe it's an idea not to encrypt your traffic but use a plain proxyserver. That way they can see you're just accessing slashdot and not organising a coup.
Of course it's nice of you to worry about him doing illigal stuff in a country like China. But I don't understand that there're are no practical answers being modded up. Only the warnings that say he should adapt to the situation there. Everyone here probably objects strongly to the Chinese censorship, but nobody seems to we willing to take the risk to 'protest' against it. The risk might be very real indeed, but then again, I'd bet laws like these aren't quite the same for foreigners. Maybe someone could enlighten us about the risks involved? Are there any example cases?
One easy thing you can do is install this cgi proxy script on some host you know isn't yet banned. Then when you need to surf the web from an internet kiosk or similarly restrictive environment, access all the banned sites by way of that script.
Or in situations where you have full control of the machine, ssh to a known host on the other side of the firewall and do your surfing from there.
I play Nerd-Folk!
China rounds up, beats mourners for deposed leader Zhao Well, aside from getting the crap kicked out of you for mourning a leader that was viewed weak on college students (1989) I'm sure it's lovely...
Ask that guy (Michael something?) who got caned in singapore for vandalism if being an american helped to save his brutalized backside.
hmmmm...How about DAVID DUKE?
This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?
Bear in mind that any breach of the law in China will likely land you in a dingy prison cell for 10 years while they get around to hearing the case, followed by your 10 minute trial (guilty verdict for subversion already stamped and ready to go), and finishing with your 10 years of hard labor in one of their people's work camps. I suggested that you stay here in the United States unless you were born in China and still have family there. I don't know about you, but the only way that I would want to see China is in uniform looking through a gun sight.
Two things come to mind... Firstly, how do we know that this guy isnt some chineese spy looking for the holes in their firewall. Secondly, if your not a spy, then your just to much of a moron to figure that China has probably already blocked this page (or all of slashdot) for this. And I havent even said anything about the punishment someone might get if they told you how to get around the firewall.
"I'm considering a move to China next year..." Wait a minute...is this voluntary? Or forced? Why on God's green earth would anyone want to do that? Don't you see people desperately trying to come in THIS DIRECTION? DUDE, YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TURN AROUND!!!! Seriously, if you know what you are getting yourself into, what makes you think they won't kill you if they catch you trying to get around the law? That's a dangerous thing...hence why you shouldn't go there to begin with...
Chinese markets are great places to get knocked off games, music and DVDs. Even legit music CDs are very cheap in China - I was there in November and picked up some Beatles CDs for $4 each.
As for pr0n - get yourself a nice Chinese girlfriend for chrissakes! You'll probably be seen as an impressive catch...
Have fun!
I was in China recently, and I used GPRS devices (a Blackberry and a P800, but a PC with a GPRS modem would also work) to read external sites. GPRS establishes a GTP tunnel to an "APN" in the home network, so it bypasses intervening firewalls. It would be an expensive way of doing all your Internet access, but if you just want to pick up uncensored news it would be workable. ou would need to find a mobile phone company with a roaming agreement in China - I used Vodafone, but I think most companies would be ok.
If i wasn't so anal i'd say this guy was a spy or working for an intelligencia in China.... if he was that smart he'd already know the answer!!!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
zing
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Is that question being asked by a citizen of a country, which prohibits its citizens from going to certain places (Cuba), or buying items from these places? Same country that imprisons people indefinitely in these same places (Cuba: Guantanamo) without trial, pretending that somehow this place is out of its jurisdiction?
I think it's also the same country that spreads democracy by using it's military force, while being unable to count votes in its own presidential elections...
Careful: propaganda goes hand in hand with restrictions of freedom. Both exist in the US and it is naive to think otherwise. Don't think you're free just because you live in the US.
If you value your freedom as much as you suggest, I'd leave the civil disobedience to the people of China.
Unless you are really trying to make some point, and are willing to risk dealing with the Chinese government, I suggest not circumventing their filters. They don't look too kindly upon people opposing them.
If you're really freaked out about it, run all your web/internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a proxy server outside china's borders, and run your firefox web browser and putty (or whatever you use for ssh) off an encrypted USB drive. Set it up so your history and cookies are also saved to the USB drive instead of on the home folder on your computer.
Unless the information he wants to get to is anti-chinese-government, I don't think they will give him any trouble as he's a foreigner. Most of the information blocked is of this sort anyway.
With that said, trying to circumvent censorship isn't worth the risk. Whenever you're abroad it's a bad idea to engage in criminal activity.
read a history book
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Just as the people have the right to speak their opinions, the president is still one of the people and also enjoys this right.
To stand on
However idiots who do not respect that he shares the same rights try to enter an event uninvited, shout to drown him out, and not leave when asked are violating his rights.
But we are still really tolerant of these people and let go within a few hours.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
If you like browsing around the web for news, you are going to be sadly dissapointed. When I was there, it felt like half of the sites linked by fark or slashdot were blocked.
You are subject to Chinese law (unless you have diplomatic immunity). Show a little respect and common sense, and obey the prevailing laws.
That you're American makes little difference -- in China, you're subject to Chinese law.
Do quite the opposite of a Boycott. Right now the Chinese is caught in a catch-22. They want to maintain their totalirian control over society yet desire more then anything the Almighty Dollar. However, our economy REQUIRES financial freedom. You think those that become millionaires from paupers in China won't demand more and more control over the government? It's Happening but it's happening slowly. I'm personally cautiously optimistic about China. Yet, I woouldn't consider moving anytime soon.
China, OR freedom of information. I'm sorry :(
Sex, drugs and rock and roll. They shoot people for using drugs, and sex can be dangerous as well if it results in pregnancy.
I notice a lot of people are saying to forward all traffic through an ssh tunnel. That's all well and good, and would probably conceal whatever you're doing on the net, but is it legal? I know in some other countries encryption is considered illegal; does anyone know what the legal status of encryption in China is?
I recommend you buy some chinese-made clothing when you get there, to help you blend-in with the local populace. They will instantly overlook your blond hair and 6-foot height, and think you're a long-lost cousin, and invite you to marry their daughter.
... and you just put the sole of your foot on his face (showing the sole of your shoe to someone is a grave insult in Islamic countries).
On a serious note, it's their country, and they're their laws. Obey them or bad things happen, just like anywhere else in the world. You have some limited immunity because you're a westerner, but that only goes so far, so don't push your luck.
A better question to ask would have been: "Does China have any laws or customs that a westerner would inadvertently run afoul of?"
A good example would be one from Turkey: You do not stomp on a rolling coin to prevent it from getting away. You see, it has Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's image on it (founder of modern Turkey), and the law forbids defacing his image
Chip H.
Because your family WAS the law and could flaunt it as they saw fit?
I think this topic would serve that purpose quite well...
or expect to get the beat down if you do. funny all the people talking about china is not "some sort of omni-present superpower". clip from cnn:
0 50 127/wl_afp/chinatiananmenpoliticspetitioners_05012 7114011
They were among some 60 people who pinned white paper flowers to their clothes, a traditional Chinese symbol of mourning, said a bystander who took pictures of the beatings and posted them on overseas websites.
"A man from Henan province was beaten badly. His left eyeball looked like it was beaten out of its socket and he had a one inch cut to his right eye," said the man who requested anonymity.
"An elderly woman from Shandong province was beaten to a point where she couldn't move and a man from Hunan province was also beaten," he said.
Police shouted at the petitioners that Zhao, who spent nearly 16 years under house arrest until his death last week, was a "political criminal," the witness said.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20
It's been many many years since I've been to China. Last time I was there was 1992 and the internet was an unknown thing. But I do have an idea or two. There's pesky filtering software at my college that makes it a pain in the butt to have "freedom." So I set up a webserver off campus and put a proxy on it. If a normal proxy server doesn't work, you can try using a cgi proxy script and access it using https. A cheap solution is spending $100/year on a virtual server. That works for me, but maybe a country of 1 billion people is a bit more sophisticated than a university of 5000 people.
No. They will not demand "more and more control over the government". The best that China will achieve is Singapore's level: brutal government control with limited freedoms.
Nonetheless, people like Rebiya Kadeer need help now. They cannot wait until a-moral scum like the Chinese become rich. Rebiya has already been in prison for 4.5 years. She needs to be released immediately.
Last time I checked, virtually no Chinese attended my local chapter meeting of Amnesty International. That absence says a lot.
If we boycott China, we must also boycott Taiwan. God damn the Taiwanese for investing $100 billion into more than 50,000 businesses in mainland China.
Ah yes, Japan... A bastion of human rights and equality.
Technically Japan is a free democracy. But human rights? Equality? They are given lip service at best.
Don't believe me? Ask the two Kurdish Turks just deported even though the UN had declared them refugees.
Or perhaps the nurse who was denied a promotion because she does not have Japanese citizenship. She was BORN in Japan! She *only* speaks Japanese! Her mother was Japanese, her father Korean, and this is the source of her problem. At the time she was born having a Japanese mother did *not* get you Japanese citizenship. (Having a Japanese father would have though.) So her passport says "Korea", and thus she is denied a promotion. The kicker? This decision was just *upheld* by the Japanese Supreme Court!
Yep, Japan... A bastion of human rights and equality.
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
And put the world out of your misery.
I've never said anything like that on Slashdot before... But, the simple truth is that anyone who believes what you just said is my enemy and the enemy of every human that lives now or ever will live.
Stonewolf
I had a simple solution to all the filtering/monitoring that went on there. I have a colocated server (replace with a linux box on a cable modem if necessary) which I SSH'd to and tunnelled. Although you could port forward anything you wanted, if you run windows you can just use PuTTY. It has a nice feature they call "dynamic" port forwarding. It just sets up a local socks proxy which tunnels through the SSH session. Just set your applications to use it as a proxy...I could use IE, Kazaa, etc. I could get at anything I wanted, and they couldn't snoop.
Remote Desktop.
Where in China are you moving; because if your moving to hong-kong, it's not going to be very different then the most amazingly crowded part of lets say new york, save;
1- it will be more crowded
2- Everyone will speak chinese first, english second
3-The average height will be 5'6"
4-When you board the subway, a man or woman with a large 'gladiator' style prodd will force you into the train during rush hour traffic.
Outside of hong-kong the firewall might be more of an issue; but I woulden't circumvent it if I were you, as other's have pointed out; if you have a fundamental problem with the rights affoarded to you by a country you plan to move to; perhaps you should reconsider the move?
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
He says nothing about the freedom to speak or offer others his opinions or views. Or freedom to express parody. He says nothing about freedom to practice a religion of his choice
This is a technology oriented website. It would be on topic for him to ask what kind of technical issues he'd run into over there, but it would be OFF TOPIC if he asked a question about practicing religion or expressing parody over there.
Mod parent DOWN.
... and you might see people shouting jeers at President Bush, asking how many children he murdered that day.
Clinton got his fair share of "babykiller" rhetoric from the pro-life crowd.
Nixon was FORCED TO RESIGN due to Watergate. When was the last time a communist dictator was forced to resign, in anything other than a bloody coup?
-5, stupid. (The "mod parent up" should go in the TITLE, D'OH!!!)
I've actually never tried it before, but I've read about a tool called triangle boy that utilizes third-party freedom-of-speech advocate servers that allow you to redirect url requests. I recall a company called safeweb develops this tool. I heard about this about three years ago though, so I'm not sure whether it still works.
I thought exactly the same thing. And I am machiavellian when it comes to defense. I read an article by a high ranking "Chinese Guy" (VP or something) denouncing the war in Iraq as folly. The writer has a great deal of polish, and this unseats the harmless intro. Is it cultural or random or clever? I think it is highly proable that it is culture, as most Americans have a not so rounded education. I live here - I can say that. The walk among us.
Stuff that matters.
proxy and or shell = firewall bypassed.
and one such flub I can forgive, but every single time indicates a misunderstanding of proper word usage.
Your is possesive. You're is a contraction of you are. In every case you meant to write you're instead of your. A solution to this problem is to simply avoid use of contractions - use "you are" instead of you're in cases you intend to use you're.
Maybe English is not your first language, maybe you are just having a bad day, but it is a shame to see a mistake like that detract from a well thought out post.
Aw, that sucks... 3 minutes late, and you don't get the extra "Funny" point... c'mon Mods... boost a brother up... he's just as funny, just a little, uh, slow. :)
Well..
;-)
I have a friend who lives in Beijing (married to an American she met there, she is working as some sort of intern for a German company) since 2001 or 2002.
They didn't have problems with the government and have good relations with their neighbours.
Another couple travelled on their own through China for a month,also no problems (in theory, they had to report where they were staying that night, but never did or it was taken care of by the hotels).
They were welcomed everywhere they went, although mostly because of curiosity as they went to some places were they were the only tourists and the first blonde people there
Another friend and his-now-wife lived in China for about one or two years, no problems there (and he is a geek/CS student who wrote his final thesis there, surely used ssh a lot to log into the university network (and for sourceforge access)).
And: they didn't live somewhere in a tourist area,they rented a flat via a Chinese estate agent, they took private language lessions, dance courses, she worked in a hospital (-> interested i skills..) there yaddayadda
Both of them even appeared on TV (gameshow&some sort of propaganda news documentation "the foreigner visits our family");-)
Mind you:
I am well aware about the human rights violations in China, but I am also quite sure that you can lead a normal life there without fear.
Sure, you better don't start demos there or hand out "fuck the system"-flyers, but..
Believe it or not freedom is just like any other natural resources. Its supply is limited. When there are 1.3 billion people who all want the same resource, you have to pay a much higher price for it.
An ex-gf of mine is over there going to school, and I asked her this very question, and she said she hadn't noticed any difference. Now she's not really nerdy or anything, but we talk on AIM sometimes and I've tested it by saying anti-communist things and such, but no secret police have arrested her yet.
Don't lose hope my friend. Persistence will pay off. Keep on saying those anti-communist things and you'll get her arrested yet!
I am NOT a hick, anyway.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A couple of years ago, I couldn't get any of the world's news sites (BBC, CNN, PBS, NBC, etc.), but now you can. However, if one of those sites has an article that the PRC gov finds offensive (human rights, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang), that article will come up empty. Also, good luck finding anything about the abovementioned on other sites. Hint: use Google's "Cached" option to get baned sites. Good luck. It's not as bad as you'd think.
Matthew
Don't go to China unless you can do without your precious freedoms. Only thouroughly anti-social perverts need them.
Well said.
Also keep in mind that when a USA citizen breaks the rules in many countries it is often treated as SPYING, which can make put you in the position of being a pawn in some political game you're completely unaware of. The host country can decide to put on a "show trial" and/or jail you to try and trade you for one of their spies sitting in one of our jails.
There are allot of battles being fought around the World by and against the USA that our citizens are completely unaware of. Example: we have troops in over 100 countries around the World.
Famous last words for many USA citizens when caught doing something wrong on foreign soil are "you can't do this to me I'm an American". Allot of these people are rotting in prisons that make ours look like 5 star hotels.
Do yourself a favor and stay in the USA unless you plan to play by the host country's rules 100%, and to keep your mouth shut about any of those rules you think are wrong.
Stayed in Shanghai for an internship until last October. ... but sometimes they do!
.... didn't see one in Shanghai. Found one in Beijing at a railway station --> take a laptop and get DSL (it's cheap).
Most annyoing thing were mail servers: Have a GMail account, which wasn't accessible most of the time. Same with Google-Groups: Sometimes they just don't work.
This does not happen the whole time though: Most of the time they don't work
Same with my private mail server in Germany.
Didn't have problems with news sites though.
As well: Finding an Internet-Cafe is really, really hard
dont expect to go to someone else's home and expect to be treated like you are in your own
of course man in white house thinks otherwise doesnt he. he says, if they dont embrace our rules, make them embrace our rules. fire up the aircraft carriers!
"When in Rome, do like the Romans"
Not that it's legal, but a VPN is about your only foolproof way of doing so.
The other option is just live with it.
Or...
go with offline methods:
Have a buddy in the US send you a CD-R of pr0n every month. Or video about how to make a car bomb... or whatever else gets you off.
There not going through your mail.
Other than that, I'd say respect the law. If you don't like their laws, don't visit them.
"When in Rome, do like the Romans"
Witness our current shining success in Iraq.
There are very few things you can shove down a person's throat without making them angry. You might gratefully accept chocolate if I offered it to you, but I bet you'd struggle like mad if I tried to shove it down your throat.
The analogy goes farther than you expect.
Some good info from eformo. The comment deserves better than a score of one.
Btw, is anyone else annoyed by the flippant tone of the question?
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
, wanting to figure out how people bypass the firewall, this is exactly what I'd post on /.
I'd also be asking on Usenet and IRC channels.
In all the years that I have been coming here (yeah, anonymously), this is by far the most intelligent discussion I have read. Thank you.
If you have a dog, I'd leave it for adoption. There are a lot of hungry people over there in China.
It shouldn't be too hard to set up your own tunnelling server at a home computer, or have a friend do it. It would actually be a very interesting project to develope some sort of P2P proxy server system, one that was so massively distributed it couldn't be shut down without shutting down the web entirely. What does the rest of /. think?
"This brings me to my overall question: is the censorship that real, that hard to get around, and how do you do it? What methods and technologies are you aware of or use to circumvent the Great Firewall of China?"
Is it? Sounds like: hi, I work for Cisco (don't they do the Great Firewall?) or the Chinese government. "Will you show me how it gets circumvented so I can (a) arrest people and (b) block those holes."
According to this backgrounder, it seems like China lives up to the hype: http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific /bg1806.cfm
BTW, whatever happened to TriangleBoy? And how is it different from Tor or Peek a Booty or Anonymizer?
Here's the link: http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific /bg1806.cfm
I would slightly disagree; I would characterize "agreement" as a class of things that can almost never be successfully forced on a person.
To see this, consider the thousands of examples Slashdot serves up for our enjoyment: flame wars.
How often does insulting and berating someone elicit their agreement on the topic of discussion? Pretty damn rarely. How often does polite and inoffensive language cause a person to say "good point" or give some other indication of agreement? Less often than it should, but still vastly more often than flaming.
Consider how much less likely you'd be to agree---and not just to placate him---with someone flaming you if he gunned down your child halfway through his flame. How positively do you think you'd receive his arguments then?
You can't use force to make someone to adopt your beliefs and values; the most you're likely to accomplish is the opposite. Sadly, those who realize this are rarely those who try it.
"How can I circumvent the laws of the country where I'll be living?" If you do, and if you're caught (and you're likely to be -- surveillance is widespread) you will pay a penalty. The Peoples' Republic does as it will, and impassioned pleas from your embassy might keep you from hard labor in the Chinese version of a gulag, but they probably wouldn't keep you from a period of re-education inside a Chinese jail cell before you're kicked out of the country as a persona non grata.
On the other hand, if you don't feel you are entitled to special privileges, and obey the same laws as the locals you'll probably get along swimmingly.
I won't make any guesses in regards to your nationality, but when you're traveling abroad, you do *not* take the laws of your country with you. For your information the laws of the country you are visiting supercede those of your country of citizenship. If you go on a spree, there's nothing to keep you from being tried twice for your crimes, once in the Peoples' Republic and again in your home country.
My advice, if you're already planning on breaking the law, don't go.
-Joe G.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Democracy is a basic right for all human beings? Human rights are a basic right?
Why? Because the UN said so? If we actually hold these rights sacred we should start actually enforcing them here, in our country, before we go out and try to tell others what to do, or force them to do things.
Human rights are violated in prisons and by our government every day, we are condemned by Amnesty international, just as China is condemned, we were founded by violating the natural rights of the native peoples. Democracy? We don't have democracy for the people in Wash DC... we don't have democracy in general, we are governed by tyrants, who care for the corporations, not the people.
Freedom? Tell a man in jail for planting a seed that he is free, tell that to those who wish to merely go from one place to another and are harassed or stopped at roadblocks and sometimes beaten by the police.
Equality? A rich man is more equal than any poor man, a white man is more equal than a black woman, the disparity between salaries for the genders is far from equal...
How long have we been this great and free nation? How long has it been since black and white men were gunned down, lynched, burned, for trying to be free?
We are a great and free nation, maybe more so than all others, but you seem to be deluded into thinking that we have found the one true answer, and that we can tell everyone else to fuck off and get with the program.
China has been around for thousands of years... I wonder if it is such an evil thing for a nation to be held together at the expense of a few rights that we in this nation have been propagandized into thinking are as important as the air we breathe.
Ultimately China lives, it survives, people will live, die, be governed, and be happy in China. Babies will be born and our race will live on. Certainly it would satisfy our moral indignation if they were more like us, but they are not like us... they live their own way for now, a tree who's roots are confined can still branch out into the sky like any other tree.
Good luck in your endeavour. Despite what some of the idiots here on Slashdot are ranting about, China is much more free and open then the media here has led you to believe. You would be fine as long as you don't do something serious such as injuring/killing another person, at which point you will probably be deported.
HOWEVER, China cracks down on illegal drugs really hard. Chinese citizen who traffic drugs get executed when caught. I doubt they do the samething to foreigners but you can expect hard jail time. So just don't do it!
As long as you don't want more than one child- go for it......
Seriously, senõr retardo, nothing's going to make your network activity stand out more than encrypting it. Do you really think that if the Chinese government is intent on securing internet access, that they'll just ignore non-HTTP traffic? What this situation call for is steganography .
You see that brine there? That's my brine.
Today. Blame the boogieman media if you want. I can't imagine being beaten or imprisoned for visiting the Clinton Library here in America. The PARTY decides who you may or may not revere. Beating is an effective method of "reeducation".
I have to say that every time I've been back to China, I've encountered absolutely nothing in terms of enforcement of laws regarding security, information, freedom, religion, porn, blah blah blah. The real problem is the latency of the connection from China to the US. It is absolutely horrible.
I was recently in Shanghai visiting family and took a lot of photos and would upload them to Flickr through the Flickr Uploader software. Typically, I would have to try 3 or 4 times to get them uploaded because the connection would keep timing out. Same thing for accessing my bank account, my credit card, and so on. Incredibly slow because of the latency even though I was on a 1.5Mbps/256Kbps DSL line. I also had no trouble getting to major US newspapers like the NYTimes and CNN, and no trouble getting to porn sites in the US. Mind you, this is all on a connection provided by, and available only through China Telecom, a corporation that is state-owned and operated (They own and operate all phone communications in China I believe).
So for those people who are moving to US and are deathly afraid of loss of such freedoms, don't be, as others have said, as long as you're not trying to raise a ruckus, no one's gonna give a damn. Though being guarded about your opinions in front of people in high positions of power maybe a worthwhile tactic. I would guarantee you, in most places, people will eye your skin color and then think about how to make money off of you first before they worry about if you're gonna try to spread the evils of western-style thinking. What you should be most concerned about is the difference in manner and attitudes of Chinese people.
help a poor college grad get a free Mac Mini
Following RFC 3514. That way, all your traffic will look like government traffic.
Assuming you're on a Linux machine, do PPP over SSH. Plenty of people will say it's slow, but I've been using it very successfully for several months on high speed connections (> 2Mb/s). The only time I've had problems is when the connection goes down, but hey, that's the problem. :)
:)
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/etc/ppp/options on either the server or the client.
;
/dev/pty$d\n";
/sbin/route delete $localip"; /usr/sbin/pppd passive\"";
/dev/tty$d defaultroute local proxyarp ktune";
I found this script somewhere on the 'net, and made adjustments. It's not perfect, but it works for me, so I have no grand plans for making more changes.
You'll need to have SSH keys set up between where you are, and a server on a 'friendly' network. This will route *ALL* of your traffic, over SSH, through the remote host. Nothing you do will be seen. It'll all be encrypted SSH traffic. I use a different port for SSH, so it's not even recognized as SSH traffic. For all they know, it could be music streaming or something.
--- begin rc.firewall (for the server)
#!/bin/tcsh
# not all of this is necessary. Play with it a bit.
#!/bin/tcsh
# A simple rc.firewall to start NAT.
echo 1 >
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -F INPUT
iptables -F OUTPUT
iptables -F FORWARD
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp+ -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
--- end rc.firewall
--- begin ppptunnel.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# there should be no
#
$localip="1.2.3.4"; # first ip on net
$localmask="255.255.255.0"; # 16 ips
$remoteip="1.2.3.5"; # other end of link
$ssh="/usr/bin/ssh";
$pppd="/usr/sbin/pppd"
$sshuser="my_vpn_user"; # The remote user, who has SSH keys set up.
$sshhost="1.2.3.4";
foreach $maj ("p".."s") { # adjust this to the ptys you have
foreach $min ("0".."9", "a".."f") {
print "Trying $maj$min\n";
&tryopen("$maj$min");
}
}
die "Couldn't alloc pty\n";
sub tryopen
{
local($d)=@_;
if (open(PTY, "+>/dev/pty$d")) {
print "Opened
$pid=fork;
defined($pid) || die "can't fork";
if ($pid) { #parent
print "Parent...\n";
open(STDIN, "<&PTY") || die "reopen stdin";
open(STDOUT, ">&PTY") || die "reopen stout";
close PTY;
print STDERR "running on tty$d; ssh=$$, pppd=$pid\n";
#system $ssh, "-vt", "-l$sshuser", "vpn", "sudo
#-f -x -t
$c = "$ssh -tx -l$sshuser $sshhost \"sudo
print STDERR "Executing $c\n";
exec "$c";
die "exec $ssh: $!";
} else { #child
print "Child...\n";
close PTY;
sleep 5;
print "Modifying routes\n";
$old_def_route = `route -n | grep ^0.0.0.0 | cut -c 17- | cut -f 1 -d ' '`;
chop ($old_def_route);
$c = "route add -host $sshhost gw $old_def_route";
print "Route: $c\n";
system("$c");
$c = "route del default gw $old_def_route";
print "Route: $c\n";
system("$c");
print "starting pppd\n";
$c = "$pppd
# exec $pppd, "/dev/tty$d", "defaultroute", "local", "debug", \
# "netmask", "$localmask", "$localip:$remoteip";
exec "$c";
die "exec $pppd: $!";
}
}
}
print "Switching default route back to it's original\n";
$c = "route add default gw $old_def_route netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1";
system("$c");
--- end ppptunnel.pl
If the link comes up, you'll see a ppp0 device on your machine (not the server). Do some traceroutes to verify you
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I lived for a year in china in 2003, the only sites I ever had a problem accessing were bbc news, and googles cache. Also, anonymizing proxy sites such as megaproxy are all blocked. Using any other proxy won't work either. Still had no problems with any american news sites, any pr0n or anything else. China's quite a cool place to live if you're a foreigner, but the authorities don't like you talking about sex, religion or politics, which is kind of difficult really. Still, I'd highly recommend going, it's a completely different lifestyle. And unless you're going to Beijing or Shanghai, you'll probably have to get used to being stared at.
It's hard to defend morally, and it's hard to stomache, but forcing people out from the yoke of a tyrant doesn't work - the best you can do is convince them that they want to get out from under that yoke.
Dont listen to what half the the anti-communist conservatives and media say about China. Yes its true human rights are trampled when in the states interest...BUT and that was a big but for a reason, the Chinese have a totally different attitude about policing their citizens than American police. As a criminal justice instructor I am very interested in these difference.
In china the situation is much different, their saying is "its only illegal if you get caught" Which has a deeper meaning than many understand...many times the police are not looking to arrest people for petty matters, they are more interested in social order...or as they refer to it "harmony". However this cultural view of harmony represents tome things we consider unpleasant. But the upshot is that unless the government is interested at that point in time in cracking down on something...it is usually just ignored...for example it is illegal to manufacture or distribute bootleg cds and dvds, but when my girlfriend and her family were in china right when you get off the bus...and the government doesnt care. Many people go to banned websites, download illegal things, hell half the banned games in china can be bought off a store shelf! The point is remember when those cybercafes got busted, that was a crackdown. Chinese policing usually let things go for a while then crackdown to show it is illegal...then let it go again...remember they have limited resources and are more interested in maintaining their fragile power structure than concerning themselves with if your watching porn...which you can totally get in china, easily..as well as hookers but both technically illegal.
That wouldnt happen in america,
In many ways american police are much more facist than chinese police, in that if you are breaking a rule they will arrest you. If it were illegal to sell pornography in america, no stores sell it..but it is illegal in china but still sold out in the open in many places..DWI check points are a perfect example...people who are over an arbirtrary legal limit but still in control of their vehicles get the same punishment as those who are swerving all over the road because they cant handle their liquor. This over emphasis on enforcing every rule is due a great deal to the colletion of fines, which police departments in America use to fund themselves...ever notice why they go after drug dealer so aggressivley but if you aparment gets burglarized they dont even dust for prints?
it is NOT "insightful" to say that "news sites are forbidden" in China.
its just plain false.
and stupid.
Take nothing: Assume nothing, go naked, go native - make sure you learn to speak and write Chinese too
well my advice is short and sweet. A little expensive though. Get your own dedicated server here in the good old USA. Install PPP tunneling on it. This is easy. Make sure it goes through an SSH tunnel. Set that up as a NAT server. Then mess with your routing tables a little. Once you do that you can connect to the internet through you American gateway. Cool, eh? The alternate route. Uses less bandwidth but you can only use it with Apps that have proxy compatibility. Get your good ol' 100% Americano servero running linux up. It has to have SSHD and Squid. Make a tunnel from localhost to squid on the remote server. Just use localhost as the proxy. AES-768 is the encryption i reccomend. The last route is get a computer here. VNC into it over an SSH tunnel. TightVNC has this nice-nifty feature built it. Wanna hear from you soon. Get that wiki up and running now!
Chinese DNS servers do not respond with IPs of dynamically addressed websites (dyndns.org, and the like). However, while I was living in China, I found that I had no problem tunneling through a private proxy back here in the US.
You will be fine in China and will be treated much better than any local would. The biggest form of censorship on the net is directed at groups the Gov't views as "anti China".
They are still persecuting, torturing and killing innocent people. The most severely being Falun Gong practitioners who have been persecuted since 1999 for following the principles of Truth, Compassion and Tolerance.
Sometimes pictures speak louder than words. Below are links to pictures of Falun Dafa practitioners that have been beaten, raped, shocked with electrical batons, etc.
Warning: Most of the pictures are graphic
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/hosp30jul01_4_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/2002-7-23-11.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/more/images/wang_bin_torture_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/11810_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/chao_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/torture3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/m2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_3_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/lixin_foot290401_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/helene26nov01_2_big.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/torture/images/2003-1-2-songxu.jpg
http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_ evidence/evil_scene/images/2002-7-11-violent-polic e-2.jpg
For more information on Falun Dafa I recommend: www.falundafa.org.
For more information on the persecution, I recommend: www.faluninfo.net.
For more information about the lawsuits filed, by Falun Dafa practitioners around the world, against the perpetrators of this persecution, I recommend:
http://www.bjtj.org/
http://www.grand trial.org/
Th
I was in China this summer; my i-net connections couldn't resolve www.muohio.edu to 134.53.7.10 but if you typed in 134.53.7.10 it would bring up the page. So I happened to remember our pair of DNS servers were 134.53.253.1 and .5 and just edited my tcp/ip settings - it works to get to every site, including www.ChinaIsABunchOfPinkoCommiesAndLookHowThatFucke dRussiaDemocracy IsSoMuchBetterChinaDie.com.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
That list is woefully misleading. Yeah, the censorship in China is amazing and its wrong, but the sheer length of that list (25,064 URLs when I checked) tells you something about Chinese censorship. But the list is padded with many duplications.
:) Playboy variations are duplicated over 700 times. Amnesty International, over 200 times. CNN almost 500. The list goes on and on, literally :)
I quickly came up with 7,375 unique URLs, not counting things like variations in case.
Google along is duplicated over 5,000 times
RP
Chemical weapons include such nasties as Mustard Gas, VX, and other blood and nerve agents.
Also, I doubt very seriously that Iraq approached us, and said "Hey, we'd like to make some biological weapons so we can really stick it to the Iranians, with whom we are at war. Waddya say?"
The CDC wouldn't have been involved if the request wasn't made under the guise of medical research. If we hadn't provided it, they could have gotten it from any number of other sources.
I'm not saying we never sold them chemical weapons, or the makings thereof... Just that these aren't them.
Not everything is as sinister as you think it is.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
www.georgewbush.com it nice know befor he invade and start killing chinee
*DISCLAIMER* I am not a historian, but a few things bother me about this post since I tend to study this time frame.
We could have dominated the world, and who would have opposed us?
Quite a few people. I agree the America was most generous and possibly the most moral country that once ever existed (until maybe the 21st century), but...
The peasantry of China?
They opposed 2 million Japanese troops since 1927 with nothing but militias. The Chinese handed us our rears in Korean War
The decimated demoralized Soviets?
Stalin dictated the post war terms directly through Molotov to the Allies. The Allies agreed to every term! The Soviets had almost 10,000,000 troops in the field with more factories and tanks than us to boot and millions of readily available free slave labor (German Pow's, Ukranian Freedom Fighters, and Russian dissidents in gulags... not to mention the Soviet People themselves). The Red Army was inefficient, but it was far from being defeated. They would scoff at the poor quality of US tanks that the Americans sent them as aid and nick named them coffins compared to super IS-2 tanks that could knock out Tiger tanks with ease much less a thinly armored Sherman tank. He mostly lacked a Navy and Atomic bombs. Had he not died in 53, it was speculated he was gearing up for a war with the US.
Once the Soviets had the bomb in 1947, America did not have that option to dominate the world even if they wanted to. That's only two years. Mind you that General MacArthur bemoaned on the state of the military by the Korean War.
Great as America was, it's military might was not really as great then as it was and is since the 1970's as it was tested in the Vietnam war. Of course the prevailing thought at the time was that there was no need for a standing army since the US could defend itself with the Bomb.
Not to say America has great freedoms, but neither was it a lone super power until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
However China is slowly catching up...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
These are the Americans who voted for Bush, who can't see the problems with the Patriot Act or the war on Iraq,
Bush or Kerry or Clinton or Gore or whoever...it's not the nature of a candidate or party to erode freedoms. It's the nature of government to erode freedoms. It's been this way since the dawn of history.
Whoever we elect may be great for a year or so...but give 'em time. This really isn't a partisan or politicial issue.
IMHO, once we got addicted to the 'free' cash of entitlements, we pretty much ensured that people would be too distracted to care about freedom. Americans these days don't think about free-DOM as much as 'free' prescription medicine, 'free' retirement, 'free' education....etc. Don't believe me? Compare the upcoming brouhaha over social security to the debate over patriot act renewal. See which one people care about more.
You actually can have freedom shoved down your throat, it just takes a whole hell of a lot more force then the US is willing to use these days. Case in point, look at Germany and Japan. These are both nations that were occupied by the US and now are thriving democracies.
For better or for worse, no one can stomach the formula that seemed to work so well on those nations. The real problem is that the first step in making both of those nations was to completely destroy them and blatently target the civilian populace. IE, wage total war on them and win. Whatever Iraq is, it is not an example of total war.
So, to keep going with the analogy, you might not like it if I shove chocolate down your throat, but you probably won't complain if I first beat the living piss out of you. After the beating you might decide that didn't like the beating, but the chocolate sure was yummie.
There is only one place in China that you enjoy the freedoms that your looking for -- Hong Kong.
Macau?
Taiwan?
I have just seen the mythical +6 sword of Insightfulness tear through a troll like a sharpened chainsaw through a sassafras sapling.
+5 should not describe this post.
If your the mosad and a killer for the israeli secret police, then you can do what you like, brake the law, murder people and flee the country on fake passports and live like 007 but on the bad side.
Yes its true , the mosad has in the past killed innocents in Europe and often get away with it, though sometimes through thoughtlessness get caught but do little time.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You can in fact joke about killing the President
Actually, you can't joke about anything.
For example:
two Brazilian surfers were arrested in Miami's International Airport under terrorist charges. Mizael Cabral, born in Paraíba, and Daniel Correia, from Rio de Janeiro, spent a good amount of time in Uncle Sam's land working hard to save money so that they could start a surf board factory in João Pessoa. They bought as suction pump here that would make their job a lot easier, but something really weird happened in the airport while they were going back to Brazil. According to the American authorities, they were joking about having that suction pump (pump and bomb are the same word in brazilian portuguese). The man from Paraíba supposedly asked the inspector in the airport: "Haven' you found the bomb in the bag yet?" And the one from Rio would've said: "If you open up my bag, it will explode". In cuffs, the two men were taken to Miami's Jail under the charges of "false information about explosives, with malicious intentions, irresponsibility and disregard for the human lives safety". They can be sentenced up to five years in prison and they will have to pay US$ 250 thousand dollars each. They have been in jail for almost a month and the press has no access to them.
They are now back in Brazil, after plead guilty of terrorism! Deported.
There is no presumption of innocence. There is no right to appeal.
You got that right!
I shot the sheriff
He's a Narc. Well, a Chinese Narc. You get the idea.
Speaking as a Mac OS X programmer who really wants one, but does not expect HP and Verbatim to port to OS X right away, my question is: Do HP and Verbatim tell me what I need to program this thing?
/.ed.
Are there published specifications? Like the communications protocol between the drive and the driver, or between the driver and the application?
Sorry if this is answered in TFA, I could not R becaused it is
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
... a meeting is being held about a new threat to the Chinese government. Not much is known about this person, but we do know his name.. Coward, Anonymous Coward.
Live web cams
To drive drunk in China, just do the same as you would in the States. Turn off your headlights so that the cops won't see you.
Vandalizing and defacing cars.
By and large they don't see that having a controlling government is a problem, because it makes the right decisions. That's the thought process. She had never seen that image of the student in front of the tank in Tiananmen square. Never. And she was happy they didn't show it in China, because it could reduce the stability of the country.
When you can understand and respect that reasoning without trying to change it, then you are ready to go into that culture.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Because we have never "stuffed freedom down people's throats." People naturally desire to be free. It's part of being human. The only thing standing in their way is tyrants and oppression.
What did we do to make Japan free? We removed the tyrants (the military culture) and removed the oppression of women.
The same thing needs to happen in China, one way or another. Those people who wield power abusively need to be removed from their positions. Those cultural elements that oppress need to be discarded. From there, freedom will flourish, just as it has everyway else.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
All of these are basic rights for all human beings.
That has been wishful thinking of the western countries since 1945. While many countries have made impressive advancements in the development of west-compatible institutions and economies, this doesn't necessarily mean they adopted our cultural and moral values too.
Formal acceptance of the UN's human rights charter is necessary to participate in the "civilized world", but there's no need to actually implement and enforce them.
Heck, even the U.S. violate human rights on a daily basis.
Your presence there will help prop up the existing repressive regime.
Instead, stay here and work to ensure that our own government doesn't become that repressive, or worse. They're well on their way and it's going to take a lot of effort to stop them. Making a buck or having an interesting cultural experience in China just isn't as important.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Sourceforge is on the list? But... but... Bill Gates told me that open source is communism. How can China be against communism?
Thank you for saying that; saved me a reply :)
Yes, respect or the place or don't go there. Whatever you think of their laws, they have them for a reason, and they're trying to build a good society, just like most other countries. What's more, they're trying to maintain values that have served them well for over an order of magnitude longer than the US has even existed for, and they just might be onto something, considering that the US has recently been pronounced one of the most unhappy societies on earth.
> the nations of the world combined could not match our power.
Got a cite for that?
I'm not necessarily disputing anything you're claiming; however, neither is it at all clear that what you've said is actually true. In particular...
> There were no limits to the power we could project.
I think you're underestimating the remaining power of the other industrialized nations at the end of WWII. Even by D-Day, Britain had enough military might remaining to take responsibility for as much of the assault as the USA.
If you look at this link, for example, you'll see that while the USA was well-supplied with equipment, it was severely undermanned for dreams of world conquest. At the end of the war, there were about 1100 divisions available to the countries most involved, of which less than 10% were American. Moreover, this link suggests that the USA didn't enjoy such a dominant position in equipment after all; for example, the USSR was producing more tanks than the US by the end of the war.
Given the numbers and logistics involved, your assertion of the manifest ability of the USA to "roll over" the rest of the world seems...optimistic.
The peasantry of China?
They opposed 2 million Japanese troops since 1927 with nothing but militias.
Seems like you forgot about the Rape of Nanjing
Also, keep in mind that "opposed" simply means they fought them. Those living in Tibet "opposed" the Chinese military, for about 20 minutes...
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
This project could use some of the more excellent networking /. hackers.
n am e=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1
1 .php3
(I'm definitely out of my league here)
Wanna be really elite? Code for a cause that might just be your own quite soon.
http://www.peek-a-booty.org/pbhtml/modules.php?
Ref:
http://www.cultdeadcow.com/archives/00087
~hylas
I think it's important to note that China's government uses the censoring and the punishment of circumventing that censoring for different goals.
By censoring they try to keep the masses uninformed. Currently a bunch of websites is blocked and search engines are limited in their results. These messures can be avoided, but most users dont know how.
Cracks in the Great Firewall
Probing Chinese search engine filtering
In the punishing of circumventing these messures however, the government has simply found another excuse to put people who they don't like in jail. The people actualy being prosecuted for and convicted of these "crimes" are either members of the Falun Gong or the China Democracy Party.
List of People Detained for Internet-related Offences in China
With a bit of effort, you could probably enjoy everything the internet has to offer, logging in from China. And probably nothing will ever happen as a result. But when the authorities decide they don't like you they are going to hold it against you. Current sentences range upto 12 years or "unknown", while even capital punishment is a possibility.
would be carrying a rifle and fighting as part of an army to liberate the country from the bunch of gangsters currently running it.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
ABC, is that like.. OPP?!
(I'm a cracker)
I call bullshit on your statement about dropping tha tomic bomb on Japan
Pot. Kettle. Black. Things are far more complicated than you realize. You are as simplistic and misinformed as those you criticize. You only differ from them in terms of politics.
Japan had already attempted to surrender to Moscow weeks before Hiroshima
You seriously misrepresent things. Imperial Japan made an unofficial attempt to make peace with Russia. That was not a surrender to the Allies, it was an attempt to split the Allies, they were willing to continue fighting the US(1) but did not want the Russians to join in. Large segments of the government were not aware of the "feelers" to Russia, the military was not aware. The military would have instantly shot as a traitor anyone involved had they known. Hell, parts of the military staged a coup to prevent the Emporer's surrender orders from being broadcast. They wanted to separate the emporer from the "traitors and cowards" who were "deceiving" him. And that was after two atomic bombs(2).
the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the greatest massacres in the history of the world
Actually conventional bombings from World War II inflicted greater casualties than the atomic bombings. Read up on Dresden for example. While you are at it read up on Nanking.
(1) Imperial Japan was willing to continue fighting the US in part because they were preparing both nuclear and biological attacks on the US. The had conducted extensive biological warfare research on Chinese prisoners, conducted field trial on Chinese villages, and were preparing to deliver biological agents to the US homeland via balloons and submarine launched aircraft. Perparations were also underway to deliver radiological material to the US homeland.
(2) I've seen Imperial Japanese Army training films showing soldiers training while covered in white sheets. The sheets were an attempt to reduce casualties from the flash of an atomic bomb.
No matter what the topic, it can always be turned into an Iraq bitchfest.
1s /\cc355 to 1nt3rn3t. M05t 0f t1m3 w3 c4n 5urf 4nd m4ny m4ny p3op13 th1|\/k w3 411 s3nD sp4m, but it 15 s1mply ju5t b1g li3.
cl1ck bel0w to f1nd out h0w b1g B1g it Is.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm writing this way too late to get modded high enough for anyone to see but maybe someone will see it and it'll help. The irony is that I'm so late in posting as I'm in China and just woke up this morning.
I was here briefly last summer and am now doing a semester abroad. China really is not that a bad of a place to be. It seems most of the replies are very negative or sarcastic about the security situation in China. In all seriousness, living here as a foreigner is not that bad. Sure you have to deal with weird, to the US, government regulations, but I don't feel as though I'm under an iron fist or anything. Just respect the culture and their customs/laws and you will have a great time.
Oh and if you take the time to learn even a bit of the language it can help immensely. I know I've run into many people who were much more cordial when I told them (in Chinese) that I was a student here learning the language.
Everyone has different experiences, especially if you are ABC or even look remotely Chinese. But instead of listening to a bunch of other people talk about it, just take a 2 week trip to China and see for yourself. I think more Americans need to get out and see the realities of the world (although my cynicism says that when the they do the average Americans will do something stupid, get into trouble, and then blame it not on themselves but on the country they are in)
They'll end up shooting you and sending the bill for the bullets to your parents. Don't go, don't fuck with draconian extremist nut case governments.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Better to ask while outside of the great wall of Amerika.
Remember, 9 year olds are prosecuted as terrorists for stick figure drawings now.
Hail Bush!
Hail the great Republican party
Hail the skull and bones club; AKA Deaths Head Nazi party.
Yeah, I hope I am really anonomous!
But it is true...
Democracy is not a basic right, but thank you for spelling compatible wrong over and over.
Democracy is a form of government, not a right.
Please don't think it's the "right" of other countries to give the "right" of democracy and freedom to other countries. Because we all know you don't give freedom by dropping bombs.
[cx]
You may also want to make sure you can take the money you earned in china with you when you decide to leave.
People of the west enjoy their current lot in life because at some point in their histories, they threw off the yoke of tyranny. Nobody gave it to them. They had to take it.
The people of oppressed cultures have to take some responsibility in securing their own futures.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Oops, forgot one comment ...
I doubt that popular opinion will ever coincide with this until all the WWII vets are dead and gone.
Again, things are not as simple as you believe. As time passes we learn that Imperial Japan's crimes are greater than originally believed. For example the biological research conducted on Chinese civilians. That only became common knowledge, well in the US, relatively recently. It was classified for many years because the US government made a deal with the Imperial Japanese war criminals who conducted the research. We traded their freedom for their knowledge. Their notes and other materials advanced our bio warfare program a decade or more. The Imperial Japanese researchers who used Chinese civilians as lab rats, actually I think they referred to them in reports as "logs", were free to pursue their normal lives after the war and become leaders in Japanese politics, medicine, and business.
IS SLOW!!! Besides that things aren't that bad, and I guess I've heard that some fast connections can be had, but where I'm sitting at (Guilin-southern China), things aint that fast. Pretty much like dial-up most of the time, no matter how fast the internet company says you're connection is.
:)
The government doesn't allow you access to certain pages, it's true. Some news sites (BBC, CNN, Google News are ones that come to mind that I've had problems with). YOu know, also, don't be looking around for stuff about falong gong, or tianan men, as you're probably not gonna find it. Various web-pages, it seems often ones that Google hasn't picked up yet, also can't be had often.
I've found the very easy and simple solution is to use proxy servers. Using them I haven't had any problem whatsoever getting pages that I wanted to look at. The times this is harder are when you're travelling and have to use some windoze machine and can't find the proxy settings as everything's in Chinese
Besides that, enjoy it here if you come. Despite what some people began to talk about (I only read the very first few replies), there is little to no problems to be had with the government on the whole in any way whatsoever. Just don't get to spreading religion or democracy and you're fine (and don't worry, youre general Chinamen is a capitalist through and through). I'm suspecting some of the other problems (shipping the knife in the mail is one I read) are due more to the fact that there are communication issues. Those kinds of things are possible to do in China. THey just need to be slowly talked out.
Best of luck.
The "Rights of Man" are a culturally defined idea.
Bullshit. Human rights are absolute and universal.
Any culture that doesn't respect them is evil and inferior, and the sooner said culture is changed or replaced, the better.
Gah...I hate moral relativists.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I've lived there and seen it for myself.
/. :-) )
I lived for 4 months in Baoji and then for 2.5 years in Shanghai. My girlfriend lived for 2 years in Baoji working in University and Middle Schools and for 6 months in Beijing. So, I've seen and experienced probably more than you.
Living in China made me realize how much freedom we have in the west. Yes, many people speak quite openly about what they dislike. As do most people still believe Mao was the greatest person on earth (put some "70% good, 30% bad" in it to water it a bit down). But you realize how much freedom is missing when people criticize the government and keep looking over their shoulders if no strangers are listening. Can you imagine bashing Bush in Central Park in New York or bashing Blair in London and worrying that someone might hear it and get you into trouble? Privately and with foreigners they don't risk too much by being honest.
The worst thing about China in my experience is the utterly useless and terrible media (because of the extreme censorship) and the non-existing legal system. So, theoretically many people have rights. But when a street with its buildings gets completely destroyed outside the university (as happened in Baoji) to make room for a wider road, then theoretically all the shop owners and restaurant owners get compensated for losing their main source of income. But they don't and they don't even think about going to court because it's useless.
It's true about the police, but only because the police actually has little rights. The communist party is the ruler and they take care of things. But aside from that Chinese are in most cases very decent people (much more than in the west) because of peer pressure to not lose face for the family and other reasons.
Go there for a longer period of time and you'll see what the real deal is. Most people only go for some weeks or months and haven't even scratched the surface. The Chinese people are very good at making you believe things are great and only later you find out that things actually aren't great.
(Not often that I see the precious chicken (Baoji) mentioned on
According to British detainees held with Mr Habib and since released, "one of the prostitutes stood over him naked while he was strapped to the floor and menstruated on him".
Wow, that is truly brutal. How is the guys still alive? Personally, I don't think I could have taken that for more than, say several minutes before breaking. And that bit about pigs heads being put on the photos of his kids...SHOCKING!
If this is what the most dangerous Muslims in the world are made of, I'm glad I have George Jr. to protect me....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Taiwanese investing in China... hmm... seems to me that the best way to control something is to own it right? It would seem that the Taiwanese may have realized that boycotting one of the largest producing countries in the world is a bit ineffective.
I'd also suggest that tack for all the people who don't like a business' practices in other countries. If the Southern Baptists in the US had all bought Disney stock years ago, there would only be Southern Baptist T.V. shows now (the buying power of the largest (depending on how you count it) religious group in the US is rather great), but instead they dumped all their stock, stopped buying Disney toys and movies and quit watching ABC.
Solo Han writes: ...pr0n...
Suitable nickname you have...
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Spent a year and a half in China from '96-98. Loved it been back many times. Accessed pretty much anything I wanted through public web access. Even played online games though they lagged a bit. Now i understand they are rolling out broadband in Nanjing where I stayed. Never really had any bad experiences with government or police besides standing in line for visa issues. (the wait was shorter than it would have been here in the states at a similar govt agency though). Loved the food but avoided the meat. Good cheap beer. I loved the people so much I brought one home. Unless you are ABC you WILL be stared at from time to time. I avoided politics and would suggest same. Have a great time.
It's not 'American, born-Chinese', IT IS American-Born Chinese.
This term refers to someone who's family line comes from the region of the planet referred to as China, but is unfamiliar with the ways and customs of the Chinese culture and government.
This is a problem because they will not afford you the same courtesy they would an obviously "white" American due to his explainable ignorance of their ways and customs. An ABC gets no slack in China. They are expected to be aware of the way things are done, and if anything are treated worse due to their ignorance of what could be thought of as "their own culture".
Obviously this is a close minded viewpoint, but it does happen to ABC who visit China.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Byrd? No wait. He's a modern day Dem.
But from a practical standpoint, without the occasional war to keep civillization ordered, the world would balkanize and we'd live in what would amount to a state of eternal war with all 20 of the countries within 5 miles of us. Right of war and nationalism keep things from being as bad as they could be, and thus they have my general support.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
1. Tell President Bush there is a nation out there that isn't "free". Whatever that means exactly.
2. Inform him the nation in question is called China. Someone may have to point out to him that China is not just `what cups and plates are made of`. Tell him they `hate` the Western ideals and freedom, and are of a different religion too.
3. Wait for inevitable "War On China" to unfold.
By the government.
Unless you have to steal and trade blood for in which case Dubya will invade and bring great instability and death to your country.
Sub-human trash, go wait in line at the death camp for your turn. You'll make the world a better place by fertilizing the ground than polluting the air with the stench of your breath. Shithead.
To paraphrase an old joke about the USSR:
In China they have freedom of speech.
They have freedom of assembly.
They have freedom to criticize their government.
In America, we have freedom *after* speech, etc.
"This is China."
-- "The Diamond Age", Neal Stephenson
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
1000 yeah
That the concept of "rights" is a figment of a couple nutters in western history. I mean, had it been worded "a ruler should not overly restrict the actions of his followers, except when necessary", it would have gone over a little better in China. And been called "Taoism". As it is, it's worded as "Freedom and democracy are basic human rights" implying that the universe itself somehow favors these things, which is something... well, completely factually wrong. In fact, the entirety of Locke's "because I said so" philosophy is kind of ideally geared to simply annoy the hell out of whoever doesn't already share the guy's viewpoint... I'm not particularly suprised that the Chinese haven't jumped on the "natural rights of man" bandwagon.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Internet sucks, particularly outside of Beijing and Shanghai.
My best internet experience was in Suzhou, not Shanghai. In Shanghai I couldn't find a place to hook up my own laptop for a reasonable price. The best way to maintain internet freedom is to have a VPN or ssh accounts back here in the states. Tunnel through those.
Expect to be cold most of the time.
That's funny, it was warm and muggy when I was there.
The Chinese are very proud of Chinese herbal medicine.
This is true. Don't worry about taking your own medicine, however. The doctor we visited definitely knew what he was doing and laughed at the herbals that we had been given.
In Shanghai at the moment, funnily enough my first couple of tries to access this discussion topic came up as HTTP500 errors ..spooky =O
now China has a legit reason to ban it.
Perhaps we should give Texas back to Mexico, since we killed all the mexicans living there and "stole" it. Or perhaps you should realize that war has nothing to do with right and wrong.
Changa hates change.
Also, keep in mind that "opposed" simply means they fought them.
Nanjing was an attrocity against an occupied city of civilians and not a major battle against Nationalist or Communist Chinese forces. Otherwise it wouldn't have been called "the rape".
Perhaps you should read up on the Sino-Japanese War. Sure Japan occupied a great deal of China... Well so did Germany occupy a great deal of Russia, but neither China nor Russia were totally defeated (Tibet is a poor example because they were defeated unconditioanlly). In most occupied territories of China the Japanese, had a hard time with resistance as well.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
where I come from
ABC = Australian Born Chinese
put in wrong subject line gosh this is a bad day
You need to install it on a non-Chinese server. After that, you'll be able to access it so long as it's in a directory under public_html (you should password protect this directory so only you can use it). I paid $7.95 a month to a hosting company in New Jersey to use it (as part of a shared hosting package)... worked perfectly except for https sites, which it wisely doesn't allow because the link from the server running cgi-proxy to you isn't secured. I still use it today, actually, to read my personal email while I'm at work... you can access any port you want, so it's great for web email programs like Neomail, Horde, etc. that are blocked by firewalls.
I think you're talking about Beijing. In southern China it's winter, but for instance in Hong Kong today it's 19C. Never gets below 10C, and I expect I'll be back at the beach within a month. Beijing has a really shitty climate, hot and dusty in summer, freezing in winter. In HK it's pleasant most of the time except for the very humid monsoon (July-September), and of course typhoons. Just remerber that China is as big and varied as the US as it goes for climate, food, amd most other things. What applies in New York may not in Miami.
Really!
It depends: are you moving/traveling to former British China, or interior mainland China? Are you going to an economically strong, ethnically diverse region, or a poor farming area? If you go to either Hong Kong, or Shanghai, you will be fine. Buy a graphics card. Try to bring it back. Have fun. Heck, Hong Kong still sounds more English than Chinese in many parts.
The police are there to protect you, but also to protect the people. They don't want change. They are a very large country, and so they are naturally unstable. All we read about is them trying to maintain a hold on their country, and at the moment, despite all their problems, everyone gets fed. So as long as you don't threaten their stability, you will be fine. Shooting an Americain (especially if you are white or black), is a big no no. They do not want to trigger a new version of the sinking of the Lusitania. So mainly, worry not. If you are a woman, learn the word "pregnant". They will not arrest (on most occasions), and mainly treat civily a pregnant woman, despite law violation.
Thats about all I can say, from asking family and friends about their trips and for advice. I myself am planning a trip, even though my family history in China ended kinda violently... But hey, one cannot live in the past, right?
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
In practice the past four years, the Bush White House has assumed a much larger control of how his party governs itself in the House and Senate than previous presidents. Republicans are expected to support the President no matter what and independence is punished. Bush has had unprecedented say in, for example, who chairs the various committees. Note how quickly the wrath of the right came down upon Judiciary chair-to-be Arlen Specter when he said Bush shouldn't expect to get a rubber-stamp on his nominees.
Compare to this to Clinton's exercise in cat herding his first two years in office with a Democratic controlled House and Senate.
Speaking as a European I don't see why any American would find this a strange concept given the outcome of your last election.
The American government should terminate support for Taiwan immediately. When Taipei whines, we give them the same bullsh|t reason that you just stated.
By the way, the majority of spies who have stolen American military technology to give to Beijing is Taiwanese.
There are some serious misunderstandings about China being voiced here -- even by people who have gone there. I can understand this. I spent seven years in China and saw many misunderstandings both by people who had just gotten there and by people who had lived there but never bothered to really immerse themselves in it.
China is a wonderful place. The people are nice. The culture is respect-worthy. The landscape is beautiful. The history is intoxicating.
Is there corruption, especially in the really rural areas? Yes. But if you understand the culture and the guanxi (relationships) system then you will have few problems. They ask for 15 RMB for something that is supposed to be free? Give it. Who cares? It's two bucks. Though usually, if you speak some chinese, you can demonstrate that you are a friend of the country and of its people and get around with no hassles.
As for the government's rejection of human rights -- things are relative. I don't approve of everything that the Chinese government does, but I also appreciate that there is an amount of ethnorelativism that needs to be engaged consciously. For instance, the UN definition of human rights includes a provision that allows everyone to live at a certain basic level -- something we know as welfare. But Americans wouldn't submit to that being a human right. Much of the world's declaration of human rights is not considered valid in the developing world because people see them as western-defined examples of human _needs_ -- something everyone accepts. (Read Azar. Human needs fit into three groups -- security (food, protection, water, etc), acceptance (for whatever group you identify with) and access to/participation in the institutions that allocate resources (markets or governments.)
As for Internet access -- it is easy to come by. It isn't the fastest stuff in the world (esp. outside of the big cities) but the blocks are nominal. You can get around them as well. Some methods are mentioned in this thread.
You shouldn't worry about having your freedoms repressed. Just be sensitive. Just like you wouldn't walk around Saudi Arabia (as a woman) wearing a bikini top screaming "you should be allowed to do this too!" you don't walk around China doing things that aren't culturally acceptable. It is disrespectful. And in China respect means a lot.
So I hope you do it. The best seven years of my life (so far) were those spent in China. It was a mind-opening experience. If you have any questions you can email me. (Just make sure that you write a good subject line so I don't click "junk.") Take care! Oh, and don't listen to anyone who says China sucks or is oppressive. The experience of individuals can be awful anywhere. But statistically speaking the vast majority of Chinese and of foreigners live happily.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
in regards to the patriot act:
-metric
Point taken, but "China's products" are the world's products.
---- I have nothing more to add.
I've been living in Shenzhen for more than 4 years and have found it is a great place to live and work, as a foreigner. The internet is slow, unreliable and censored, but you get used to it and eventually learn how to setup an illegal satellite dish to get your news fix. Living in China is not for everyone though. It is terribly overcrowded, polluted, and generally disgusting in many ways. Few foreigners can tollerate the extreme differences in the environment, so there are not that many of us here. It's a great place to do business though.
"Freedom is not an incompatable world view."
Freedom? Freedom from? Freedom to? None of these concepts are core to Chinese philosophy. You are not born free according to traditional Eastern philosophy; you are born into a complex web of social interaction and obligations.
"Democracy is not an incompatable world view."
Yeah it is.
Democracy is completely alien to the Chinese worldview; it only came through Canton/HK after the Western powers invaded in the 18th/19th centuries. Chinese philosophy, especially Confucius and Mencius, advocated human existence as simply a set of key relationships. There's no such thing as a formal developement of individualism in China; traditional Chinese philosophy views the basic unit of society as the family, not the person. Your obligations to society define your role; try reading up on it sometime. Collective good >> individual; has been so for the past 3000 years in China. Communism is not at all incompatible with Chinese tradition.
"Human rights are not an incompatable world view."
The concept of inalienable human rights is totally foreign to China. You are not born with rights in traditional Chinese society; you are born with obligations you parents, your family, and your (historically) Emporer.
"Equality under the law is not an incompatable world view."
This one is interesting. Chinese history is full of specific examples of law and philosophy that espouse DIFFERENT punishments for DIFFERENT classes of people; this has been the case since the existence of the Tang Code - the predominant legal system in ALL of ASIA. Japan's law system up until the Meiji era was based on this system. This system specfiically CODIFIED different punishments depending on if you were related to the Emperor, whether you were an official, or had money and could pay to have your punishments reduced.
This was not arbitrary and evil; it was based on specific philosophy from Confucious. the Confucian school of thought held that Junzi, or those educated elite, should not be held to the same laws as the peasants; moral law should guide them and terrestrial law should be limited to application to peasants.
Your view is purely that from a Western society; freedom, by it's very nature, cannot be forced down a society's throat - witness Iraq. You must have a tradition of open thought and philosophy to set the stage for democracy to even start. It's foolish to think you can export your 3 branches of government to China along with the Bill of Rights (or what's left of it after Patriot Act I) and expect everyone in the world to be jolly. China WILL become a democratic society, but expecting overnight change from a country with 4000+ years of contrary philosophy and traditions is naiive.
"So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?"
Very true and tragic; the students at Tian An Men truly were heroes. Nothing I can say about that. Hopefully one day those who ordered the massacre will be put on trial.
"So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?"
Injecting people with poison or frying them with high voltage isn't exactly humane either. America and China are in similar places when executing people.
"So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?"
Westerners seem to single out Falun Gong; one of the big reasons the government has a problem with Falun Gong is because it advocates spiritual treatment over medical treatment. I agree their handling of it is wrong, but many in Chinese cities have died because they refused medical care and just meditated. The means are wrong, but I think it's also wrong to lie to poor rural peasants and tell them that they don't have to go to the hospital when they have life-threatening illnesses.
"So the Chinese government does not make huge amounts of money from prison labor?"
This is true. Conditions in Chinese jails are truly terrible. There've been stories circulating from the 1960's and 1970's that food was so scarce that inamtes began to kill fellow inmates and eat them. I can make no excuses about this.
"And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?"
You mean the Taiwan problem. I agree lobbing missles over Taiwan is dumb and counter-productive. China, however, has a right to ensure it's territorial integrity. I believe in peaceful eventual reunification with Taiwan - BY the will of the people of Taiwan. The pro-independence movement in Taiwan is not a majority among the populace there. If Hawaii or Alaska tried to break away, the US government would do the same. In fact, the US just bombed another country for no reason than simple suspicions and neo-conservative politics. Interesting, huh?
I have lived in Shanghai for 4 years (U.S. born, white male). Life in Shanghai is very easy. Its simply a very large city...other than that, there is nothing that a normal U.S. citizen would find "oppressive". If you are a person who is compelled to stand on street corners in the U.S. and stir up a riot over government policies, then neither the U.S. nor China are for you at the moment. But if you are a normal person who isn't interested in stirring a revolution, China is simply not an oppressive place. You can have small group and one-on-one conversations about anything you want (even politically sensitive issues). You can access almost any content you may desire over the net (some porn sites have been blocked...some chinese political content (in Madarin, so you couldn't read it anyway) has been blocked)...but google works as you would expect and most any business which requires internet access can be conducted fairly easily. Sure, doing things like extending your visa requires going to a gov building and waiting in line, but how often do you do this? Its not much different than going to a U.S. gov office. Other services are mostly private/free-enterprise and are very easily accessed; your largest barrier is language. As with almost any travel around the world, an open mind and a friendly smile will do lots to improve your experience. In terms of the Internet...it is very slow to access non-China servers. This is caused by two major issues: 1 - the "Great Firewall" and 2 - enormous amounts of local traffic (lots of it due to infected PCs). Best guess is that its item 2 that is the biggest problem with traffic, since the content filter isn't real-time (or so it would appear). MS's recent announcement to not continue to security patch unlicensed copies of Windows will no doubt add to this problem. As to other places besides Shanghai, well this is the top city China for westerners to do business so its the easiest...for anywhere else you can scale down your expectations on services from here; but freedom of expression, movement, etc...are all pretty smooth so long as your not here to stir up trouble. Good luck to you...
http://www.epochtimes.com/b5/5/1/24/n791584.htm
Please watch Red Corner before leaving to china.
~Aha~
Chinese people in the current generation don't have a lot of cousins. Their parents were the first generation to get the effect of the forced breeding limit. This has an enormous social effect that hasn't even been studied yet. Can you imagine the impact? I can't.
I will not set foot in China, not even as a tourist. To do so would be to give support to this inhuman regime. My greed would not motivate me to contribute to them, and my stated desire to see a fundamental, complete end to the communist system in China, would and probably should make travelling there a political impossibility.
Sounds like a thorough brainwashing to me
Disclaimer: I do not support Falun Gong's ideology; only its freedom to exist.this has been a facinating thread. Talking about China and comparing USA to China. I was born and raised in Eastern Europe and lived there untill I was 18 under what was called a "communist" regime. I ate enough bullshot there to last me a life time or so I thought. I have lived in USA for the last 21 years. I have seen both sides of the coin. Now I KNOW much better and i can smell bullshit from a mile away. USA is no btter or worse than ANY other country in the world. US citizens live in a fantasy world. The majority are ill eduicated and ill equiped to do anything but to consume and consume some more. Shurb used the word freedom 29 times in his speech. USA loves to use words such a s freedom and democracy. Please. The expression "Money talks and bullshit walks" describes USA perfectly. In USA you get as much freedom as you have money. No money no "freedom". It is as simple as that. You think USA doesn't censore its news? You think USA doesnt monitor its citizen's Internet access? You think there is no such thing as wage slavery in USA? Ask the "native Americans" who are spending their years in jail for fighting the USA government. They are the political prisoners in modern day USA. There is a conciderable number of them too. Remember Wounded knee? Maybe not. Bush will be spending billions of dollars for Iraq and Aphanistan, while there is hundreds of mentally ill people in the USA who will be spending a cold night on the street in USA tonight. Freedom? Freedom to do what? Consume more of the world's resources? I have asked Americans what exactly they can DO that i cannot do anywhere else and they were hard to give me an answer. Most often I was told to go back where I came from if I dont like it in "here" meaning USA. What a logical responce. USA is just another bully today. Maybe 200 years ago it did stand for something special but no more. I hope USA goes down as fast as possible. I hope the countries of the world unite against USA and fight it economically so USA will learn just how irrelevent it has become. Go China, go!
Obviously your greed will trump your respect for freedom anyway, so why bother asking. Go. Don't come back please.
Here in the states, my wife only commits adultery *after* she gets stoned.
The sad part of all of this arguing is that we each think we are right. Ralph Wiley, who recently passed away, once wrote on Nolan Richardson being fired from the University of Arkansas under dubious circumstances. He wrote, "hey, just because you ain't racist doesn't mean Nolan didn't run into bigotry in Arkansas. Don't take it personal. It's not about whether or not your feelings are hurt." I do not consider myself racist, yet I am a fool to think that there are not people in America who look down upon and scorn people of a race unlike their own. There are Republicans who are racist, and there are Democrats who are racist. And, there a probably many people of both parties who are not racist. When someone accuses another person of racism, I should not defend that person just because I have some of the same beliefs as him (or same party affiliation). It is not an attack on me. Racism is a personal belief. Luckily, in America, it is not longer a public policy. Link to article: http://espn.go.com/page2/s/wiley/020306.html
Keep it real, innit
Task Mangler
Ehh, yes. I live in the US. I am a foreigner. I am constantly afraid I will be thrown out if I say something too negative about the government. I have been a foreigner in many countries, and this is the first time I am actually afraid of being deported. Hence, I shut up.
Un paio di scarpe, per favore!
During the election Bush blocked access to his website from other nations, I guess this is not specific to China.
Same thing in Japan. My friend, who spoke WAY BETTER Japanese than I was often asked if she was retarded because she couldn't read Japanese whereas people were always singing my praises. Of course, that actually points out that you really suck but that is another post...
i got back from spending a month in Shanghai in December. I'm not a huge slashdotter...so i don't remember if i even tried it from there...but i do remember not being able to get wired.com...which i thought was funny. I didn't try any work arounds...mostly because it didn't really seem like that big of a deal...but the cool thing was downloading the Daily Show and other TV via BT...i also used my vonage VoIP phone, which was quite cool...local US incoming and outgoing calls without a single problem.
enjoy it.
When I first arrived, /. was blocked. It was unblocked a few weeks later. I asked a friend on Y!M who was located in Japan if there was any reason he could see that it was blocked and he couldn't.
A little while ago, wikipedia was blocked. That didn't last too long - a week or two IIRC.
Groklaw has been blocked for the whole time I've been here....but...(checking)...wow...it isn't any more! (That's the first time I've seen it while in China [when not on a company VPN]).
The news.bbc.co.uk site has also ben inaccessible, but the news radio and tv feeds are not blocked (I like to listen to Radio2, and watch the BBC TV News).
There have been more blocks that are seemingly mistakes than intentional.
Most of the people chanting the "Saddam genocide" mantra tend to have far-right views that conveniently overlook:
* US-sponsored african genocide, both internally as slave trading and externally as propping up vicious military dictatorships
* US genocide of Native Americans. At least the Jews got their own country afterwards, and could keep their country (course, they resort to ethnic cleansing themselves to make room for their new citizens)
* It was Reagan and Bush Sr. that normalized US relations with Iraq
* It was Reagan and Bush that BLOCKED UN security council action for Iraq's use of chemical weapons
* It was Reagan and Bush that sold actual weapons and chemical blueprints to Saddam
* Saddam had built up his troops along the Kuwait border for WEEKS before invading. The US government's public response was "This is a regional matter". That is "diplomat-speak" for "we won't get involved; do what you want". Bush only spoke out against the invasion 3 days afterwards, after intense pressure by the Saudi Arabian government.
Is Saddam a bad guy? YUP. Is he worse than other countries with better lobbyists to represent them? Debatable. Women in Iraq were legally and culturally almost equal to men; inside the Saudi Royal Kingdom, women are dogs to be locked inside burning buildings if they attempt to run outside without their burkhas.
wow! the pics were pretty bad - and white people do get off easy.... btw, though the leader mentioned in the two websites w/out links is no longer the president of China. It's Hu Jintao or something now. Just fyi. Those sites are a bit out of date. Also those pics are old too. It may be the the persecution of falun gong *is* spinning down a bit...
Taiwan.
For instance: http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:jo3aRe29uHsJ: slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will be blocked by the firewall, but http://216.239.57.104/search?%71=cache:jo3aRe29uHs J:slashdot.org/+slashdot&hl=en will not. Congratulations, you've just successfully did a canonicalization exploit on their firewall! :)
Hopefully they won't figure this out and fix their firewall...
"Freedom [...] Democracy [...] Human rights [...] Equality under the law [...] All of these are basic rights for all human beings"
Oh, I agree. But perhaps the US should first practice what it preaches, because it is far from a shining example for these human rights. The US got democracy rather late compared to other nations, formal equality under the law was not achieved even only for African Americans until the 20th century (and still hasn't been achieved for others), the US government is getting more and more drive by religious fundamentalism, and the US record on freedom and human rights is pretty mixed (in many areas, including prison conditions, prison labor, health care, education, poverty, child mortality, etc.).
The US has been snatching people with no proof whatsoever - I believe in someone's guilt when they are declared guilty at a trial. Not because they were tortured for a couple of years with no charge,
But you are a foreigner. The Chinese are not foreigners in their own country, are they? Look at the demonstrations against Bush and Blair to see that it's no problem there.
Now look at the demonstrations in China against their government... (tiananmen)
Then you can understand why people look over their shoulders when they criticize their government publicly.
You are so naive. You actually think that we went into Iraq to liberate those people from their dictator? You actually think that we went in there to disarm Saddam Husein of his weapons of mass destruction? Do you think we actually thought he had WMD's? That's insane. Can you imagine how hated this war would be if instead of 2000 dead U.S. soldiers total we had 50,000 dead U.S. soldiers on the first day due to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used? If we actually thought he had them, it would have been tactically irresponsible for us to invade like that. Our government only told us that he had WMD's to sell it to us. If we acutally thought he had them, we would have bombed them from the sky instead of going in on the ground. Actually, that might not be true. We might have thought that he had them, but wouldn't really have them ready to deploy if we attacked quickly. And we probably organized our troops into smaller units to minimize the effectiveness of mass weapons against us.
Anyway. our military strategy is not based on right and wrong or human rights or spreading freedom. It is based on one thing: always keeping the United States in a good position in the world.
By the way, most Iraqi's didn't like their dictatorship and most people in China don't care if the government controls all the corporations as long as they can make money and buy cell phones, bootleg DVD's, and knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags.
My other first post is car post.
Well I am late to the party, but being chinese and all, I feel obliged to contribute my 2 cents.
There is a lot of talking about how circumstancing the Great Fire Wall is breaking chinese law and commie will put you in jail etc.
Well the situation is rather more complicated.
Rule of laws never really established in China's long history. It's rather "rule by law". Emperors enacted laws to govern the people, law is common people's enemy, law isn't there to ensure justice but to install order.
Even in mordern china, people don't respect law. Laws are often written by government agency in a hasty and rubber-stamped by a stooge congress, without much consultation of the people.
people get around law whenever they can and more often then not nobody cares. Piracy is supposedly illegal, prostitution is supposedly illegal, but in any city you can find DVDs for $1.00 and massage parlors on certain streets. everybody's driving like there is no traffic law. waiting lines are for suckers in theater or public trans tick counter. that's just for common people.
for big crooks and shady businesses, wining, dining and bribing are the grease the oil the wheel. business even MNCs look for preferential treatment 1st fair competition 2nd.
Unless you are in china with a mission to overthrow the government, getting around the Great FireWall is the last thing anyone would care.
petty crimes are expected, you almost can't live without commiting a few daily.
Says someone who clearly has never been to China.
How did Crows post get modded at Troll and Flamebait? You can't mod down the TRUTH!!! Freedom is a humans born right!
Life is not for the lazy.
The differences are decreasing. No joke.
1. A wide support base filled with naive members given lots of good credos and compassionate spiritual laws to follow so that they seem altruistic and nourishing and all that good stuff while they spread their belief system.
2. When you get deeper into their literature, (and not even that much deeper), you discover that the higher end of the cult bases itself on the grafting of a 'Fulan', an energy being, onto one's own energy in return for 'special powers'. --Grafting an energy being into your own energy is fucking creepy, and I have never heard of any such case which is not parasitic in nature. It's just another energetic feeding arrangement designed to screw humans. It is all the more shocking in a place like China, where where everybody knows about energy and chi and doesn't dispute that reality. They know about demons and they know about energy vampirism. So what the hell? --A demon called by any other name is still a fucking demon. How dumb do you have to be to fall for basic re-wording and PR gloss?
And that's what it is. The Fulan Gong, like any cult worth its salt, has a very well orchestrated self-promotion and public relations arm. Like Israel, the Fulan Gong likes to make a very big deal about it's own persecution.
The fact of the matter is that there have been MANY spiritual groups which have been savaged by the government in China. --And many of them are far, far more legitimate than the Fulan Gong. I'm no fan of Facism, but the Fulan Gong is just another dangerous lie and it can go rot. I sympathize with the pains suffered by its ignorant followers; their stories really are tragic, but on the other hand. . . I really wish people would read and think for two minutes about the literature offered by a cult before joining it. Membership in any of the stupid religions to which most of this world belongs would be non-existent if people used their brains. Christianity, Judaism, Islam. . , they're all dumb and dangerous lies desgined to misdirect and bleed humans. --Witness the world today!
An interesting side-note. . . High level Scientologists are also into grafting energy beings directly onto its followers, but they're savy enough to conceal that fact and base their whole bullshit cult on secrets; you don't know what the heck you've really joined until you've been a (paying) member for fifteen years! Any spiritual group which as a policy keeps secrets from people making inquiries out of genuine interest should automatically be avoided.
Ignorance endangers. Knowledge protects.
-FL
American Born Chinese = Banana man.
The skin is yellow but when you peel it open it's while inside. No offense, I am a chinese too.
I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks in China, and 3 days in HongKong, in 2001. I (a white US citizen) was there as a tourist. This had been my first trip overseas.
Beijing and Shanghai seemed like foreign countries compared to the body of the nation. HongKong (part of China now) felt a world away.
I can't speak on the tech side of things. My vacation gave me an opportunity to escape the net and I was grateful for it, really.
My personal experiences were great. The people were very friendly, from the elderly to children. I never once felt in danger or threatened. In fact, I found people to be more helpful and courteous than most Americans. Mind you, I was concerned that I'd accidentally do something to insult people, so I tried to watch and learn and not step on people's toes. I was overly worried. Don't act like the sterotypical American guffah, and you should be OK.
Many wanted to speak with me, I felt, because they wanted to practice their English. Our tourguide taught us only a few minor phrases. I tried to use them when possible, but there were few Chinese I'd met who I could not communicate directly with myself, in English.
People did seem to avoid discussion on events though, if we spoke in public. In private, people would open up. For instance, our tourguide would not discuss politics, religion, etc. while we we out and about. However, he made it a point to discuss these topics when the group had privacy.
Ah, another instance, which I suppose goes against what I'd said about speech earlier... My last night in Beijing, I wanted to see some of the nightlife of the city. After not being able to convince any in the group (we were beat down tired, and I was the youngin'...) to come out with me, I decided to brave the city alone. Perhaps not too brave (i WAS alone, 12000 miles from home,) I found the nearest bar to the hotel. Anyhews, NOONE in the establishment spoke English. It took me ~3 mins just to get the point across that I'd enjoy a beer. After getting about 1/2-way through it, a man who I can only surmise was the owner/manager wanted to apparently show me around. AFAICould tell, it was his residence as well. He was proud to show off his artworks, allowed me to play with this gorgeous ~15-string lute-thingy, etc. In short order, he moved a curtain from the wall which had behind it a door... painted as the American flag!!! Inside was a small shrine/prayer area, and I was able to please him just because I recognized and commented "Dali Lama" on the photo he had of him and the Dali Lama. I think those two words were the only ones said that both of us understood.
The point here being that people did not practice free speech, but seemed to let me in on their lives if some sort of privacy was available.
Economically, well... Being a student, I certainly wasn't fincancially well off, and I needed to do considerable budgeting to afford the trip. Total cost ended up being around $2000 US for all expenses, including airfare, trinkets bought, beer, etc. For that $2k over 2+ weeks, I felt like I was treated like a foreign dignatary or some such. We stayed at 4-star hotels (much better than hotels I've stayed at here in the states,) had all our whims looked after diligently, and ate like kings. I almost felt out of place (economic status) staying at "Hotel Beijing." After a week, we needed to ask our guide to stop ordering SO MUCH food for us, we were given enough to feed 4 people each. ( That's four voracious American people. )
Hong Kong was, well, it felt like a British china-town. Go figure. Its a special province, and even citizens need a passport to travel in and out. An interesting place, for sure, but I'd rather have spent my few days there as more time in Shanghai.
I suppose I'm not responding to the questions being asked by the poster, and instead just blabbing on telling stories here, so I'll wrap it up.
Great vacation, great people, great scenery, great accomodations, great food, great prices (haggle everywhere!!!). The freedom thing does need some work, but the people do seem to want it.
Here's hoping that your travels are as rewarding as mine were! =)
On the other hand, even if your favourite sites happen to be blocked, would it really be that bad? You will probably find a few thousand other interesting sites instead. The internet is bigger than my garden.
This is slashdot. People here do not want you to talk about freedom. Noticed how you got modded? I guess they just have an affinity for sadomasochism.
The fact remain however. You can NOT have peace without victory. That is an undeniable fact of life. Anyone who states otherwise does not understand human nature and/or psychology.
Life is not for the lazy.
So go, move to China. Better yet, move to N. Korea. But don't cry when your not allowed to post on slashdot from withen said countries.
Your brainwashed. Please for the love of humanity, seek psychological help. You are in dire need therapy.
Life is not for the lazy.
I wouldn't like to comment on freedom in China. I know very little about it. What I do know is in the West freedom is a misused concept, spouted like it was obvious what it meant.
Am I free because I am indocrinated with the ideologies that Western culture spouts? Am I free to because I fetishize consumerist culture? Maybe...
The trouble is I don't think so. If laws stopped me being indocrinated with false ideology, they wouldn't be bad, they would be doing there job - keeping me free.
I am not defending the Chinese administration, but I am offering a different side to the coin and I am saying we are not free in the West. We have been targeted from so many angles, ingrained with self-replicating and false ideologies, we don't know freeedom is.
The common belief is that money makes us free - our second home in the country makes us free. But no, money incarcerates us in a vicious cycle of production and consumption. Good luck China, I say... escape the free World's view on freedom. It has incarcerated us.
I look to India and China for the future of humanity, after all, it is the hope of one of the few ideologies that made any sense - Buddhism
"The US Govt has used the army against its own population. Check the protests in the 60's"
This is not true. Here is a link about the shootings at Kent State.
A few highlights.
"May 2 Ohio National Guardsmen are sent to Kent State after the University's Army R.O.T.C. building is burned down."
Notice these are not federal troops but national guard units under state control.
"May 3 Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes personally appears on campus and promises to use "every force possible" to maintain order. Rhodes denounces the protesters as worse than brownshirts and vows to keep the Guard in Kent "until we get rid of them.""
The Governor not the federal goverment gave the orders.
"uly 23 Key portions of a secret Justice Department memo are disclosed by the Akron Beacon Journal. The memorandum describes the shootings as unnecessary and urges the Portage County Prosecutor to file criminal charges against six Guardsmen."
The federal goverment steps in.
It was a terrible thing but the differences are huge. The troops where not ordered to shoot. They paniced. The students had alread burnned down a building before this happened so the guardsman had a real fear to deal with.
And the fact that all this information is out in the open and is being questioned makes all the difference.
Here is the link if you want to check it out http://members.aol.com/nrbooks/chronol.htm
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Um, Mao was not in charge of China last time I checked. Dubya is. Let's stay on current events.
Which alternative reality are you posting from?
What on earth has ridden the guy who modded the parent Troll? It just points out the obvious!
I never said anything about China. I don't condone what the Chinese government does or did.
I just pointed out that in this "free" country, I don't feel free at all!
Un paio di scarpe, per favore!
The standard for "cleanliness" there is different than in the US. Don't be shocked by what you see in the restrooms (as well as the slit toilets). Also, no matter how good it smells, do not eat anything from the street vendors. Most people I've met there are very, very interested in talking to a Westerner and were extremely polite.
whoops...meant to hit preview
Remove "China" and replace with "America" as well as switch "government" and "corporations" and it still rings true.
Your arguments, however, seem to be more predicated on a vilification of the Japanese as a race and nation ...
That is a pathetic attempt at playing the "racist" card. Normally the most heated of exchanges do not bother me but you crossed the line. I expect an apology for that one.
Note my use of "Imperial Japan" and "Imperial Japanese" throughout my posts. I do so to differentiate Imperial Japan of the 1930s and 40s from the Democratic Japan that followed. My vilification is of a government that was rightfully removed from the face of the earth nearly sixty years ago and its agents who committed war crimes beyond imagination. The only thing you could conceivably criticize is that I did not specify the 1930-40s timeframe. Imperial Japan's behavior in the First World War, and possibly the Russo-Japanese War but I could be mistaken, was "civilized" with respect to non-combatants and prisoners.
While I definitely agree with the R.E.S.P.E.C.T thread, I would like to see the answers to a couple questions raised here.
If you are going to change countries, you'd better plan to live by their rules. The US ain't perfect (or other 'free-er' countries), but you don't appreciate some of the perks until they're gone.
That said, I have dealings with a certain multinational company which has an affiliated company in China. I would like to better understand what their Chineese affiliate gets to see from their end, and what their life is like, particularly with regards to technology and freedom.
It appears China is not as it was 10 years ago, but much more open to change and modernization. What restrictions are imposed on Internet traffic? I am familiar with them modifying DNS queries.
I would rather not hear of circumvention techniques. I'm sure intelligent people can figure them out on their own, and smart ones probably don't do them.
Besides, if someone *does* circumvent the restrictions, let's not encourage the closing of the loopholes by writing about them. That doesn't help anyone.
Anyone care to (or have the knowledge) to detail the restrictions China imposes on the Information Superhighway?
I think you just forgot to mention that "any Tibetan or Uighur who doesn't love China is a freaking criminal splittist dog that needs to be exterminated".
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing
actually, i'm having a hard time deciding whether the original poster, cliff, is a cop from china. posting a request for chinese citizens to publicly state:
No, because then the question would have been?
HERRO! I want ask Srashdot persons, how can tourist to China pass by comprex internet security?
I lived in Shanghai for about two years (2001-2003). While living there, my biggest tech problem with was the horribly slow and unstable internet connections. Hopefully they've fixed that by now.
As far as non-resolving DNS, connections being blocked and so-on, that does happen on occassion. What I did was set up an SSH tunnel to a squid proxy outside of the country. If I remember correctly, they block port 3128 going out, so the tunnel was more so that they wouldn't detect the proxying. Honestly, I don't even know if they checked. All my email going in and out of the country was through SSL/TLS encrypted connections to the servers, so that was pretty much safe. Unless you're going on behalf of a religious organization (or equivalent) though, that shouldn't really matter.
If you do go, enjoy it. I miss living there, myself. The most important thing as a foreigner is not protecting yourself from the government (cuz honestly, they don't really care what kind of information you're getting, unless you're overtly attempting to brainwash the local people with it). It's going there with an open mind. Don't be quick to judge the local people by your own standards. Don't apply your preconceived notions based on things you've heard in western media. Take time to understand where people come from and why they hold the mindsets that they do. If you do, your experiences will definitely be unforgettable.
The PATRIOT act passed because a majority in the House and Senate thought it was a good idea, and the President agreed.
Good idea how? Good for the country, or good for the political careers of politicians afraid to dissent from the GOP leadership? That majority does not tolerate dissent. It's "with us, or against us," remember?
You seem to forget that the past fifty years includes China's invasion of India, and border skirmishes with Russia and Vietnam. Not to mention ongoing repression in Tibet and threatening Taiwan, and claiming the entire South China Sea in violation of international law. The list goes on.
China is pacifistic only in your dreams. Sheesh, have they outlawed the study of history in your country?
I believe you are forgetting that Confucian thought has always been a philosophy of the ruling elite. Other philosophies: Taoism and Buddhism have more universal appeal and are more compatible with western ideals of individuality. Buddhists are so individualistic they reject even the obligations of their own family.
To buy into the idea that Confucianism maps one to one with traditional Chinese culture or philosophy is to ignore the vast majority of Chinese people.
One of my former coworkers was ABC. His sister and her also-ABC husband moved to Japan, doing some kind of high-tech management. The husband did ok, but the wife got tired of it really fast. It seems that even though she had a perfectly good college degree and was highly competent, and Japanese are used to Western women working and not acting Japanese, as an Asian she was expected to behave like a proper salaryman's wife even though she was Chinese, and being American-born she had no intention of putting up with that nonsense. She found a good job back in the States fairly quickly; it took her husband a bit longer, but he had the motivation that she was back here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I lived back east, I had a coworker whose grandparents had immigrated to the US from Japan. They were ethnic minorities, and she'd occasionally have people walk up to her assuming she was Chinese and start speaking Chinese at her, which wasn't useful (she'd do just fine in French, and knew a bit of kitchen Japanese from mom talking to grandma.) I assume ABCs have similar issues, unless they happen to speak the right dialects fluently.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Shining Path revolutionaries were wacko Maoists who could support themselves quite well because of the US's well-organized program for funding world terrorism and domestic crime, i.e. providing muscle to drug-lords who exported cocaine to the US at many times the free-market price. Many years they were more competent at violence than the government armies, and certainly were able to stick around for decades longer than they could have without US aid.
Fujimori was somewhat like a crazier version of Ross Perot with less knowledge of economics - he did a bunch of things that were Not Stupid, which placed him well above average, used a lot of violence, including against many people who deserved it as well as people who didn't, staged a coup against his own government (I really had trouble following that one... but perhaps Bush/Cheney will show us how professionals do it), and was certainly not the best government the country could have had, but neither were his predecessors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Flamebait, and Offtopic don't fit. And Overrated is such a catch-all.