Slashdot Mirror
Bloggers Test New MS China Filter
earthbound kid writes "Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices Online has set up a test of Microsoft's censored blogs on MSN China (see previous Slashdot story) with screenshots. It seems that MSN rejected titling a new blog 'I love freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy' (in Chinese) because 'The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity.' MacKinnon managed to use a workaround and got a pro-freedom blog up, for the moment."
If I made a cartoon of Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, or any of dozens of other fairy tales that are in the public domain, do you really think I'd get them released with Disney fighting me?
Is it that different if the government blocks free speech directly or allows companies to do it?
Nice to see Gilmore's Law is still in effect.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There often is a difference between what's legal and what's right in a moral sense - in other words, the "right" in "a right" is not the same as in "morally right".
China may have the legal right to do whatever it wants with its citizens, no matter what that is, but it doesn't mean that it's morally OK for them to do it. Furthermore, China *did* sign and ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - in fact, there even was a Chinese professor (Zhang Pengjun) on the commission that drafted the declaration.
That being said - as has been reported, there *is* not even a law in China that would require censorship of words such as "democracy". MSN is simply sucking up here, in one of the worst ways imaginable.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
And they will care about your concept of morality (or mine, for that matter) because...?
there *is* not even a law in China that would require censorship of words such as "democracy".
Another regime that looks good on paper, doesn't it? Except that the written laws do not necessarily hold in some (quite many) countries. The constitution of the Soviet Union, for instance (i'm quoting the 1936 Constitution), states that In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings; freedom of street processions and demonstrations. Except that, well, they weren't.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
"(If Slashdot would only get with the 20th century and permit Unicode in postings - or even just parse HTML entities instead of stripping them - then this sort of misunderstanding would never happen...)"
Unlikely, I've modernized slashdot and the slashcode engine to be fully XML compliant and use DIV's instead of tables.
I've even fixed it so you can make text larger in CSS without the overflow (like many of the people who have tried to modernize slashdot)
My code additions were rejected, and I contacted every one of the editors through their personal emails... and haven't had a reply.
I guess they're not concerned. Oh well..
What about changing the plain text "freedom" or "democracy" to multi-part images of those words (or the characters that represent them in Chinese) that are lined up? Couldn't that get past their filters? Just a thought.
> I don't understand why people are faulting Microsoft for cooperating with a
> government that could keep them out of a huge market.
Because the Chinese government is considered unethical. Presumably you wouldn't agree with Microsoft working with the Nazi German government of the 1930's and 1940's? There are some lines you just don't cross if you want to continue to be seen as an ethical company that makes life better for people.
This should be fun...Let's say a 50 billion dollar company makes...uuuhh...shower heads, and a certain "socialist" country wants to buy, say 1 billion dollars worth. Would you want to be part of it? After all, you're not the one...er..."cleansing" the place, and the shareholders want the best return...Where are you going to place your loyalties now? If you help someone commit what some consider to be a crime, you might be (rightfully)considered an accomplice. I don't think the shareholders would be pleased with that.
...and how people and governments can influence China to change.
Sometimes money works. We could consider it to be economic pressure. For instance, we could stop buying Chinese made products. A boycott(shunning) can be effective. It helped India win their independance.
What?
At some point, it appears that certain values of the ideas of freedom and democracy and human rights have been diminished. When they were written into the founding principles of certain revolutionary governmnents, they were held to be ideals that trancscend national boundaries and governments.
Now, we seem willing to accept the idea that things like "Constitutional rights" only apply to "citizens", and even then, only when those rights are abridged as a direct act of government.
That belief stems from what appears to be a recent change in attidudes -- that the idea of individual rights is too complicated and difficult to take seriously, that we should only hold these principles high when the negative consequences of doing otherwise become obvious. Never simply because we have these beliefs as the most important and basic elements to our ethos.
If it were so, a company like Microsoft would find itself without employees, investors, or customers, a day after this information came to light. But look! We don't *really* believe that rights like free speech are more important than life and death, do we?
We're supposed to. That's the point.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
No. By anyone's logic.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1