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Adopt a [Chinese] Blog
malorkus writes "Here's a great way for bloggers and others with decent web hosting to help fight internet censorship in China and other restrictive countries. Adopt a Chinese Blog aims to match up censored bloggers with volunteer hosts."
what's stopping the Chinese secret service (or whatever) to register with this service as hosts, collect all the information needed to snatch the blogger and make an example out of him and his family?
Would any chinese adopt my european CVS?
That would be great! If I could move my project to a free country. Reading trivial patents is so boring you know...
And therein lies the tale of moral relativism. Freedom isn't better than tyranny; life isn't better than death; bravery isn't better than cowardice; and truth isn't better than lies. So let's stand for nothing, since we have nothing on which to stand.
The linked site does not exactly show how they plan to limit (ab)use to actual opressed bloggers and keep the spam and ads out.
BTW, what is wrong with opening a (Chinese) blog account on one of Western sites and emailing blog posts via some foreign Webmail site that provides HTTPS encryption of Web sessions?
It may seem drastic I know, but why do we trade with countries that have a bad human rights record ? It seems a little odd to me
Nobody gives you rights. You have rights. There are only people trying to take them away.
If all people exercise their right of free speech, free press and free association then those rights will persevere. If you back down, then you will cede your rights. Its easy to promote a popular cause. Its the unpopular ones that define your character.
Anyway, I'd like to help, but my ISP won't let me host a blog on my server. And I have to wash my cat this weekend.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
It's great to see efforts being made to give the people of China free speech, but the increasing level of madness and greed emanating from (corporate)America the situation is no longer as one-sided as it once was.
The Chinese government should return fire with fire by encouraging "legal" Chinese web site operators to "Adopt a patent-free website" or Adopt a DMCA victim".
They could start with the author of DVD Decrypter.
The American Government is no longer the squeaky-clean defender of the oppressed that it never was, and now that Canada and Europe have fallen,
it looks like the time has come for a kind of copyright anti-here.
China fits the bill like no other country in the world...
That's a valid point on a philosophical level. When there's no universally recognized moral authority (such as a supernatural being of some kind), there's no way to tell right from wrong that is beyond contestation.
From a more down-to-earth political viewpoint however, there are such things as universal human rights, which include, amongst others, freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Chinese law is in violation of those human rights, just like law in nazi-Germany and Japan during WWII, or laws in the former GDR that allowed people to be shot on the spot if they tried to flee the country.
Since WWII, the international community has developed an international legal framework to protect basic human rights independent of national law. There's, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Although it remains a controversial issue, human rights related international law is increasingly considered jus cogens, meaning it applies universally, regardless of a countries national laws or whether it has actually signed a human rights treaty or not. This is especially true for issues like slavery or torture, that are illegal in all cases. Regretfully, censorship law is probably in a somewhat greyer area, though.
Apart from all that legal mumbo jumbo, the question what gives the Chinese government the right to decide what's to be published and what's not, is just as valid as yours.
I submit an article to a magazine. The magazine decides to publish it.
How does this constitute the magazine forcing its values on me?
KFG
Why not, answer me. You claim that because they're value system is different we cannot interfere. However, by saying that you're forcing YOUR value system onto me since there is no universal right or law preventing me from interfering with someone else's value system. Why can't I condemn them? Why can't I interfere? What are you basing my actions as being "bad" on? They have no inherent universal right to anything as you claim, which also includes the right to keep me from interfering.
You're a hypocrite, attempting to use a line of reasoning without following it through to completion.
You also ignore the fact that the very existence of such dissidents means not everyone subscribes to the Chinese governments moral system, so you cannot use the government to claim I am interfering. You talk of moral systems, and as such you must compare the Western one to the Chinese one not to the Chinese government's one. If some people do not agree with the government then they are no longer covered under its moral system. If you're going to use the governments actions as a basis for morality than at least use it for both sides, and don't compare apples to oranges.
When I first read about the blog censorship on msn in china, I tried it myself, and discovered that you were infact allowed to write the words "freedom" and "democracy" if you only registered yourself as not living in China. So with my fake identity of a Chinese student living in Beijing, I couldn't write the characters for democracy, but with my real identity of a Danish student living in Copenhagen, I could easily write those words, and it had no impact that I was infact using the Chinese msn site.