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The Great Firewall of China, Continued
rcs1000 writes "Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...) has a terrific article on The Filtered Future and how China's censorship is changing - for the worse - the Internet. The piece makes a few points: firstly, China is really trying (largely succefully) to seperate its Internet from the rest of the World; secondly, it may be possible to use technology to circumvent restrictions, but that makes them no less onoreous; thirdly, the sheer invisibility of the restrictions makes them worse (when Google doesn't even show up articles about democracy, that's no good thing); and finally, some Western companies are actively co-operating with the Chinese government in their censorship. Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?"
yay i finally got the first po--This transmission has been CENSORED.
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values. I'm not saying that's a good thing but that's how the system works. If there is money to be made in China, they will play by their rules to get it.
If you think they should act otherwise, then you should get your government to make rules about that banning the companies from bending to Chinese will.
> Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...)
Thats what the world needs, more stupid black&white idiots like the story submitor.
Like they swapped all people when the mag sold
If they choose to do that, it's to the Chinese public's loss. It's unfortunate that the citizens can't uproot and overcome this at least without a fair amount of debate in their society. Fortunately I don't think it has anything to do with the rest of us though.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
How long until they put up their own root servers? (ChinaNet, as someone mentioned in the earlier /. story.)
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
if only everybody were mexican...
oh, wait. that's not what you meant is it?
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
Why can't China just get invaded by the US and become democratic? We all know that http://www.bash.org/?469107hypothetical situations aren't all that realistic.
Anonymous, distributed blogging on top of the I2P protocol.
Internet stopped being unregulated and uncensored long, long ago, when Police and Censorship noticed its growing potential... So they are trying to pointedly suppress it...
Actually it is a loss in many ways.
Firstly, it is a loss because many people will find it difficult to communicate effectively with people over there..
Secondly, and unfortunately more importantly for lots of people with money, it makes China more difficult to deal with as an investment. China is a huge potential market for many many companies, and some of these are internet companies. With China's stranglehold on its internet, breaking into the market may be problematic at best, and impossible at worst.
This is a problem for people on both sides of the Great Firewall...
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by 'us,' but the internet is losing out on the unhindered addition of a 2 billion strong population. That's a lot of potential minds lost.
Despite all this, you really have to hand it to the Chinese government. Consider that:
* There is a legitimate concern that people reading articles critical of the government will cause enough upset to collapse the government.
* The number of people involved that you are trying to black out information to number in the billions.
* You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
I mean, yes, it's distasteful and all that, but beautifully executed. I don't think *I* could sucker 1.3 billion people, no matter how hard I tried.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
BTW, think how different the world might be if the ancient barbarians along China's border had had skateboards...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"The Great Firewall of China"
That the IP tables syntax will change from geek jibberish to simplified-Chinese?
Damn, I will never learn how this CLI stuff.
Unfortunately, civil liberties and a "free" market are at odds.
Even more unfortunate is a mostly non-free Chinese market and a country that denies its citizen freedom to information, while a mostly free USA aids them in closing off information access.
It's a companies perogative to decide what it wants to do. But it's also a duty of a government to protect while not oppressing its people.
Limiting circulation of governmental data to strengthen security is one thing. To prevent a people from accessing information so they can't learn about other forms of government is unforgivable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also here in Germany. GEMA (the German pendant to the soviet american RIAA) tries to strongarm ISP's into blocking access to donkey and torrent sites.
Flamed to death for this I suspect, but is national regulation of the internet such a bad thing?
There's a lot of emotion because the internet was *initially* unregulated and free, much like the wild west.
As it becomes an ever more a part of social, commercial government and business infrastructure shouldn't some rule of law apply? And isn't it sensible to break it down over national boundaries as well?
I don't mean to say that they should be disconnected, but a Chinese internet with Chinese rules verus a European internet with European rules, or a US One - *provided* that there is interconnection/interoperability is not the end of the world.
If you had to have a licence to set up a mail server in the USA - with penalties, severe ones, for using it for Spam - how much spam would be reduced? You are sentenced to fines of $40,000 - and are banned from licencing a mail server for 2 years.
Western long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the company's monopoly on power. With every passing day the Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we're only beginning to understand--one in which powerful companies refashion the global network to suit themselves.
In Soviet Russia ... ... there was no Internet :-)
Bonjour !
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?
Yes, this is the beginning of the end. As usual.
The only reason Europe and America can even compete at all in the global market place with China around is because the chinese gov't keeps its people opressed. If China were to become democratic, or its billion people could read, study, learn and do anything they wanted, it would take about 5 years before the chinese owned every major asset in the world and we'd all be their slaves.
Another post on /. rang a bell when I saw this submission. I will try to paraphrase into this discussion:
If the Chinese decide to grab a free distro of Linux and flavor it with the principals espoused in the article and force it on the population as "Red Linux" who is to say they would be wrong to do it from a legal standpoint?
Morally, I think this would be wrong. But there is a lot of money at stake here on both sides.
For a while, we all thought he was too busy to respond to our random email conversations. Turns out that he never received a lot of those emails. We all decided that it was because censorship but could never figure out what keywords brought it on. There didn't seem to be any rule-based system. It was almost as if millions of Chinese were censoring the emails of the other millions by hand.
Well, except the sentence "Hey, is this getting censored?" That email always got censored.
Taking your comment from the specific to the general, it's interesting that the American biologist E. O. Wilson has noted, in a different article I can't now locate, that China is the test case for humanity. His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems.
While civil liberties are an important facet of China's development, its fast degrading eco-structure is a more telling and scary indicator.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
I see a new google poisoning action comming... this time misspelled democracy words for the crawler, like -> dmeocracy.
Can they filter it all out?
i dont know how it works, but i believe my cousin who has another internet provider than me cant reach any of the non-chinese websites. he tried downloading opera or msn from the original websites but without success. it was me who hat to forward it to him. i myself am living in beijing right now but have still access to all websites on the net. except lycos, tripod and geocities...
If being owned by Microsoft made Slate an unacceptable place for stories, wouldn't Slashdot being owned by OSTG make it also an unacceptable place?
"from the pretty-country-shame-about-the-government dept." Proverbial pot calling the proverbial kettle black?
... that say 'made in China'
mmm, the ironing is delicious.
If China want to seperate their countries interntet from the rest of the world so communisim can continue to brainwash the public... Fair play.
China will continue to excel... Maby communisim works??? Although what is the world coming to when the govornment has the right to control what you see, hear, think, what you speak to other people about. I personally can only see bad things happening.
Hi I live in China and many words seem to be missing from the story and the article, it's really hard to read. Are these typos ?
\u262D = \u5350
You're new here, right?
It's not infeasible, what's being talked about in TFA, but I'd view the information and conclusions with your Tabloid-ometer turned up to full. It was the following snippet that first made me wonder:
"This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable."
As I recall, the only reason the rest of the world doen't use IPv6 is because we're too half-arsed to upgrade our existing infrastructure. I don't know a lot about v6, but I do seem to recall reading it was what everyone was "supposed" to use in the near future, and that we (with such a large already-established infrastructure) were unreasonably dragging our feet.
In other words, the chinese are doing it right, but according to Slate this is somehow a bad thing.
Hmmm, I smell inadequate research or downright sensationalism.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?
I'm of the belief that there is no government on the planet that really wants a global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet. The reason it exists at all in this form is the result of several societies (primarily western) having years of legal precedent protecting individual rights regarding freedom of expression. But don't think for a minute that if they could somehow regulate and censor the Internet your nation wouldn't try to do it.
adjusts strap on tin foil hat
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
The only good thing I see in this is that the Chinese are moving to IPv6, so perhaps the rest of the world will upgrade too.
It will take some big reason to make the switch; CHINA is hopefully a big enough reason.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I think that the Chinese government is doing a remarkable job at making the people believe that their government is really much kinder to them than it really is. I've had Chinese people accuse me of being crazy because I like to have the freedom to bad-mouth my government if it needs bad-mouthing.
The best slaves are the ones who think they're free -- and yes, that was a bit of irony. The Chinese government does not have a monopoly on oppressive policy.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
Lenin once said: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." This is the sentiment that the Chinese government is taking. This is the theoretical justification for what the government is doing now, and their control over the internet is merely a part of it. They are using the capitalist tools which were sold/given to them for their own uses, which will eventually not be what the capitalists want. So yes, I agree, the socialists wish to use the capitalists against themselves.
IBM Germany was happy to make punch card systems to help the Nazis run their concentration camps. Companies are run by human beings. Decisions are made by human beings. We can blame the human beings who make immoral choices. Nuremberg established the principle that "I was just followong orders" does not absolve you of personal responsibility. Even less does it mean they cannot be criticised.
And moving slowly goes 2 steps forward and 1 step back. The chinese goverment is the best communistic goverment around, since they manage not to break to much human rights, and really manage to distribute the wealth better as communistic herritage prescribes.
A switch in China, which was to be expected after the fall of the Soviet Union, would probably solve these freedom problems, but replace it with utter poverty for more people, and will most likely break more civil and human rights.
The chinese people know about democracy, they know what is wrong, and they have their own underground movements to push the right buttons to improve the situation. The attitude of chinese people is luckily a more mellow attitude than that of the US or western world, giving them the time to get those changes without a lot of blood shed.
So for the mean time there will be a chinese firewall. Since we can not stop the chinese goverment from doing this, the chinese themselves will show them one day that it needs to stop. Lets try to stop our own goverments from imposing blocks on the internet, for example the US goverment forbids international gambling and pr0n sites. US companies (VISA/MASTER) help the goverment in this by preventing people who want to visit those sites from being able to pay using their creditcard. There are probably other blocks which are less visible (conspiracy theory?), and enough examples to fight in the US and other countries, where we live ourselves.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Blame the confusion between free enterprise and democracy for the sorry spectacle of companies from supposedly "democratic" countries going out of their way to cater to the whims of a supposedly "communist" country.
For a long time free enterprise did equal democracy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was held up as the prime example of a non-capitalist and non-democratic state. Here was proof for the peoples of the developing world that democracy went hand-in-hand with capitalism. China's success proved that this need not be the case.
Some free enterprise appears to be necessary to promote democracy: the right to be as rich as the corrupt bureaucrat next door. But China proved that it's possible to get rich in a supposedly socialist setting even if you're not a card-carrying member of the party. You can make money if you know when to shut up.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Should be interesting... everything under the sun is on /. - from goats to Dalai Lama to banned Chinese cults. Wonder what the Chinese think of Slashdot!
They're related, Chinese who've been poisoned by industrial waste are persecuted by local governments if they protest; newspapers which cover these stories are shut down or have their editors fired.
that YOUR internet isn't already being filtered in some way?
Maybe the US gov't is doing the same thing, just on a more subtle and un-obvious way.
Just because we think we live in an open and free society doesn't mean that we're not fed as much propaganda as the rest of the world - it just means it's not so blatant.
My favorite example is CNN.com - if you visit the page often enough, you'll occasionally see a major headline story show up, and two minutes later it's gone... with NO word about that story ever again (anywhere on CNN.com). Searching overseas news sources will often bring up the whole story, but not always.
Obviously, someone censors these things after they appear - in a country where freedom of the press is supposedly paramount, this is a very scary thing.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Well there's this joke about someone sending a letter to his friend in Soviet, in the bad old days. He ended the letter with a note "I hope this letter gets through, in spite of the censorship". The letter was returned a few weeks later with a note attached: "This letter is returned as it contains false accusations against our country."
Telenor may be the major, but not the only ISP in Norway. I am surfing from Norway using NextGenTel as my ISP, and they are at least not telling their users that they have any kind of filtering. They have a policy close to this: "We supply the bandwidth and don't care what you use it for (as long as you don't break any laws)." The only complaints I have got is when they think your macheene is used as a zombie.
Three spelling mistakes in one sentence? Sadly, not unusual.
Yes I'm well aware that won't sub the possesive form.
Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
No, neither is access to paper to print on, or printing presses, but we still take for granted that the government should not seize printing presses based on what ideas they were used to disseminate, and that that is a natural continuation of a basic human right, the freedom of expression (UN Declaration of the Human Rights, article 19, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html).
So, if you regulate the Internet to weed out uncomfortable ideas, you are indeed violating the UN declaration of the Human Rights, to which I believe China is a party.
Also:
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws.
Indeed, but by signing said convention, you are giving up a part of the sovereignity of the country (article 2).
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
Do that. However, not that the freedom of expression protects the exchange of ideas and information. It can be argued that child porn is not an opinion. In all western democracies that prohibit child porn, it is still legal to have opinions about child porn (that it should be legal, for instance).
The comparison had been more accurate if you had compared with how some companies cooperate with the French government to stop foreign nazi sites and goods to be served to the French public. The quite common European prohibition against racist incitement and other hate crimes are indeed an limitation of the freedom of expression (well-founded as it may be).
Where the heck does this come from? Anything non-Microsoft is OK? While I don't expect /. readers to be unbiased, they should be able to critically examine a bit of prose for logical fallacies.
What, are you @#!%ing nuts? China does not "redistribute wealth". Since Deng Xiaoping's reforms after Mao died, China has pursued economic development. The CCP redifined several Marxist terms, and came up with the idea that socialism is not incompatible with economic policies such as private ownership of the means of production and free markets. China is absolutely stuffed to the gills with free markets nowadays. It's like the Marco Polo days...buy stuff, transport it elsewhere, and sell it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You are right but it's difficult to abandon a rule that isn't officially a rule, merely a side effect of circumstances.
Companies are driven by the desire for personal gain of their shareholders. Shareholders are quite often only interested in making money, not in exercising responsible control of their company shares. This is especially true for mutual funds.
What government can do when personal greed dictates the rules is limited, because personal greed can also sway an election.
In my opinion you need to force companies to publish ethics and adhere to these ethics. That demand has to come from as many people as possible, including but not limited to shareholders. To do this a navigable system of ethical policies seems helpful. I'm currently trying to design a recommendation for such a system: Ethics Search Protocol (ESP) for Internet Search Engines.
Until 20% of the males of a billion people are sent to take back Taiwan. And then teach Japan a lesson about WW II. And then for sake of national security decide to clean up the mess the Imperialist Capitalists have made of the Middle East.
The reason why you do not grasp the problem is that the thought police has decided they would rather make a buck off of China, rather than indulge in fearmongering. And that you're stupid enough to think that what is taught in public school is the only education you need, and that the news media exists only to report the truth to YOU. You can bet they will be back yammering about the evil Chinese once China decides they're done floating American currency. Your only hope is that you're too old to be dying in Iraq right now, or that you don't mind sacrificing your children on the altar of War.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Imagine the way these companies must feel when they see the largely untapped, rapidly growing Chinese marketplace. These businesses have a choice: do business the way the government wants, or risk being locked out of the Chinese market altogether. Making what seems like the obviously moral choice (don't make products, for instance, that arbitrarily censor debate and dissent regarding democracy and human rights) is not the profitable way to go.
I'm tired of profit being used as an excuse for unethical behavior. Who cares if Company X is locked out of the Chinese market? Who cares if they make more profit? The stockholders? Screw the f***ing stockholders! We're talking about a government that's using the technology to hunt down and jail people for what they read and write. If producing products for that market is critical to your company staying in business, then have the decency, principles, and ethics to go out of business.
Wtf? Get a sense of fucking realism here, why is the shit spewed by Bill Gates puppet company of any less value than the shit spewed by Rupert Murdochs company? Well probably because Mr Gates is the biggest fucking philanthropist in the world and not interested in directing editorial content.
Honestly, I swear you people would worship Mugabe if he was under the fucking GNU license.
"His argument is that if China, with it's huge population, can find ways to provide for it's citizens, without destroying their ecology, then it's likely we, as a species will be able to overcome our current problems."
Do the ends justify the means? If survival of the species means having to live under such a government, I'd personally rather die off.
is it slashdot`s forever motive about china?
Yet.
Why does all journalism on China assume that Chinese youths using the internet yearn to overthrow the government? FTFA: They point out that when chat rooms are closely monitored, people start talking about "cabbages" when they mean "democracy. If you replace "democracy" with "porn" then you may have something. But the belief that all Chinese want democracy and want it now, is just ethnocentric. The economy is steadily improving, so people are happy. That is, the middle-class folk who use the internet are happy, because get a large benefit from the stability of the government and the economy. The only kind of people who would be interested in overthrowing the governemnt in China are the peasants. I hear every other day (not through the official news here in China) about peasant riots over something; usually development companies making land grabs on peasant communities. So these kinds of peasants obviously have nothing to lose, and maybe even have something to be gained in a change of the system. So yea, they might be intersted in reform. But they are to poor to be on the internet. So review: people who use the internet, have a vested intersted in the stability of the system, don't want revolution. Please get this through your heads jouranlists of the world.
This must be where pies go when they die.
Shock horror, company follows national rules when doing business in said country!!! OMG WTF!!!!111
Don't forget that what one nation as a whole believes is 'right' or 'ethical' isn't what another country will believe. Don't you find it just a little arrogant to assume that because they are different to you they are wrong?
Remember that there is no inherent right or wrong in the universe, no sense of morals, no right to freedom rights to censorship, or heck rights to anything. That's just a layer put on top of life by people. And by heck, different people... are different.
If you want to do business is China, you follow Chinese laws. If you don't agree with that, I hope you also support companies breaking local laws wherever you may live.
That's all I have to say.
"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime." - Justice Potter Stewart, US Supreme Court
Here endeth lesson 1.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, I just read this article from an Internet connection in Shanghai. It will be interesting to see if it posts.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
While we all complain about human rights in China, let's not forget that they also managed to eliminate hunger and bring a 3rd world country up to speed in record time.
Freedom of speech and freedom from hunger are two different goals that do not always match. The chinese have made a decision that a meal every day is more important right now than an uncensored newspaper to go with it. Unless you have been a starving freedom fighter for a while, I'd suggest some caution and serious thinking before crying wolf.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?"
Are regulations or even censorship always a bad thing? I see cheers here on Slashdot when a spammer gets sued or pulled into court. What about trojan writers, phishing, and bot nets?
If you outlaw spam that is censorship.
China has the right as a nation to censor. I do feel that US companies should hang their heads in shame if they help China censor just for money. Google if you are watching. If you do this you have done evil.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
hitler's (& many of US now) #1 enemy? terrorism.
censorship? tell 'em how you do it (with the patentdead PostBlock devise) robbIE.
lookout bullow.
Actually, Australia doesn't have a national censorship firewall. It does have a takedown regime for censoring inappropriate materials hosted in Australia, and a religious party who have one seat in the Senate want a national firewall, but it's not on the agenda. At least not until the religiots hold the balance of power and the government need their vote to get some union-busting legislation passed or something.
Britain, however, does have a national firewall. It's currently set up to block only several child porn sites and such. Though, given the British government's fondness for D-notices and such, it's probably a safe bet that the next time an ex-MI6 agent publishes his unexpurgated memoirs online abroad or somesuch, the firewall will be extended to block access to them.
I can tell you right now that there isn't much difference between the United States and China at a certain level. Yes, China has a huge amount of poor, they censor the media, and the government doesn't have any pretense of public input into policy decisions.
But when you make a comparison, you find that the United states has these same problems, but only to a different degree. The US has poverty and financial hardship - you can easily find statistics through a google search. The US indirectly censors the media, if you consider that the vast majority of the public only receives it's information from mainstream corportate sources that are deeply tied with members of the US government and will only present a certain view point. And the people really don't have a real say in the political process, considering that the US isn't really a true democracy - it's a pseudo-republic, one with two entrenched millionaire clubs that are highly exclusive and aristocratic.
You only have to look at the last thousand Slashdot stories to find hundreds of examples of abuse of power in the US. I'm living in China and find everything just as comfortable here, and I am actually able to access almost all the information that those in the US are.
Ideologically the US and China are different, but in reality they are not much different.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
We like to think that free societies are happy and successful because they are free and open, and in fact the example of their success will encourage others.
China is now trying to prove the opposite. They are trying to control their own people, and motivate them through a shared sense of national purpose and recovery of past greatness.
The last government that tried this was the Nazis. And it took millions of lives to suppress that threat.
The government of China is replaying the experiment. But they have time, numbers, capital, and unlimited reserves of patience on their side.
We are now engaged in the last great test of freedom, people. Wake up, we live in interesting times.
What is needed here (but would of course be difficult to do - both politically and technically) is to make laws at the EU or US level that ban their companies from participating in censorship - probably impossible to get through though
there was no Chinese filtering of the internet (China I/O).
So, this can hardly be the "beginning of the end". Sheesh article dude.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Chinese culture has a long histroy and tradition of 'indirect' communication. It's so ingraiined that rarely will anyone say anything directly. Everythig's an allusion and the allusians change.
It's impossible to censor.
As with the rest of the world, communication does no good without education. Tke your radical followers of Islam/Christianity who have no education beyond their leaders interpretation of the Koran/Bible. All the communication in the world isn't going to make them 'better world citizens'. Censored or not, internet access in China offers opportunity for education about the world and it's different cultures. The result? People who think. These folks will communicate just fine, even if certain words and phrases are filtered.
because Miller has never written about Plame.
Look at it this way. Technology always finds a way. You just can't stop the avalanche of information. We may not be giving the Chinese access to the highest quality information, but at least we're still peppering them with little bits here and there. It may not be overt, but it still seeps into the unconscious. That's much better than nothing.
You should still be pissed of at Google, et al. for rolling over, but be thankful that they've still got their foot in the door. The world is grey.
The tendendcy that the government tries to "protect" citicens from dangerous thoughts is, unfortunately, not limited to China. In a western democracy it can happen as well.
s sow, German) who tries to filter Nazi propaganda and pages linking to Nazi propaganda from the net. He argues: "There is no freedom of information when minorities are discriminated against by this information" (http://www.brd.nrw.de/BezRegDdorf/hierarchie/news /newsticker/271_2003.php, German). Af first, there was a public outcry, online demonstrations, conventions, finally a law suit on which his position was first corrected, then confirmed. Today, the situation is unclear, courts rule differently on various cases where Mr. Buessow tries to get web sites censored.
E.g., in Germany we have a provincial government official named Juergen Buessow from the social democratic party (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_B%C3%BC
The interesting point is that he seems to believe that information can act and do harm by itself.
China may not be perfect, but...
An even more astonishing number of Americans believe it was an accident.
Seriously, this guy seems to believe that all show of nationalism within China is the work of the CCP. There is undoubtedly some propaganda, but that is no different from other countries. I don't have to mention WMDs, do I?
And what's the problem with Ipv6? If the US and EU are slacking, China is using a new technology (not proprietary AFAIK) to provide more IP addresses for a country in rapid development. One has to be paranoid to see the Party's only interest in this ("In communist China, technology updates you!")
Fine, China has an authoritative set of rulers. For my part, China has never bombed my country, never planted booby-traps, never tried to interfere with our politics, and as far as I know we've never even been at war. Since our current main ally has done all this over and over, I'll keep my worries elsewhere.
My sympathies to the Chinese who strive for a better China, but this article is really paranoid. Wait till the writer finds out that most TVs in Europe don't use NTSC, and that the French have their own system...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
You can always jump that wall with a skateboard.
No, wait...
From the universal declaration of human rights:
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
That seems like a rule against this kind of censorship to me.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
And so does this one. Seek and receive information.
The article almost implies the US encourage wireless access anarchy.3 51258&tid=123&tid=193&tid=158
This just a few days after: "Florida Man Charged For Stealing Wi-Fi"
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/07/1
so much for anarchy.
In fact most western governsments are fighting anonomous access to the internet. The EU are introducing data retention laws right now.
This could mean the end of "arnarchy"
I am running an open anonomous AP http://www.agol.dk/elgaard/torap/
but for how long can I do that?
German industry came to regret its self-centered, coreless, characterless, purely capitalistic financial support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Suppression of labor unions seemed like it would be good for business and increase profits. As we know, Hitler engulfed, looted, and eventually sought to utterly destroy all German industry. Microsoft cannot appease or attempt to use the new criminal communist capitalism and expect to prosper long term.
Point two: The fear of words on the part of the chinese communist government is pathetic. Their real problem is the 250 million internet illiterate chinese peasants who are estimated to move to the cities of China in the next 10 years or so seeking jobs and a better life. Ideology -- words -- as a cause of revolution is the darling of historians and intelligent and educated people, but revolutions are the result of discontent in the masses, not words. And China is sitting on a ticking hydrogen bomb of growing discontent right now. The chinese will fiddle with the Internet and censorship and fear contamination from the outside world while China burns from within. It should be an interesting next few decades.
E Proelio Veritas.
If this is true how come almost all of my spam comes from China Net?
A picture is worth a 1000 words
...and a few chuckles
Ron Paul
that work for those companies. people who exist only to make money are the enablers of tyranny
If you want to knock something down, you must first support it.
This is all part of American cultural imperialization. Once China is dependent on services like McDonalds and Google, American companies can call the shots.
The important thing is to not let other countries do things on their own. American companies must maintain their monopolies at all cost.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
communist pr0n only!
I'd go further: companies that enjoy the same legal rights as individuals should bear the same legal responsibilities as individuals. The corporate equivalent of serving a prison sentence is suspending commercial activity. If a company commits a crime (ie if responsibility cannot be attributed to any single employee), the company should serve the same sentence as a person who commits the same crime.
Note: I'm not a liberal arts major -- I have two engineering degrees. Being a technologist does not excuse you from knowing your language. Cue arguments for why knowing your language matters ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
Freedom is not part of the Communist manifesto!!! Your either with me or against me!!! China is another great Evil that we are whore outselves out to for SLAVE labor. It will come back to bite us on the ASS.
great cartoon
Please, corporations care about profits and where they can make the MOST money. They can only make the MOST money in free markets, they cannot make the most money where people are not free to spend their dollar where they wish. Yes, it may be good for a handful of companies. All these "evil" corporations want people able to freely shop and spend there buck where they can.
The dollar is the best form of democracy, you get to vote wiht your dollar to the best company and product.
This silly anti-capitalist mentality really has no backbone to it.
Also, from what I understand, France has a law that holds executives personally responsible for the wrongdoings of their companies - this was enacted after the Elf scandal. We should do the same thing here, as well as suspend (or revoke in really egregious cases) the company's privilege to do business.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
At least china is open about it or too clumsy to hide it.
Also you missed the point of my proposal: Ethical policies would create a network of ethical rules above the demands of the law, not increase the weight of the law towards companies.
To follow through with your proposal you need to change the laws, to follow through with a system of ethical policies you just have to make the offer of this or a similar specification. While the education of customers with the goal to make them ask for ethical policies leads to some kind of democratic system it does not require the existing democratic system of the state at all and thus might ease the strain on this system a bit.
Is such a move so surprising when we see the US trying to keep control on root DNS ?
I think you meant onerous not onoreous.
It's futile. In the end, chaos prevails and the Internet is just that -- chaos.
We are also still talking about companies that break laws, not companies that avoid laws by leaving the country or that circumvent laws or "mere" moral obligations in any other way.
"China is huge".
Why is that a problem?
Is it even true? By landmass, it's no bigger than the USA. By population, it will be surpassed by India in a decade or 2. Why isn't India a problem?
SO US companies wants to tap this market. Some will succed. Many will fail. There will be intense competition against both western and chinese companies. Investors who treid to make a fast buck in China will likely lose. US companies now knows this. They have to invest carefully and for the long term. The old claptrap about 1 billion people each buying 1 toothbrush has been exposed for its shallow illogic. There are no secrets here. It only requires a little study.
Finally, do you really think Americans care about democratizing the Middel East? Perhaps in the abstract. How many really wants to send their dons and daughters to lay their lives on the line for THAT?
And how would US companies investing in China diminishes YOUR freedom?
If you really care about your freedom, I suggest that you concentrate on thinigs like the "PATRIOT" (sic) acts.
Work on where you can actually make a difference.
It is ILLEGAL for US companies to export technology to assist murderous and Communist dictatorships.. no?
Or only if that nation is Cuba? Cuba needs to have it's own Tienamen Square Massacre... so in a few years without a repeat they can claim "progress", and have their lobbyists infiltrate the Texas GOP.
The above is ironic but not untrue. What I *am* certain of is there is a federal law against US Corporations providing technology that aids suppression of political and religious beliefs.
China is using this technology for both.
One wonders if the so-called conservatives in Washington are turning a blind eye to this Microsoft development so the technology can "mature" (perhaps enough for home use?)
Sickening. Where did the true conservatives go? Where are the liberals? What happened to my great country, that the elite are now riding Chinese made lifeboats (bound for Bermuda residency, no doubt, given their total lack of allegience...)
Yeah, you gotta hand it to the Chinese. They'd NEVER finance a war on terrorism using tax cuts and money BORROWED from the Saudis.
I'm tired of profit being used as an excuse for unethical behavior. Who cares if Company X is locked out of the Chinese market? Who cares if they make more profit? The stockholders? Screw the f***ing stockholders! We're talking about a government that's using the technology to hunt down and jail people for what they read and write. If producing products for that market is critical to your company staying in business, then have the decency, principles, and ethics to go out of business.
I wonder if you'll keep saying that when all of these companies are gone and you're left in the stone age.
Ummm, tax law in the US punishes people that are married *if you have two incomes*.
Two single people with jobs can deduct more than two married people that both have jobs.
Two married people with a single income can more easily deduct the costs of the non-working spouse.
For 401K savings, the situation is worse since the cap is determined by the joint incomes as opposed to the individuals. If there is only one wage earner, or there is a great wage disparity, it is a benefit, but if you have two people with well paying jobs, they are better off, both from an income tax and tax deferred savings point, if they remain single.
From TFA: "Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...)
Slashdot has never been great and it's going more and more downhill. The editors are a fucking joke as well as the news. This site is like a soap opera, you can miss it for a whole year and still know what's happening (dups, mindless ms bashing, google worshipping, and linux is the answer to everything). Of course I cannot forget the "presidential election coverage" LOL or so should I say the liberal propaganda and Bush bashing. I'm never visiting this site again. I really regret the many times I've donated money to this place... I'm second hand embarrassed for the site's creators.
My regime would most certianly have had Novak up on treason charges for blabbing the name of an agent of the state to everyone and Miller up for accessory to treason for refusing to cooperate about her sources. Their choice would be life in prison if they wanted to give up their sources or execution as traitors if they didn't. And their sources would face the same charges as well. The method of execution? Impaling, of course! I'd be Bruce the Impaler. I think impaling could solve a lot of the problems the country faces today. Insurgency in Iraq? Impale them! People expressing reservations about my regime? Impale them! Of course, I'm a simple sort of guy. I see a problem, I impale the problem...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you actually bother to read the above posts, they are not being anti-capitalist. They are simply against corporate capitalism, which isn't really capitalism, but a form of mercantalism (anyone remember their US Revolutionary War history?).
People who talk about getting rid of government interference in business forget that the mere existence of corporations is a form of interference. In real capitalism, individuals would own companies and be held directly responsible for what the company does, both financially and criminally. In corporate capitalism, the absolute worst that can happen is that the corporation goes bankrupt. But even then, if you have good lobbyists and "honest" politicians (to use the Gilded Age euphemism), you can get the government to pass laws that are favorable to your business or even bail you out if you are in trouble.
Since you are complaining that the above was modded "insightful", keep in mind that even though it is something that you disagree with, it may still be insightful. Also, if you have mod points, many on /. would appreciate you and others not modding down something simply because you disagree with it. I never mod comments like yours down because I know that it is your opinion, even though I happen to disagree with it.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
So they hope. Most of Google's offerings are reproducible. When the better or near-equivalent to Google is out there (or simply one of Google's many services), the moralists may jump ship causing Google to lose money. Those opposing China may become less likely to support Google or use and promote their services. This includes people inside and outside the Great Wall. They increase their market share of statists at the expense of freedom lovers.
How long before Google has a vested interest in actively supporting this regime? How much profit will they lose if they tie their fortunes to Chinese communists? Not that I like the tobacco analogy, it is worth considering from a long-term perspective. China is an old country but their government is a toddler compared to that of our young country
Just like California is the testing ground and vanguard of political movements here in the U.S. China is the testing ground for thought and people control for the world. Once they have ironed out all the dissidents, they'll "share" their findings with other majors *cough US* to help them control their populace.
rcs1000 writes "Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...)
Plonk!
Another point is that some Western companies do act responsibly. They include both Reebok and Nike . Reebok is a major supporter of Amnesty International. Of course, the best example is all the American companies (except one, Marathon) which signed the Sullivan Principles. The Sullivan Principles is an agreement to treat all employees in South Africa equally, regardless of skin color.
Westerners and Western companies are far more responsible than any Taiwanese company.
Now, consider Stanford University. It recently divested investments in 4 companies doing business in Darfur, where the worst government-sponsored genocide has occurred. What is clear is that much of Western society believes that business and human rights should not be separated although some (like some writers in SlashDot) in Western society believe otherwise.
Nonetheless, contrast the attitudes and behavior of Americans and Taiwanese. The difference is stark.
What makes you so certain that the same thing isn't happening in the US? Would you really put it past our current administration to transparently censor information that they didn't approve of?
Since when do credit card companies prevent American users from subscribing to overseas porn sites? Or do you mean sites dealing in child pornography, snuff video and otherwise grossly illegal things?
Totalitarian regimes can only survive as long as there is no real opposition. That means getting rid of the middle classes who have money, education and influence. Russia and China did it, as did Cambodia. We can see the process in Africa with Mugabe at the moment.
Today China is busy building back up it's middle class. The inevitable result of this is going to be increasing demand by the moneyed class to have a say in how they are governed, that will ultimately mean liberalisation and a form of democracy.
Deleted
What I do believe that any power authority will often do anything to maintain and expand that power. That US pesence in the middle east is so popular because it involves an expansion of power of so many groups. Christians, republicans, energy industry, maybe even the people of iraq who have been powerless for a long time. OTOH, the marginal benifit of doing anything in china is small. Not only have they have proven they can kick the US ass, but the US is increasingly becoming depenedent on them to loan us money so we can continue to buy their stuff(look up the percentage of public debt that the people owned in 1970, and the percentage of debt we own now).
So back to the topic of censorship. The countries and people that overuse censorship want to maintain thier power. If the people don't know, they can't do anything. However, the counties that allow a more free communication tend to be better a creating wealth. Not money, no income, but those creatins and inventions that will be the legacy we leave to out children. On reason for this is that the people who create this wealth tend to prefer to live a land where they are able to learn and grow.
So, many of the issues are not the economic system, but the everyday human greed. I want stuff. You have stuff. So I will kill you for your Nikes, or rob a liquer store so I can take my girl to McDonalds.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Cisco? For firewalls?
Websense? For content filtering?
Juniper? For routers?
Checkpoint? Federal Express? UPS? Avaya?
I want to know so I can check out the stock.
We are the Americans. Lower your firewalls and remove your censors. We will add your technological and economical power to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
It does explain what a root nameserver is (kind of) but please, mods, just because the URL includes DNS-HOWTO doesn't mean that's what it really is...
It's really more of a "Dummies Guide." For perverts. With computers that drink too much. And therefore can't remember things like IP addresses. Such as the address of the dildo store their owner browsed just the other night.
You really have to read it. It even has pictures!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
In the history of mankind, there have been some aweful regimes. But which regime has murderred the most of its own people?
It's the current Chinese one. 40 million. In fact, it has killed more people than any other regime in history. And it continues to kill people for "treason" or "talking against the regime". It sponsorred Pol Pot and the Korean despots who killed further millions. And it has nuclear weapons.
Google has a promise to "not be evil". What evil is China not guilty of? Forced abortions, environmental massacres, aggression towards neighbors, genocide of Tibettans, and so forth.
What does the Chinese regime have to do to be considderred evil? Google has a responsiblity to look at its relation with China in respect to its promisses.
-Ben
Oh please, don't be so stupidly simplistic. You really think that if we forcibly dissolved the top 20 ethical offender corps we'd end up in the stone age?
There have been regulated, censored sections of the Internet before. Example: AOL. A little internet with a set of "captive" users. They dictated what sites where allowed inside the walls, and censored sites from beyond. In the end, the walls crumbeled. Slowly but surely Chinas Internet wall will open up to the world, just like their economy is doing.
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?
DUH. Of course it is.
When the citizenry would rather sit on its duff watching TV, what true freedoms could they possibly want or need? Who needs the freedom of speech when nobody wants to say anything? Who needs free flow of information when all anyone wants is entertainment? Who needs indpendence of any kind when everyone expects the government to save them from everything?
If you've lost your freedoms, it's because you weren't using them anyway, and apparently don't give enough of a shit to get them back.
When was the last time you heard someone say "go ahead, it's a free country."?
It maybe shock to you. However, almost all the activist(especially leaders) for human rights in China are funded by Western government. They are either very young in heart, like college student, or they are unemployed who are left out in the society. After they get a ticket to US, they will care less about Chinese human rights, and start to make money and live their lifes. In US, like falun gong, and all funded by certain organization which in turn, are funded by western government. Where you think their income come from? Everyday sits there or give people flyers, and rent office, making books, and has transportation. US also use media to influence their citizen and also Chinese citizen(by broadcast over the strait) on how "evil" Chinese officals/government are. And make people believe in it. Have you heard any negativity about Iraq in US media like abc, cbs, nbc? who stood out firmly saying it is a big mistake that US should not be there? No, they are all connected to the government. No one broadcast company firmly stood out say no to the war. However, the majority internet vote think Iraq war is a big mistake. You have to be in China to find out the truth, see what average internet user say about censorship. In China there are BBC and CNN. You will be surprised on a lot of things that will prove you wrong. you already been used by the US government and the media about Iraq war when it first begin. Remember all other UN member are against war before it begins? You are continuing be used on a lot of issues. Unless you read more from other countries' media, or experience yourself. It is very hard to get the truth from one source. I don't understand why there is a continuation on the chinese firewall article. I suspect the person or maybe the site is partially funded by organization which is to bash Chinese government which in turn is funded by US government. If you go to US Chinese lived towns, you will see anti Chinese government newspaper which everyone knows that they are funded by those organization in US. Just my 2 cents.
Many Western companies have been actively co-operating with US government censorship for years. Why should China be any different?
IMHO, China is "Socialist" primarily in name and origin or the current regime.
It's really about power, the people who have it, and their desire to keep it. Socialism, Capitalism, Boontism, who cares, as long as the power stays where it is.
I agree with a later poster, that having a freewheeling, energetic, innovative economy, PLUS rigid control from the top with perpetuation of power is an inconsistent model.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Strongly AGREE!!!
I think you misunderstand. The poster I originally replied to stated that democracy is better than capitalism. I pointed out the fact that you can't really make such a comparison since they are two (mostly) distinct concepts - one being a form of governemnt, the other an economic system.
As far as your A->B comment I'm assuming you mean Capitalism leads to removal of democracy which leads to something worse and therefore, capitalism leads to something worse. Personally I find that logic a bit speculative. I could make a similar statement about phone calls. Phone calls can be made to terrorists which may lead to a terrorist attack and therefore, phone calls lead to terrorism.
More importantly, I think you are confusing capitalism with corporatism (probably closer to what we have in the US). I say that because you seemed to be concerned mostly with the actions of corporations (which of course are protected by the legislature in a corporatist state).
Over the weekend I heard that the Cleveland Plain Dealer had dropped 2 investigations, because they feared getting the Miller treatment. (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/arti cle_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000976374 ) Don't forget, her publisher has been taking on some rather large fines, too. When investigative reporting is stopped before it even really starts, because of fear of legal retribution...
Of course, not that I would mind seeing Karl Rove NAILED, but... (It would be interesting to see John McCain on the committee investigating Karl Rove, if it comes to that. But I doubt it will.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Discounting the bloodshed which has already happened on Tianamen Square.
I remember reading an article a few months ago talking about this very subject from the point of view of an American reporter who was in China and trying to get to sites like CNN and such. While he couldn't officially get to any of these, he was easily able to find kids on the street that showed him how to connect to them using proxies and DNS servers that the government censors didn't know about. While it's certainly not the best solution, and I'm sure for every one person that knows these hacks there are probably hundreds who don't know them.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
Gotta love the way the story portrays this as a bad thing on the Chinesse part, where as in fact this is a failing of the rest of the world
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet? Until another big market wants it another way.
"Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?"
...
No, it's not the beginning of the
It's been that way from the very beginning. Telcos and national ISPs have exerted control over access and content for a long time. In fact, there are web sites here in the US that are also blocked "for your own good". I'll leave it to you to figure out which sites those are.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
China is not "stuffed to the gills with free markets" as parent would suggest, however. China does not even have internal free trade between its own provinces and administrative units. Imagine Virginia and Maryland not being able to trade with one another freely. Since China joined the WTO, it has been scaling back its protectionism both internally and externally, but it's not really a free market. External trade with the EU and U.S. is made quite free, comparatively.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Unfortunately, we live in a different world from the one that fought communism so well. Coming of age during the 1960s, my peers, the 'baby boomers' are the most hedonistic and self-obsessed generation in history. Tutored by NPR and Moveon into believing that the only evils in the world are the 'religious right,' Republican party and Bushitler, they make it difficult to have an intelligent foreign policy toward China or any other country. Just yesterday, I had an intelligent-seeming university librarian tell me that the Patriot Act was censoring what books libraries could display. The remark was so stupid, both in what the law says and how it has been used, I didn't know what to say.
For the baby boom left, foreign policy is about tourist destinations. If they go there (i.e. Europe), they wanted to be treated nice. That means we should coordinate our foreign policy with the French, who've consistently had dumb-to-foul foreign policies for over two centuries. One must not have one's vacation in the south of France marred by nasty remarks about Bush. On the other hand, if they don't go there (i.e. Iraq), then they could care less what's happening there. That's why the mainstream media has said almost nothing about the 300,000 bodies, many of them children, found in mass graves in Iraq. They're liberals. They don't care. They don't have to care because their followers don't care. The biggest myth is the world is that of the 'bleeding heart' liberal.
These aging liberals are, almost to a (wo)man, cowards. That's why protesting federally funded "Piss Christ" was evil in their tiny little eyes, but accidentally having urine blown by the wind onto a Koran is like the Soviet Gulag--the latter an evil they rarely mentioned when there was a USSR targeting us with nukes. Catholics don't blow up subways, and can be ignored. Islamists do, and thus must have their every whim catered to and their every flaw explained away. They don't care about democracy in Iraq, it's not a tourist destination. They don't care about the Jewish victims of terrorism--Israel is only a tourist destination for the religious sort. Don't expect them to stand up for free Internet access in China. As long as they can get themselves photographed on the Great Wall, they could care less. That, incidentally why they never cared about the horrors that descended on South Vietnam after we left. It wasn't a tourist destination.
Remember, for the baby boom left most of the world's people have the moral status of unborn children. Democracy or tyranny, it doesn't matter as long as NPR remains federally funded, so someone can tell them what harmless people they should be hating this week. In a few weeks, they'll no doubt be hating as "extremist" a federal judge, nominated for the Supreme Court, whose name they don't even know now. That's what Orwell meant when he described the 'one minute hate' in 1984.They hate good people. Don't expect them to hate evil.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, Editor: Dachau Liberated
it really is, if you want to do business there you play by their rules
- My question is: Can Slashdot be Slashdotted? -
Hi, Well I've lived in China. And I have plenty of friends who did, or do live there. It is totally ridiculous for you to say that the "US and China are different but in reality they are no much different." In the US I don't have to worry that criticizing the US govt on my webpage will get me and my family arrested and harassed. Try that in China and see what happens. And it HAS HAPPENED. In the US I don't need to worry that working for a human rights NGO will lead to my parents losing their jobs. But that is a real concern for some Chinese people. Now is the US getting worse? Certainly, as the Joseph Wilson case shows us it is. But to claim that there is not "much difference" between China and the United States, is like saying there isn't much difference between getting a broken arm and a broken neck. There's a difference. Get out of your "expat" bubble and maybe you'll see that. Or not.
One example of US censorship is the blocking of the website www.alemarah.com which of course is the Taliban website, if you go it it, it reads "No website is configured at this address." Which basically means they have rerouted any DNS queries for this site to another server.
...featuring headlines like "Turd Blossom Must Go."
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
I wonder if you'll keep saying that when all of these companies are gone and you're left in the stone age.
That's an absurd false dichotomy. No one in the U.S. is going to be "left in the stone age" because companies refused to tailor networking equipment for an oppressive regime. Computer and networking companies prospered before China was a significant market, so there will be plenty of them to meet the market demand in the free world.
Please don't call the Chinese socialist. I'm a socialist, as 20% of the people of my country is, and we support more freedom than those who call themselves conservatives.
It is insulting to compare the socialist movement to the horrible abomination that is called the PRC.
"I'd go further: companies that enjoy the same legal rights as individuals should bear the same legal responsibilities as individuals. The corporate equivalent of serving a prison sentence is suspending commercial activity. If a company commits a crime (ie if responsibility cannot be attributed to any single employee), the company should serve the same sentence as a person who commits the same crime."
Suspending commercial activity of a company for any extended period of time is a death sentence.
Vote for Pedro
Totalitarianism is a form of political government. Communism is an economic system. Countries which are communist often have a totalitarian government as it's the only way to force people to 'share' all their posessions with the state and everyone else.
Simply using pgp is not a good idea; it can be easily detected among "normal" mails.
Using images or music files containing the actual data seems a better idea; though if this is ever detected, the resulting interview might not be nice.
First, the need for corporations as entities of commerce is real, since it is undersirable for the company to die when the owner dies. Corporations create continuity, jobs and shareholder wealth, all very good things to have. As has been stated before, individuals commit crimes and individuals should be held responsible for them. The all too common practice of anthropomorphizing corporations (Microsoft as the Evil Empire, Apple as the Source for All Good Things, etc. etc.) is silly and unuseful at best, and destructive at worst. Silly, because corporations employ perhaps thousands of individuals who cannot be characterized by any one trait, and harmful, because thousands (and perhaps millions) are damaged economically when broad-brush penalties are applied to corporate entities. Finally, the fact that Westerners are employed in China, free (after a fashion) to live and work normally is a breathtaking change from twenty-five years ago, and amply demonstrates the value of allowing corporations the ability to participate in China's economy. Does anyone believe that the China of twenty-five years hence will look anything like the China we see today? If we ban corporate participation in China, it's a good bet that we will indeed see little move toward personal freedom.
Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?
It's the beginning of the end of a SINGLE internet. There will the the gov't USDA approved internet, and there will be a very well fortified "unauthorized" tunneling internet. It will be treated like the warez sites of today. Actually there will be many of them as they each get shut down one by one and several spring up to replace them. It's definitely something to keep the hacker community occupied. If you all want a single internet, then you will not support (re-elect)politicians and (buy from)corporations that support censorship. Here's lookin' acha, Walmart.
What?
China will be just like the US when they get their military spending adusted upward a little.
It should be possible to come up with a technical solution to make Chinese censorship too expensive.
Ideas, anyone?
The ultimate aim might be to make it so difficult to censor, that the Chinese government decides to simply shut off all access to the outside Internet. At that point, it'd be up to the Chinese people to decide whether they'll tolerate that.
Conquery didn't match any documents. Modified the search to [ "filtered future" site:slate.com ]. Still nothing on Google.
Hmmm. Have they just not crawled it yet, or are they avoiding an unpleasant truth? Ah. There's exactly 1 link from the search on Google News; but its not back to the Slate site. Again, hmmm. - InfoGeek
Over 5000 U.S. citizens have already been disappeared in this way. When the Supreme Court held that these detainees had some rights, the Bush administration simply ignored the ruling, and nothing changed.
Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile as dictator for decades, and only managed to disppear 6000 people. You Americans have managed to rack up 5000 in only three years, which may actually be more than China's score. Congratulations.
Note that the map cited in the Slate article was copyrighted in 2001 -- not exactly a current source of information.
Result: US rules world for 500 more years; Taiwan is US best friend and rebuilds quickly to be utmost power in Asia.
Mainland China becomes a prehistoric backwater where people pound rocks together to make food. Cannibalism returns, once again, to mainland China, where in the past people traded children so they felt less guilty to eat them. This time there aren't enough children to feed them, so they eat each other. Finally China's population problem is solved: everybody dies (after eating the Koreans).
Every request you make can be, and probably is, logged by your ISP. Any privacy you feel sitting there in your darkened room is an illusion at best. You exist as a specific and known address at the end of a specific route, a destination made visible and active only by a set of entries in a bank of servers.
Wires can be cut. Servers can be pulled. Numbers can be deleted.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Lets see...
Communist Party of China
Authoritarian in structure and ideology - Check
The Politburo - Check
The Secretariat - Check
The Central Military Commission - Check
The Discipline Inspection Commission, which is charged with rooting out corruption and malfeasance among party cadres - Check
International Liaison Department - Check
The Organization Department - Check
The Propaganda Department - Check
Semi-autonomous Military - Check
You can call it Free-Market or not Communist, but the CPC is a Communist Party with all the organization and trappings of Communism. China is some strange Mao/Marxist/Adam Smith beast, but it's not a Free-Market, it's not Capitalist.
Death to the Opressor!
Death to Microsoft!
heheheheh
At least china is open about it or too clumsy to hide it.
Do you listen to yourself?
They sold it to the Washington Post. With the Post, we are talking about a biased media source with the power to warp public perception. (and historically, the power to depose a US President)
This is an organization much more terrifying than Microsoft, so I don't think breath a sigh of relief that Slate is out of their clutches.
So many of /. comments on this story are about how Western companies are immoral for bending to the Chinese government. The problem for Western companies is that none of their goods and services are irreplaceable in China, they all have homegrown Chinese substitutes - Red Flag Linux, Sina.com, etc. Western companies can choose to either compete in China on China's terms, or be kicked out. Period. There's no idealistic wiggle room to appease high-minded slashdotters and Western notions of morality. The only real hope is for Western companies to bend to the Communist party's rules in the short-term in the hopes of building influential long-term (all-important in China) relationships with business and politicians there. Over time those relationships may allow the West to influence China in positive ways. Or maybe not, but that's the only strategy with any chance. So my challenge to slashdotters is, if you want to post a moral critique of Western companies for their dealings with China, also supply an alternative, *viable* course of action that they should have done instead of whatever you're criticizing them for. I doubt many will be able to do that.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
I worry about it because i do not like being censored or dealing with censorship and the fact there are sites blocked by the US scares me and it allows for us to see censorship and hopefully enough people will go "wait if china can do it cant the US". Then maybe the US gov't will allow us full access to our freedom of speech (and be heard).
That is correct. World Com, Tyco, Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, etc. The former executives of all these famous corporate pirates are in real deep shit. Many of them are going to prison, and the rest will be ruined by fines and legal fees.
And I want it noted for the record:
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
"I'd go further: companies that enjoy the same legal rights as individuals should bear the same legal responsibilities as individuals. The corporate equivalent of serving a prison sentence is suspending commercial activity. If a company commits a crime (ie if responsibility cannot be attributed to any single employee), the company should serve the same sentence as a person who commits the same crime."
Problem is this will drive the corp out of business and the only people to grieve its death will be the poor grunts that do all the real work - manufacturing level jobs, warehouse jobs, delivery jobs, mail room, software developers, systems administrators, folks that work the counters of the stores, answer the phones, make the phone calls, etc...
Good news though is that with that we can bring this full circle and back to China. When that corp goes out of business, the "evil" executives just create another one, only this time headquarter it in another country and use chinese labor for all the manufacturing and minimize the US side of the corp to strictly distribution, use a name close to the old one for that great recognition, and this time keep all the big money out of the US.
Since a long long time (I do not know the period, I worked for a creditcard processing intermediair).
The credit card transaction gets a "cardholder not present" + company designation code along. This combination results with most VISA/Mastercards (~75 to 80%) from US banks in a transaction refused. This is even higher for international (not residing in US) companies.
This refusal to do the transaction is based on two things:
1. image of the bank (ie censorship)
2. afraid for fraudulant transactions
This last one is "solved" nowadays by one time only creditcard numbers, extra codes like cvc (weak) or pin (stronger) or one time pin code (strong)
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
So you are sayin that there is a blanket ban on US subscriptions to porn sites based outside the US?
Is this unofficial, or is there some government legislation behind it, as with gambling?
Morality is a common social phenomenon. It is too widespread for someone to claim that it is parasitic in nature -- it must be a meme that is symbiotic with human society (which is not equivalent to being symbiotic with individual humans, but may still assist the survival of individuals' progeny).
The problem is public-good problems, where rational, self-good optimizing agents produce a globally non-optimal result. This is the great bane of society, and a tremendous amount of the complexity in things we do are involved in dealing with this problem.
Several social mechanisms have sprung up to address public good problems.
The first is government. Government has the ability to shift the values of games so that they are no longer public good problems. They generally do this by imposing penalties. For instance, nobody is going to spend the money to build an interstate highway system on their own -- the cost to them will exceed the benefit. However, it is in society's interest to produce said interstate highway system. So we all agree to produce a government that will tax people, jail those who do not pay the tax, and then produce a highway system. This eliminates the public good problem.
A second one is morality. It may not be in my immediate self-interest (or at least given what my brain can rationally predict) to avoid cheating someone. However, we are not perfectly rational creatures, and if a social meme can evolve that latches on to some non-rational structure of my brain, and force me to irrationally avoid cheating that person, this will be beneficial to the continuation of society, which is generally beneficial to the continuation of my decendents. Thus, morality is a positive to my society, at least barring the introduction of a superior social structure that can solve the same problem.
Morality solves some public-good problems that government cannot -- the government may not be able to enforce laws for every situation where morality tells you not to do something.
As many people have observed, the idea of morality being absolute is, quite obviously, ridiculous. While laws may be based on morality, morality is a pragmatically advantageous meme -- it can evolve separately in various societies to deal with slightly different conditions and challenges.
Morality needs a "hook" to convince (generally rational, self-interested) people to adopt it. There's no reason for someone to simply "be moral" for the sake of "being moral". Sometimes emotion can fill this role. Emotion is a common mechanism that we evolved to provide occasional "patches" to rationality. For example, while it may be an evolutionarily good idea to protect our children, it is not immediately self-benefiting (it serves our bloodline, not ourselves), and in any case the benefits of having surviving descendents (which are generally long-term) may not be immediately apparent to the rational mind, even if they could be explained in such terms. This explains, for instance, revulsion at, say, killing babies or love for spouse or children. However, emotion is generally a very basic thing. It is not much tied up in rational thought -- there are very basic triggers that fire it -- certain shapes, scents, and temperatures fire off lust in us, for example. It is difficult to quickly "train" emotion to rapidly deal with changing social conditions (and if we could, we would be too easily attackable by parasitic memes that would take advantage of us).
This need for a hook to get people to adopt morality and the inability of emotion to fully provide the hook is one reason religion and morality have often become closely intertwined. Religion ranges the full gamut of highly symbiotic to highly parasitic behavior. It has become expert in exploiting irrationalities and emotion in human nature to spread, protect itself, and survive. One way that a religion can greatly improve its symbiotic nature and thus its long-term prospects is by adopting moral elements -- morality is thus generally sym
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I'm really glad that you (and others like you) seem to be tackling this aspect of the corporate unaccountability problem. I'll be checking your web site out. What do you think of the movement to end corporate personhood? There is a lot of evidence that the priginal Santa Clara decision that gave personhood to corporations was never made as such, but was written into the record by an overly-enthusiastic clerk, Bancroft, who had a vested interest in corporate personhood.. (he had been a lawyer for the railroad companies, who were the pharma /oil corps of his day)
For more, see http://poclad.org/ and http://reclaimdemocracy.org/
NO! China is always controlling the Internet! As a hacker from China's mainland, I do hope we could fight against its control and break down the "Great Wall"(also called "Golden Shield Project").
Or only if that nation is Cuba? Cuba needs to have it's own Tienamen Square Massacre... so in a few years without a repeat they can claim "progress", and have their lobbyists infiltrate the Texas GOP.
Cuba will never, within the generation, have the US embargo ended. This has absolutely nothing to do with communism. Cuba's chances of sparking a communist revolution in the United States died a long time ago. Nor does it have to do with any threat that Cuba poses the United States.
There is a very simple reason.
The President gets to determine what we do WRT Cuba.
The President is elected by electoral college, not popular vote.
All member states of the US currently use an all-or-nothing vote -- you can't win three of five electoral college votes.
This means that the only states at issue in an election are swing states, and large states are much more important.
By far the most important swing state is Florida.
A very large chunk of Florida's voting population are immigrants who were kicked out by/fled Castro's administration. These people hate Castro, and will never accept a relaxing of US stance towards Castro.
So despite the fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from a national security standpoint to maintain an embargo of Cuba and that the vast majority of the US population really doesn't care one whit about Cuba (or would like to get cheap cigars and a nice nearby vacation spot), we will continue to embargo Cuba at least until Castro is dead, possibly until his regime collapses.
Which sort of sucks, because by doing so we completely screw over a vast number of rather poor neighbors of ours who have done absolutely nothing to us.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
PETA is a terrorist organization, sponsoring radicals to bomb laboratories for their own idiotic ends, harassing people who disagree with them, and generally conducting themselves like smug, ignorant, hypocritical assholes.
Anyone who attempts to speak about ethics while simultaneously supporting PETA could at the very least be described as inconsistent.