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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?"
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
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.
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
you know, I read this and I thought at first I agreed with you, but then I realized that really I didn't. It's 4 am and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to verbalize my disagreement, so bear with me.
In abstract, I agree with the idea that a sovergen nation should be able to have it's own laws. Basically, if a bunch of people want to get together and live under whatever waky laws they can come up with like wood should smell different on wednesdays or it's a capitol crime to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw or whatever.
The problem is, I think this only works if all of the people living under the rule of that country are doing so voluntarily. If I want to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw, then I should be able to move to an area were that's allowed.
Along those lines, I should also be able to be informed of other countries, other laws, etc, so that I can go someplace else.
The problem is that, in china, I don't think that either is the case. People can't very well up and move to another country easily, and because of the censorship they don't really know much about where they could move to.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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.
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
It isn't in the declaration of human rights, but Internet is a natural part of what we consider free speech rights. Places that censor the Internet usually do the same with newspapers, TV broadcasts, books, they imprison and execute dissidents.
I live in Belarus, a place gradually moving from moderate dictatorship to totalitarism. We have all the censorship in traditional media, and now there are moves to control the net access as well: forums impose self-censorship in fear of being shut down, gay sites get blocked, and opposition resources abroad suppressed during large political events.
So I beg to disagree. Unless you don't give a damn about Human Rights in general, Internet censorhip is ammoral and harmful.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
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.
A picture is worth a 1000 words
...and a few chuckles
Ron Paul
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)
The idea will not work. Corporations are not people, they are vampires. You cannot really kill them becasue they are not really alive. When you suspend the corporations activities, the stock will plummet as investors get out. When the price gets low enough, the board will use their own personal funds to buy up enough of the discounted stock to get control of the corporation at which point they will sell the assets of the corporation to the highest bidder or sell them at a discount to the new corporation they have formed which will in turn rename itself to the old corporations name. Both the equity holders (shareholders) and the debt holders (banks and other creditors) are SOL unless they are secured debt holders. The board either makes out like bandits, because after they control all of the stock and sell all of the assets as long as they comply with the rules for declaring dividends, they decalre a one-time bagillion dollar dividend to themselves or the keep on doing what they have been doing under either a new name or the same name. It is difficult to properly punish a non-entity.
There is no reset button in life; however, there are bonus levels.