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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.
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.
Welcome to slashdot, where you have to insert a microsoft bash to get submitted article posted ;)
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...
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.
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In Soviet Russia ... ... there was no Internet :-)
Bonjour !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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
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
A picture is worth a 1000 words
...and a few chuckles
Ron Paul
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.
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)
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
I'd say that if a company does something bad enough to be worth a long-term suspension, let it start from the bottom again (just like humans) when it "gets out."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.