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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.
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.
Here in Europe, as I believe it is in the US too, Companies are given rights akin to people. They want to be treated like people. They create brands which reflect their 'personalities'.
So, were I to say that people are only there to make money, and need no 'moral or social values', would you agree?
Would it be alright if I used slave labour?
Would it be alright if I killed for a more take-home every month?
Lie and cheat?
Bully my neighbours to score me a better deal?
Were I such a person, I would be lynched real quick!
Corporates are Sociopaths!
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
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).
so what are you suggesting? People working at google should quit their jobs and walk out? What's the name of the little world you live in?
We have laws because we cannot trust people to make up their own moral code.
We can not trust people to make up their own moral code, maybe. But we can expect them do.
I think that's one of the major problems. With comments like "they're a company, don't expect them to care about anything except profit" we demonstrate how we have stopped expecting people to act ethically. If we did, we'd have considerably more ethical people. And if we specifically said that those ethics applied to what you did at work, and what you contributed to, then I think we'd have more ethical companies and offices.
But we don't. We have been taught to think that whatever the market does it right. Or, if it's not right, that it's inevitable.
But people are made by their environment as much as they make it. It is a two way street. If we would start expecting people to have some humanity, they will start to. It might be disheartening because you feel like you're the one moral person who is getting beat up by the people who don't. (If you do, feel better knowing there are others out there who still feel that there is such thing as right and wrong and that trying to live ethically makes life fuller.)
But the alternative is no better -- we will continue to have to do more and more reprehensible things just to get by. Our kids have to take ritalin to compete in school now. To make it up the corperate ladder you have to stab people in the back. These kinds of awful realities are only going to increase unless we fight against it and insist that our business, cultural, and political leaders have some decency.
Laws aren't the basis of morality in the society, they're (hopefully) the product. But once we deffer too much to law and too little to our own ability to konw what is right and wrong, the more we have to depend on those laws just to maintain our society.
A cultural insistance on personal morality and responsibility would provide us a means to resisting the world we're heading towards (and are already wading in.)
This isn't some kind of "we need religion in our government" dogmatic position. We need a balance. But just withdrawing and saying, "to each his own" leaves us with a soceity that only hasn't collapsed because we have a reasonably well rooted judicial system.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
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.
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