Slashdot Mirror
How Chinese Evade Government's Web Controls
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "China is moving to 'centralize all China-based Web news and opinion under a state regulator,' the Wall Street Journal reports, but determined citizens have found a way out of previous restrictions in what has become a cat-and-mouse game: 'Many Chinese Internet users, dismissing what they call government scare tactics, find ways around censorship. The government requires users of cybercafs to register with their state-issued ID cards on each visit, but some users avoid cybercaf registration by paying off owners. In response, the government has installed video cameras in some cafs and shut others. ... While certain words such as "democracy" are banned in online chat rooms, China's Web users sometimes transmit sensitive information as images, or simply speak in code, inserting special characters such as underscoring into typing.' Also noteworthy is that major portals seem to be cooperating with authorities' restrictions: 'Insiders who work for the big portal sites say they are already in regular contact with authorities about forbidden topics, such as the outlawed Falun Gong religious group, which their teams of Web editors pull off bulletin boards.'"
Wow, I certainly would like to see a conversation on 1337 (H1N33553!!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Already sounds like Jew-crit in the States: "thou durst nought criticize Jew."
> As we U.S. citizens look to the federal government to educate us
All of you?
> rebuild our mistakes and provide our retirements, we save nothing (1%) and lose
> rights.
You've built plenty of mistakes - no need to build any more! Oh, and 1% isn't nothing. And you've not lost any rights that the majority of US voters are concerned with.
All religious movements are an attack on humanity. Religious people belong in gas chambers. Falun Gong members should consider themselves lucky to have the corruption removed from their heads by the government.
The internet is actually the most centralized form of communication ever invented. This alone makes it the least free form of communication ever invented.
Theoretically , I know, its 'spread out' and 'peer to peer'. But the basic reality is that you can't do jack crap without the nameservers but worse than that without an 'upstream ISP' hooking you in. The further 'upstream' you go, the more centralized the control, and the bigger the corporation/government that controls the network.
Just look at all the times slashdot 'editors' have deleted comments off this very site you are reading right now. The defense is always 'we own it we can do what we want' or 'we have to comply with the law or else we get shut down'. Even in a concentration camp you can steal private conversations with other inmates without knowledge of the guards. On the internet, every last thing you send is recorded for all humanity, passing through dozens of routers most of which are produced and/or owned by a major conglomerate corporation that has close ties with a government entity.
Truly pathetic.
Chavez was democratically elected. The people love him.
Trolling is a art,
So yeah, cencorship is bad. And all the props to the people who get around it.
But I see these Falun Gong people on the streets of NY protesting and handing out whatever crazy newspaper they've got. And while the fact that their beliefs are illegal is bad, these Falun Gong people are kind of nutty. They do some wacky mediation stuff. And they dress up as people being tortured with rags covered in fake blood. There's a huge wikipedia article on it you can read.
What I'm trying to say is that it is wrong for the Chinese government to persecute these people. But when that government calls Falun Gong a cult who teaches superstition, they aren't too far away from the truth.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Are we not allowed to sit the fuck down wherever we please? Have we not earned the right to speak our minds without even thinking about being arrested? It doesn't matter that Cindy Sheehan was alright with being arrested, it matters that she was arrested *at all*. For SPEAKING.
Permits to protest, you say? How... American.
Point taken. I guess this whole topic offends me deeply; I am strongly opposed to this "war" and the people who are spearheading it. I am also a steadfast supporter or basic principals of liberty, however unpractical they sometimes can seem in this country.