Slashdot Mirror
Google's China Problem
Wraithfighter writes "The New York Times has a rather lengthy, but informative, piece on the origins of Google's current Chinese search engine, as well as a very informative look at how censoring is actually done in China. From the article: 'Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question -- the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.'"
Nice going editors. Another dupe.
I Want To Read The Fucking Article but I can't! Anyone wanna give some helpful insight?
Google is not "censoring" the chinese.
These websites are blocked in china anyways, so instead of having the first 3 or 4 pages of results blocked, google removed the results do delivery more accurate search results. Google isn't censoring the internet for the chinese, they are optimizing it.
Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question
Oh come on, very few in Amertica would argue against any limitations on information.
From trade secrets to copyrights to defamation to classified documents to pornography laws, restrictions on information are inherent in our whole legal system. How about court sealed documents? Furthermore, atatcking "propaganda" stations has long been considered a legitmimate aim of our military in waging wars.
Of course there gradations of censorship. The debate has ALWAYS been about which information can be restricted. Pretty much everyone agrees that some should be. Prentending otherwise is unhelpful and it's dishonest.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
like you haven't give a lot of your rights away recently.
We complain about China's economy growing, about the trade deficit, about jobs going to China...
Username: jpmorgan
Password: chastise
courtesy of http://www.bugmenot.com/
One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem. People just pretend that the issue isn't there and just hope it will go away if they put their blinders on. They just go about "trying to do the best they can" while completely ignoring the nature of the big ugly hideous beast breating down their throat.
How do I know that all this talk about giving Chinees the "most freedom that we can" is all bullshit? Because the people saying it are not only censoring, but they are lying. None of them call it like it is, none of them dare say "hey your government is a piece of shit" for fear of offending the Chineese powers that be. Basically, it is a policy of appeasement and to see how it will play out - Chineese history shows very clearly, it will end in disaster.
Near the end of the first page, Lee sums up the attitude on both sides of the Pacific pretty well: "I don't think they care that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S. democracy, that's a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that's a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live happily.'"
It's nice to know the Chinese are as apathetic about their government as we are in the U.S.
What?
before the Chinese government gets its hands on this technology anyway.
Make way for zhoogle!
Monstar L
The same URL from the same editor with a differente blurb: only in slashdot.
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According to the article the chinese internet excutives' point of view is that censorship isn't an issue sinse chinese aren't interested in the censored content anyway. Makes you wonder why there's so much effort put into censoring it in the first place...
Having some experience with eastern European countries during their communist regime, I can tell you it really is just a technicality for day to day live.
On one hand, people first and foremost are interested to live in peace and comfort and want to see their children doing the same. If they can achieve this, the philosophical aspects of the current emperor of the land is of no importance. On the other hand, if they can't they will damn whatever emperor makes their live miserable and at some point will seek to improve their lot by exchanging emperor.
For the less philosophical level this means: If you starve or are terrorised by the killer squads, you don't give shit about if those responsible are brandishing little red books or are the stoutest supporters of free capitalism.
This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.
Shouldn't the title read: "China's Google Problem"?
I realize that Google is trying to enter a new market, but I wouldn't be surprised if China really wanted Google there too -- on their terms of course.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
(Subject sez it all, folks...)
A recent PBS|Frontline documentary covered how the Chinese government has gone about censoring one major event from its past including on the internet, it's free to view online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/
This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.
Philosophies like "statisim" and "libertarinisim" are not just some nice little philosophies that sit on the clouds. They involve belief systems, and these belief systems lead to chioces, and these choices have conesquences. If people don't care, it is only to the extent that they don't realise the consequences of their choices. Do the leaders at google, yahoo, and cisco really understand the consequences of their choices other then beyond the next quarterly report? It sure seems like they don't care, which means that we as customers must - or else.
Only in this country, censorship is not done in the name of the government. It's done almost solely to "protect" children or those with weak sensativities. I don't necessarily agree with the idea but I am saying that it does exist here.
Is it 5:30 yet?
'nuff said.
I was hoping to read a DIFFERENT article, from the one of last week.
Oh well...
Not only is google participating in censorship in China, they are also involved in some activities in the U.S. which are disquieting. For example, they have been documented (see link http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/sheen_goog le_censoring_story_again.htm on at least two occasions not indexing important alternative news stories, such as the one on Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments above. Insomuch as they fail to index an important story which has been heavily visited and linked to, it is clear that they are engaging in de-facto censorship.
Censoring is a red-herring. If the citizens can not get to the info, then Google is only focused on what they can get to. In addition, Google notifies them that it is censored, where MS and Yahoo do not even bother.
The real problem is the use of the services for finding and punishing citizens. Microsoft and Yahoo have been turning over any and all information to govs. with a glee in their eye and $ in the checkbook. In fact, in the most recent episode, Yahoo turned over a DRAFT of an e-mail. This is not something that went out to the general public. It was not used anywhere. It was simply thoughts that are now being used against ppl. Yahoo/Microsoft will hang their head while crossing their fingers and winking their eye.
In contrast, Google has so far fought against American Gov ( and other govs. including chinese) about releasing any information that can be used in this way. Google did release info concerning ONLY child porn, but nothing that allowed a witch hunt by our admin. And so far, it does not appear that Google is releasing info about what individuals do.
But I have to wonder, how soon before Google does turn evil and starts releasing. Once they do, they will be heading down a very slippery and steep slope, that will force them to join the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, Enron, etc. in names that are now synonymous with evil.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That totally sounds like a great name for a new band.
> Do the leaders at google, yahoo, and cisco really understand the consequences of their choices other then beyond the next quarterly report?
I know this is a tech forum, but please don't forget companies like MacDonalds and KFC, which are really (negativelty) effecting the health of the population. Get rid of them first, since they can't possibly do any good to anyone.
(IMO)
Max.
I've got a an extremely smart female chinese friend who goes to MIT. We agree on most things in life but the one thing we totally disagree on (I used get slightly fumed about it) is that she supports her government fully. "The chinese population is far larger", "You need a government like this", "It's run more efficiently and there is less fighting in the government", are things you'd here from her.
I am far from being in agreement but I can after a year almost come to an understanding of why she feels this way. I was initially surprised as she did move here during about middle school.
Hmmm... Pie...
This isn't flame bait, it's just an opinion , and he didn't elaborate.That's all . ,using the tools developed in the US"
Flame bait would posting
"The US administration protects it's citizens' rights of free speech and privacy , while China practices censorship and personal surveillance
My Starcraft 2 Blog
>> I know this is a tech forum, but please don't forget companies like MacDonalds and KFC, which are really (negativelty) effecting the health of the population.
Eating some fried chicken now and then never hurt anyone. It's the people that go to KFC and McDonalds daily that are hurting themselves.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
From TFA:
I expected [famed political blogger] Zhao [Jing] to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. . . . Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.
"Google has struck a compromise," he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo's behavior, he added, put it in a different category: "Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo." The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage.
A useful perspective from one of the internet celebrities in China. I hope Yahoo appreciates all the good publicity its actions in China are garnering.
Do two quick searches to see for yourself, the difference between google.com and google.cn. These links refer to the image search on the U.S. and Chinese Google pages, respectively.
http://images.google.com/
http://www.google.cn/imghp?hl=zh-CN&tab=wi&q=
Search for "Tiananmen" on both sites and notice the *significant* difference in content returned by each.
Did anyone note that a feature of the censorship system itself is that the censored system is not accessible from the outside. So the censorship is not visible (=censored) to visitors outside china: this goes both ways and prevents an evaluation of the censorship itself. If you try to access google.cn from outside china, back you are to google.com. Smart, really.
American Ideals and American reality are two different things. It's easy to say "Censorship in all forms is wrong", but as we see on this site on a regular basis, just because a nation has an ideal doesn't mean it will live up to them when push comes to shove.
Google in China can't display results about democracy. Google in America can't display results about Scientology. Same shit, different pile.
It's been a long time.
Google hasn't turned anything over either because the government hasn't asked or simply because it wasn't publicized. If you annoy the government, the police come and harass your executives. If you outright defy the government (say, by refusing to release documents as required by a court order), they probably come and arrest your executives, probably torturing them. China doesn't have "due process" or prevent "cruel and unusual punishment".
You would have trouble recruiting executives for your company if you required them to uphold policies that would get them arrested and tortured without a trial.
Remember, Google was blocked comletely. Chinese people could only get access to Google if they set up an office in China, and having an office in China means obeying the laws in China.
dom
Click here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Seen from Europe, US news have been so incredibly single-sided when it comes to War on Terror or Irak.
And how often have you seen body bags coming back from Irak on national television?
And Europe is no better: the press was proudly displaying the Caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, boasting about how they support freedom of expression. Yet how many of those newspapers would accept to publish a carricature combining the Christ, the Holocaust, and phallic symbols.
Can we conceive that for muslim communities, displaying a representation of their prophet is just as unacceptable as using 4-letter words in the US?
I wish they would not cause riots because of this, on the other hand they don't have the means to muzzle our mass media as other communities can.
Of course, you are less likely to be shot if you speak out a diverging opinion in the occident than in other parts of the world. But you might well be committing social or economic suicide by speaking up.
This ensures that the media, who have tremendous control over what we see or hear, just won't let it happen.
I don't want to defend Chinese policies, or put the blame on anyone. I just wish that all of our societies were enriched by more open debates, feeding a more intelligent understanding of opposed points of views.
Maybe someone can clarify to me what exactly is bad about communism. My understanding is that it is an impractical and unachievable ideal: everyone works and pools his/her resources, which are doled out based on need. So, I, with my enormous geekthinking brain, would write Free Software worth, say, $100 per hour, while my intellectual weakling brethren would issue parking tickets, doing work worth $5 per hour. But they would need their three beers a day (medical reasons, of course) which they can't really afford, so the government takes from the pool of money (well, not really money but economic value) including what I generate, and assign it to them since they really need it. But that's okay! Because I don't really *need* my $100 per hour; I'm enjoying a simple lifestyle anyway, so why not give the excess to those in need?
The impracticality comes from the fact that I would actually prefer to keep my $100 per hour, because it's MINE! Mine mine mine mine! Besides, if I live in a country with no government retirement plan or health benefits (which would not be the case in an ideally communist government), then I'd want to save it away as a nest egg. The other factor is that those in control of deciding who gets doled how much, would invariably value themselves higher and say, "Those in government get more."
Even here I see only criticism of specific implementations of communism, rather than of communism itself. But the way the discussion goes on Slashdot sometimes, I get the sense that people feel that there are ideological and ethical problems even with an ideal implementation of communism, and I'm not sure what those are, so perhaps someone can explain. It's almost like communism was a trigger word, like "terrorism" or "child pornography" or the sound of a bell ringing.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
They're already selling them cheap elsewhere I am in Latvia right now on a Fulbright. One of the "big" supermarkets in Riga sells DVDs for 1-2 lats. (1 lat = $1.75). I only get Latvian and Russian cable so I will take what I can get. Typical movies like: "The Chronicles of Riddick," "Underworld," "Resident Evil," etc. are one Lat. Latvia is an EU country so these are clearly NOT pirated. Of course the per capita income is lower than in the US but higher than China by far (no real piracy problem of course), the price is very reasonable locally since a movie, the opera, etc is about 10 Lats. I almost never buy DVDs in the U.S. because the price is not worth paying for a movie that might suck. I do not go to movies for the same reason. My local public library has a great selection of CDs risk free, however, and you can buy a whole season of something good (B5, CSI, etc.) for 40 bucks. Anyway, I have bought dozens of them since I arrived. The last time I bought a video in the U.S. was at least five ago. Since I can get used videos for five bucks in many places (or free at the library), why should I give the industry a penny more? Now they can make something from me -- since the prices are reasonable. As many have pointed out here, if they lowered the price (like that booze in the mini bar in the hotel), many people who do not buy would start buying and piracy would be pointless. Same principle as the boneheads who bitched about outlawing smoking in bars and then discovered that the young people and bar crowd still goes out but now so do the non smokers. Go figure.
I thought that giving cheap food to the poor was a good thing...
There is a reason many people do not buy healthy food. If you want people to eat better, fix the macroeconomic problems that force them to make trade-offs in their health, instead of depriving them of choices.
Do the leaders at google, yahoo, and cisco really understand the consequences of their choices other then[sic] beyond the next quarterly report?
I'm sure the leaders at google, yahoo and cisco understand the consequences. It's how they act given that they know and understand the consequences that is an issue.
It don't blame google for the way they acted. If you read the article, google chose not to provide services which would require personal information and content to be stored in china and they don't reroute traffic in china from google.com to google.cn. It's china that blocks google.com. I don't have anything nice to say about yahoo and cisco though. I don't have anything nice to say about narus either.
...a very informative look at how censoring is actually done in China
It's getting harder to find things on Google here in the U.S.A.
This is one of the problems with the age of the blog/web page/snippet, and it's one of the reasons that publications like the Times aren't irrelevant yet. And it's also one of the big reasons that the half-hour television news program is a farce.
For some stories/ideas/reports, you can't boil everything down to three nicely CSS-formatted ample white space-surrounding paragraphs.
Are you suggesting that despite the informative nature of the piece that slashdotters might not want to read it because the learning experience would take too long?
Google is just having to deal with a situation brought on by decades of meddling by American business elites in the affairs between America and China China's government and American interests employ PR firms which harness former government officials like Henry Kissinger to lobby Congress and the American people in support of trade rules that result in major exporting of jobs and materials, along with turning a blind eye to Chinese human rights and environmental transgressions (also much to the delight of American business, whose interests are often at odds with democracy and the public interest). I find it interesting how Google is walking the line here...
There are still many ways to bypass the block. Assuming one knows that the web page exists. Thanks to this "optimization", this is no longer the case.
This is a silly argument because the optimization is if anything easier to bypass than the block. All you have to do is go to the Chinese google search at google.com, you know, the one that's existed ever since before the "censored" one at google.cn was created. The "normal" google is periodically subject to being blocked itself, but, y'know, if you can't see google.com in blocked form, you can't see the sites you're missing out on by not using it.
Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem)
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: April 23, 2006
For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.
It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the cheery optimism of a life coach; last year, he published "Be Your Personal Best," a fast-selling self-help book that urged Chinese students to adopt the risk-taking spirit of American capitalism. When he started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired dozens of China's top graduates; he will now be doing the same thing for Google. "The students of China are remarkable," he told me when I met him in Beijing in February. "There is a huge desire to learn."
Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected, he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the company's earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google's mission to bring information to the masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as "youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don't be evil = The Miracle of Google."
When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing that looked as if they had been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager young Chinese men in hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous flat-panel monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. "The ideals that we uphold here are really just so important and noble," Lee told me. "How to build stuff that users like, and figure out how to make money later. And 'Don't Do Evil' " -- he was referring to Google's bold motto, "Don't Be Evil" -- "all of those things. I think I've always been an idealist in my heart."
Yet Google's conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China's censorship laws, Google's representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" most anywhere in the world on google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely.
Google's decision did not go over well in the United States. In February, company executives
Um, has it ever occurred to you that people just like eating unhealthy food?
You could put a Surgeon General's warning on every McDonald's meal, and force the cashiers to say "By purchasing and consuming this product you are taking 1 day off of your statistical life-span and increasing your healthcare costs by $100, do you want to continue?" and people would still eat there.
Greasy, salty, fatty food TASTES GOOD to a whole lot of people. If you're not one of them, congratulations. Go eat carrots and live a long life. But to many people--admittedly, myself included--McDonalds' french fries taste quite good. I am aware of exactly how bad they are for me, and exactly how many calories and grams of fat they have in them, and I still enjoy eating them very goddamn much.
People have a right to eat what they want to eat, and this means that they may do things that you and other people find inexplicable or illogical. Even if you educate them about the risks and benefits involved, people are still going to smoke cigarettes, eat french fries, and drink aqueous solutions of ethanol. It's not because they don't realize or don't understand what they're doing; on some level, they're doing a risk/benefit analysis and their results are coming up the opposite way yours (or someone who doesn't eat at McDonalds, or smoke, or drink) is.
I'm really tired of all these people, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, who think that people eat at McDonalds or Burger King because they're somehow being forced into it by the Man. There are plenty of other food choices you could get for the price of a McDonalds meal, and unless you're also implying that poor people are by nature stupid, and should be forced to live a certain way because they're too dumb to do it on their own, they're choosing to eat at McDonalds regardless.
I have this feeling that if the people who want to punish McDonalds for selling unhealthy food were allowed to run the world, I'd have to turn to my friendly local drug dealer in order to eat what I want; and let's face it, a world where Klondike bars have to be smuggled across the border in the rectum of some Mexican mule is just not one worth living in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't know whether you're terribly misinformed or just a troll, but that article seems to be completely incorrect. One quick google search for '"Charlie Sheen" 9/11' and hitting the "I'm feeling lucky" button and I got this story.
I agree with you, sorry if I gave any other signals. I ate a french toast sandwich at BK earlier this morning. I said that it is wrong to deprive people of their food choices.
The way I see it, us Americans are all too keen to make out that our system is the best and that others should conform. That's pretty dammned arrogant for a country founded only a few hundred years ago by a bunch of native-american murdering, slave-owning white Europeans.
Imagine if the boot was on the other foot! Can you imagine the outcry if a Chinese corporation decided that it would burn an American flag every day and that it's employees should carry out this duty?
Why are we Americans so convinced our way is right? It's no wonder the rest of the world hates us, we act like spoiled teenaged brats most of the time.
Perhaps the fearsome ass-kicking we are currently receiving in Iraq will lead to some of us waking up and taking a more measured approach to foreign policy.
As for the genius who posted a link encouraging Chinese people to break the law by circumventing the government mandated censorship - I hope you are satisfied when your actions cause some poor Chinese person to be executed.
Countries such as China have these censorship laws for a reason. China is for the most part populated by barely literate peasant farmer type folks. Who can imagine the effect that something like 'goatse', 'rotten.com' or 'adequacy.org' might have on these people. It could lead to all kinds of instability.
In a nutshell us Americans need to stop projecting our values onto the rest of the world. They don't need us telling them how to live their lives.
Understood -- I didn't mean to go off at you so much as people higher up in the thread, plus more generally at the whole "McDonalds should be banned" meme which seems rather popular in some circles. It wasn't meant so much as a personal attack.
... :)
Sometimes you just pick a comment and hit 'Reply,' when it's not really much of a direct response
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And propaganda? No such thing - yes, I am sure this one is very, very hard to decide...
...just like how the USSR never had any nuclear incidents, and the Soviet space program never suffered any less of human life. Crime, suffering? Practically non-existant! Oh, if only the glorious Communist state had survived, we would never have such troubles in Russia!
...in case my sarcasm is not perfectly clear: There's a fine line between "keeping an open mind" and "remaining entirely gullible". I think someone's crossed it.
--"to date"; ++"within most of our lifetimes" [ie, post WW2]
The second example sucks anyway, consider this Damage Control.
BTW, now I realize that the "our" could be taken as a hyper-patriot speaking. I meant the exact opposite - it's silly to consider a country your own, unless it acts exactly as you yourself would. Which basically rules out all countries that I know of (except maybe Vatican City - mmmmm, large brainwashed contingent worldwide... ; ) )
Yes, You hate censorship and tyranny. Put your money where your mouth is. Boycott China. http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/
Unless it would be a major inconvenience, then nevermind and just wear your indignant attitude proudly.
Be heard || Be herd
I think most people are missing the point, i have spent half of my life in china and half of my life in the UK and i can say for sure, nation wide internet access in china can only be a gd thing. why? The main problem in china is that there is a huge divide in income, most of the lower classes have limited education due to the large divide, this has changed. information is now essentialy free in china to almost every one, call it piracy if you like but piracy of education can only be a good thing. Even some of the most remote towns in the hills and valles have a internet cafe, more importanly the whole of the next generation will be exposed to almost every bit in the internet. So what if only 99.9 of the internet will ne avabile in china it make no frecking diffrence, the sacrifice in so called freedom is minimal compared to the good effects will it bring to the nation as a whole. The effect of putting a high price on information (copyright, education), and indeed physical goods has only the effect of removing it's access from the less fortune (poor ppl). This creates a desire for people to gain more represental welth individualy. since it can be assumed if every one is worked equaly hard one man's gain is one man's loss. This creates a greater divide in both distribution of physical goods and information as a whole if one is unconnected, and not just a lack of welth... but also a lack of knowlage is created. where all the bottom level agents are simply drones. but since there must be a large number of workers the majority will always be ill informed thinking they are still free, when they are infact bounded by time and welth instead of censureship. Thus freedom is nothing when there is greed. because in a free arena greed will dominate if not regulated. thus is freedom is that state still free? every country runs differently, for china to enforce control of it's media in any other way will be almost impractical and expensive, simply due to the mass of it. to think of it in another way china's media more symbotic with its political system, each allowing the other to thrive under's it's own terms, and protecting each other activly. The internet is not yeht truely free, since the information contained within is too disorganised, and not found easily. the difference is bascily in the links in the information, it's like the difference in structure between a every large notice board and a wiki. The protocal must change or at least sites which contain large amounts of information must change. information access must become more of a two way process, allowing for more user end control and promotion of information. the information should quickly became self organising with access, and adaptive due to the userend interaction.
Nothing is said about who is providing China with the technology to find (in China's opinion) internet abusers. All this publicity over Google leaves me cold when the REAL story is NOT told.
Actually, there was a specific policy decision by the Chinese government after Tiananmen Square: to appease the masses via capitalism in order to stay in power. China was far closer to revolution than most people in the West realize. Though widely reported in the West to be a student protest, Tiananmen Square actually involved weeks of protests where an estimated 10% of Beijing's population was involved. The army was actually sent in to stop the protests weeks before June 3 with orders not to shoot, but were engulfed by the citizens, unable to reach the Square, and forced to turn back ( very humiliating for a police state ). The leadesrhip realized they were on the brink at this point, and the second time around, 300,000 troops were told to clear the square at all costs and were not deterred. Most of the deaths weren't of the mainly rich students of elite professors at Beijing University ( who were largely spared ), but of the rank-and-file citizens who tried to blockade the army the second time around. ( I didn't know much about June 4 until I saw PBS Frontline's excellent documentary called "Tank Man", you can view it online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/vi ew/
===
Drawing on interviews with Chinese and Western eyewitnesses, Thomas recounts the amazing events of the spring of 1989, when a student protest that began in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic central space of the nation, spread throughout much of the rest of China. Several weeks later, when the government sent in the army to end the demonstrations, the citizens of Beijing poured into the streets in support of the students. "You had a million people on the street, minimum. ... That was unprecedented, definitely in modern Chinese post-revolutionary history," says John Pomfret, who was in Beijing at the time, reporting for the Associated Press.
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The point is that Beijing appeared to be on the brink of mass revolution, hardly apathetic to the government. Why the change now? Shortly after June 4th, Deng Xiaoping enacted several economic reforms effectively moving China towards a free market economy.
Today, the masses of farmers/peasants in the countryside are pissed at hell over the government / drawing the short end of globalization but have no voice, no way to organize. But the middle class in the cities have been appeased by capitalism, just as Deng had hoped. They've seen their standard of living---and most importantly, the perception of upward mobility---skyrocket beyond imagination. Why would they want to rock the boat now? It's hard to imagine a revolution happening without the support of the middle class in the cities.
But, as time goes on, it may become increasingly difficult for the Party to maintain its identity while appeasing the voracious appetite of yuppiedom. In the early going, market reform could be largely separated from political reform, but as the standard of living rises, we get into areas that require political/legal reform in order to keep the foreign investment pouring in: in particular, clamping down on corruption, transparency of the law and trust in the legal system, removal of the fat-cat state industries that line the Party member's pockets. What I wonder is, if the Party manages to "stay in power" by ceding to these reforms, will it even look anything like the police state / bad-guy government we in the West love to hate? Perhaps Singapore provides a vision of what such a government may look like.
Like quite a few people on /. I own a domain, and manage a few websites. Because China prevents connections to certain websites, how about if the webmasters of the world somehow got themselves organised and were able to mirror some of the censored content on their website for a period of time. Then at some pre-arranged signal (I'm thinking of the lighting of the Olympic flame in Beijing in 2008 here) everyone switches their home page over to a new one where banned chinese information (pictures, words) is prominent. Also included, could be a couple of links to other sites hosting similar material aka a webring. The point being that up until the lighting of the flame, no information is available, but once the flame is lit then the whole web "lights up" with banned information. It would be impossible for the chinese to censor all these websites, even during the time that the Olympics occurs.
Somehow, a register should be set up of content providers and hosters, anyone registering for content hosting would not know of anyone else - the whole thing would be secret - and the register would allot content to hosters so that the whole thing is multiply redundant. Finally, the whole effort should be overseen by someone respectable who can report if things are going OK or if there's a shortage in any particular area.
There's a couple of years yet until 2008, should be enough time for a mature discussion and ample time to develop a co-ordinating website and distribute the required content.
Thoughts anyone?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
and then there is a situation where if i don't eat in a certain way i get cranky so you could put a label on my shirt that says
"The Surgen General has detirmined that depriving the contents of this shirt Fat caffiene and salt may be hazardous to your health"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If you want to go a little further down, Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he had no intrest in slavery either way, it was none of his business. He engaged int eh civil war to hold together the Union and nothing else. His later decision to emancipate the slaves in the area under martial law was commendable, but it wasn't part of his agenda,
That's an interesting way of looking at things, but a few facts lend itself to a different interpretation. First off, the Republican Party was an abolitionist party. It was founded to be abolitionist. Lincoln could not have been possibly been nomimated as a Presidential candidate if he wasn't abolitionist. It would be as absurd as Democrats nominating someone who was pro-life or Republicans pro-choice, it just is not going to happen.
Furthermore, Lincoln had plenty of quotes against Slavery:
http://www.nps.gov/liho/slavery/al01.htm
"The institution of slavery is founded upon both injustice and bad policy" 1837
"I have always hated slavery" 1858
"I believe the declaration that all men are created equal is the great fundamental principal" 1858
"Those who deny freedom to others, do not deserve it for themselves" 1859
So, basically, from the beginning of his career, all the way up to and including the civil war, which included being the first Presidential Candidate by an abolitionist party, Lincoln was anti-slavery.
Lincoln's civil war spin about 'preserving the union' was, well, a lie. The civil war was always about slavery. Lincoln lied to the American People about why the civil war was being fought, and he pretty much did it for his own religious beliefs. He overruled his generals, he alienated Europe, and in fact, at the height the war, one of his ex-generals actually ran for President against him, and it was only a set of victories for the Union that handed Lincoln his re-election. Fancy that. The one thing I don't get about Lincoln, is why he made his disasterous choice of Vice President.
This is my sig.
Not only do most Chinese not care about the government as long as their lives are OK, but they also were not indoctrinated with "Nothing is more important than Democracy" pap that we get from birth in the west. In some senses, the Chinese might as well be another species, as different as their thinking is from Westerners.
I think the Chinese government's filter is silly more than it is evil. Sure there might be a few incidents if suddenly everyone was exposed to the full details of what has been hidden, but considering that we discover all sorts of not so plesant truths about the govenment almost daily in the states and do nothing, why would the Chinese?
Long before we had the notion of open source, we had the idea of the Open Society - this is a rehash of an argument from Popper's "The Open Society and It's Enemies".
The argument goes that societies are complex things, and to some degree are beyond our ken - we cannot properly predict the effects of instituting this regime or that regime, because we're simply not smart enough. Picking some system of human government and using our limited rationality to show that it works will likely lead to massive human suffering - any system that people come up with by rational thought is likely flawed. This includes Communism, Libertarianism, Fascism, various kinds of socialism, and some of the more ideologically driven kinds of Capitalism, and many ideas of Theocracy. Maoism is one of these bad ideas. As soon as someone says "if only we all do this we'll be in utopia" you know the idea is a stinker.
So what do we do? The great innovation of democracy is not that we pick the best governements - it's that we get a mechanism to get rid of the worst, without bloody revolutions. The useful bit of democracy is that we get rid of the most incompetent and evil, rather than we get to elect the best and the good. An added benefit is a government with prescribed powers --- it stops people with "bright ideas" running amok with them. The process does need "freedoms" and "rights" - essentially the freedom to mount public arguments that the government is broken, and the freedom for the majority to somehow get rid of the broken government (or broken bits) without great personal risk. This (however the nuts and bolts work) is the guts of the open society. The US bill of rights with a fairly absolute notion of free speech is just one implementation of this.
The nice thing about western capitalism/democracy is its organic nature. It's come together through a process of tentative experiment, and when bits haven't worked (e.g. 1850s and early 1930s laissez-fiare, or 1960s welfare statism) they've been gradually gotten rid of. Bits that have worked (e.g. universal income tax, freedom of information acts, reasonable economic freedom, well-paid volunteer armies with a strict notion of no political interference) are kept, and keep evolving. We evolve through tentative breaking of precedent. We don't get a good system, just one which isn't terribly bad - and a "not bad" system is what the Open Society strives towards.
China is getting there on the freedom to say the government is broken; where it lacks is the "getting rid of broken bits" part. I imagine that given time the chinese will come up with their own uniquely chinese solution to this. I imagine it will work, but be at least as daft and odd (to foreigner's eyes) as the US electoral system.
- 1) No one who does any work for the government, or any non-profit organization can hire him
- And making sure that there's a nasty mark on his permanent such that he's labeled a 'dissident' or 'terrorist' or 'communist'(ok mabye not communist), so no one else will hire him
- cause problems with the security net (whatever his country has) allowing him to fall through to the deepest depths of poverty
All of it seems his fault; "Why couldn't you just get a job you worthless communist hippie? You didn't have to starve to death"Granted I'm not sure how much of that power the neocons currently have, but there *is* a terrorist list with a LOT of people on it, including people who work at the ACLU, democrat party, and green party, and there was a law at least suggested that would allow 1) and 2) to take place(not sure if it passed or not), and 3 is just the logical extention of 1 and 2.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I had to argue in mid-2004 with someone who honest to god still believed the earth was flat, and had no conception of the solar system. A humanities student, he was from a poor part of the UK, and happened to come from an absurdly religious family. Smart guy (though he didn't know all too much, but knew to a good extent where his knowledge ended, which is more than a lot of people can say), watched a lot of TV, and didn't get out much, and was a self-proclaimed fundamentalist. We had some interesting discussions we did.
It scares me that people like him are going to graduate and find successful careers while freaks like me get to sink to the bottom of society like rocks.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Mod this poster up.
People, when making arguments against Google's actions, conveniantly leave this fact out. They often state that Google has removed their access to these search results, when the people making the arguments know they are not being completely truthful, and are using this misconception to further their own arguments.
How can anyone know if the registrar is trustworthy?
I look in the tv show in belgium yahoo google play with china cencure !
Holy crap. Fair and balanced, indeed.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Well, off the top of my head, if some "name" in opensource were to back such a scheme I for one would have no problems registering.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I just looked and my Dockers and the cup I am drinking from were both made in China. Everyone here has contributed to the propsperity of the Chinese economy and government.
Poignant question.
But maybe it is more correct to ask, when was the last time the US media covered any protests at all in or out of a Free Speech Zone ® ?
Even years ago at the WTO protests in Seattle, the media covered nothing about the protests except the problems. No mention of the issues just stats about # of rocks thrown, arrests, assaults, injuries, etc. Don't even try to ask about protests overseas against US policy. Those are even mentioned in the US media.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. If this is true, then how can they explain their decision to support China's censorship laws? Google accepting the censorship standard by Chinese law to is a sacrifice of the people's interest to achieve business profits. This only encourages China to continue this practice by making it acceptable. If they wanted to do good they would publicly denounce this practice and state why, in good conscience, they will not do business in China. It is sad that it always comes down to the almighty dollar.