Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy

rmunaval writes "Reporters Without Borders has an article on search-result censorship in China by different companies. The conclusion was made based on six politically sensitive keywords. A search on yahoo.cn resulted in 97% pro-Beijing results compared to 83% on google.cn and 78% on msn.cn." From the article: "[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or 'Tibet independence', temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond."

Comments

On the third try...

[chrismcdirty]

It acts like it will respond, but in reality it is notifying police that people are trying get information.

Re:On the third try...

[wr0x2]

You realize what bullshit this is, right? They have millions of internet users, and a huge number of such requests each day. The only possible course of action to take against users searching for this stuff is timing out their requests for a while.

Re:On the third try...

[Sexy Commando]

I think it's the Great Firewall that's doing the blocking, not Yahoo, according to the wikipedia article. Basically TGF sniffs all HTTP packats and attempt to find sensitive keywords in strings and put the IP on temporary blacklist for 30 min. or so.

Re:On the third try...

[Jeremy Erwin]

The only possible course of action to take against users searching for this stuff is timing out their requests for a while.

Or they could simply allow the search.

Re:On the third try...

[Anonymous Coward]

It acts like it will respond, but in reality it is notifying police that people are trying get information.

Wait, are you describing yahoo! in China, or a White House press conference?

Re:On the third try...

[drinkypoo]

It takes practically no time to reject a search that matches "naughty" keywords. This is a non-issue. In fact you could probably hardcode them, and keep them in memory all the time, so you don't even have to load anything but the filter code (assuming THAT isn't persistent) to filter requests. Hopefully it's ALL persistent, with some kind of database caching mechanism to speed things up ANYWAY - so there's REALLY no reason they should be denying subsequent, non-filtered-keyword requests.

Re:On the third try...

[john83]

But would that not imply that the other search engines are getting around the firewall?

If the firewall is so effective, why would China have asked Google to impliment a search filter that's inferior to existing methods?

Re:On the third try...

[stoph ct]

If the people don't see the results appear in the list at all, then they can't know they're missing information.

And I doubt China wants to bother to automatically replace Google's result pages with their own propaganda.... much easier just to have Google return "good" results in the first place

Re:On the third try...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I think the Great Wall of China is so far-reaching that it's filtering out jokes that go over your head, so you literally interpret said jokes!

Re:On the third try...

[wr0x2]

Or should I say, only realistic course of action. China is not as of yet democratic.

'Worst' Filtering policy

[HugePedlar]

Or is it really the best? ;)

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[Zarel]

According to the article, it seems like it's the best, with the least number of "unauthorized" results. One has to wonder how they decide what is "unauthorized" and what is "authorized", though. Do they call the government and ask "Hey, will you tell me if I should look at $PRODEMOCRACY_WEBSITE?"

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[B1ackDragon]

Yeah, as much as I'm tempted to say that Yahoo is 16% more evil than Google, I think it's more likely that they are equally evil - Yahoo is just more competent at it.

Unless of course, Google's poor censorship is on purpose, and it's their way of bringing freedom to the area. Then um, way to go?

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[voice_of_all_reason]

One has to wonder how they decide what is "unauthorized" and what is "authorized", though

The government in China deliberately doesn't specify exactly what is illegal. It's far more effective for ISPs, newspapers, tv producers to overcompensate in censoring themselves knowing that failing to do so will likely lead to their imprisonment or execution.

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[alexhs]

Worst ? Best ?

It's really the same once you're accounting for PR spin.
Yahoo is the worst filter as XP SP2 has the best firewall. :)

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless of course, Google's poor censorship is on purpose, and it's their way of bringing freedom to the area. Then um, way to go?

Which is exactly what Google's policy happens to be. They're doing the minimum required by Chinese law and even letting the Chinese know when and why the results have been censored.

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[Guppy06]

"Yahoo is just more competent at it."

Evil and incompetent? Google truly is the next Microsoft!

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[shutdown -p now]

Were there any known executions for spreading or accessing anti-government propaganda in China in the last, say, 15 years (since Tiananmen)? If there is a suspicion that some or all of those at least are not publicised, then is there any evidence that they do happen, or is it pure speculation?

Serves them right...

[RISTMO]

That's what they get for not doing 4-6 (for June 4th) like the rest of the world...

Re:Serves them right...

[DRM_is_Stupid]

LOL! In China, it's 6-4. But I'm not even sure who you mean by "they" and "the rest of the world."

Re:Serves them right...

[RISTMO]

Ah, ambiguity... `they` would refer to China... As to the rest of the world, well, for the most part, outside the US, people reverse the month and day in their dates (June 4th is written 4-6). In this case, the rest of the world is more or less everyone outside America (and apparently China)... Again, that's more or less... isn't ambiguity great?

WoW

[earthstar]

Wow!
What policies Yahoo has for China ! Super censorship!
Couple this with my Sig link - Giving away emailers to Govt !!!
Uber "******" !

Re:Wow

[b0wl0fud0n]

Don't worry about setting up a proxy for the Chinese, most of them already know how to get around the system.

Re:Wow

[Zarel]

What are you talking about? The first result I get when searching "tiananmen square" in Yahoo.com is 'Wikipedia: Tiananmen Square protests of 1989' compared to yahoo.cn, which is '' (Tiananmen regional administration committee). Neither one appears censored.

Re:Wow

[Braino420]

I think you'll be hardpressed to find a Chinamen that gives a damn (and that wouldn't turn you in for doing so).

It should also be noted that our results here in the US are also censored.

Re:Wow

[ndansmith]

This could be an issue of cultural bias, not censorship. In the English speaking west, the only thing we know about Tiananmen Square is that major pro-democracy protests occured there in 1989. To Chinese people it has a much broader significance, and the protests are only one of many notable aspects of the Square (including the fact that it is the largest public square in the world).

Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.

Re:Wow

[reddeno]

I would like to propose an addendum to Godwin's law, whereby all references to Tiananmen Square with respect to search engines immediately ends the thread, and whoever mentioned Tiananmen Square automatically loses any debate in progress.

Re:Wow

[Pink Tinkletini]

Mod parent up. This is closer to what's actually happening--the 1989 massacre shows up in Google image results once you get past the first page or two. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Chinese citizen who doesn't know about the 1989 events and wouldn't know where to find information on it.

Re:Wow

[mugnyte]

Sure the returns are different, but top link on yahoo.cn for ["Tiananmen Square" massacre] is enough information to start someone thinking.

So I'm a little doubtful that these changes are dramatically affecting the mindset of the Chinese population. Like I've heard in interviews before "If you want to read it, you can find it".

Re:Wow

[zippthorne]

I don't think you understand godwin's law at all. Or for that matter what a physical law is, which is what "godwin's law" is a tongue-in-cheek example of.

Re:Wow

[Kadin2048]

Actually, based on the reports I've read, the majority of Chinese internet users don't care. They search for information on freedom and democracy about as often as the average American, which is to say, not very often.

I would bet that if anything bothers the average Chinese internet user, it's probably the censorship of porn, not political speech.

There are methods available today by which most people with half a brain could circumvent the Chinese authorities and read Western information sources, write blogs, etc. But the great majority of Chinese internet users, just like their American and European counterparts, are probably more interested in searching for the latest information on pop stars and movies than they are in reading some dissident's blog.

Availibility of information is the easy part, compared with getting people interested in reading it.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

fine then, please demonstrate how our results are censored. Oh wait, that's right, they aren't. You're talking about Chinese government censorship as the same thing as FOX or CNN putting pro-US slant on things. That doesn't mean I can't search for and find anyhting I want on the interent.

Re:Wow

[blibbler]

Another example is the results if you search for Nagasaki on google.com compared to google.co.jp
In Japan, people know of it as a city, while people outside of Japan generally only know of it as the second victim of the nuke.

Re:Wow

[reddeno]

Okay, I'm not sure it really matters. But yes, not the law per se, but one of the "corollaries and usages," as Wikipedia puts it:

"There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress."

So, however I should label it, that's what I want.

Have a good one.

Re:Wow

[alphaseven]

Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.

That sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Probably the closest equivalent to Tiananmen Square in the U.S. would be Kent State, and when I type that into google I get refrences to the university but many more to the shootings. Searching "google images" for Kent State gives lots of pictures of the incident.

Re:Wow

[GbrDead]

Your comparison reminds me of an old joke we had here during the totalitarism:

An American and a Bulgarian are talking. The American says:
-Here, in the USA, we are really free. For example, I can go just in front of the White House, and shout: "Down with Ronald Reagan!", and nothing bad will happen to me.
-Oh, the same here: I can go just in front of the Party Central, and shout: "Down with Ronald Reagan!".

It is sad what has happened to the USA...

Re:Wow

[kwark]

Does anyone know where we can find the pictures for $LATEST_ATROCITIES by $WESTERN_COUNTRY in $THIRDWORLD_COUNTRY? Or has that government still not released them in fear of outrage about them?

Re:Wow

[Pink Tinkletini]

Sure, but imagine you're a prospective student in Akron, Ohio, trying to find relevant information about Kent State University--academics, programs, extracurriculars, that kind of thing. All you'll get from a naïve Google query is information about the shootings, which is irrelevant and useless to you, not to mention highly redundant (you grew up here, after all). I have no doubt a hypothetical www.google.akron.oh.us would rank the shootings far lower than would the nationwide www.google.com, and be that much more useful to you as an Akron resident.

Re:Wow

[Braino420]

Alright, http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Int ellectual_Property/Copyrights/Digital_Millennium_C opyright_Act/Google_Erasure_of_Anti-Scientology_Li nks
Do a search for scientology. Right now it is 12.6 million vs 17.6 million. When I tried it a few months ago, it used to tell you...

Re:Wow

[WilliamSChips]

You were saying?

Re:Wow

[entrylevel]

You are an idiot. Or I have been trolled.

A) The so-called censored links your are referring to have long since been added back to the Google index.

B) The links to discussions of so-called censorship exist on the very site that you claim is performing the censorship!

C) The very first site on that list no longer exists. Truly a tribute to an issue that is still relevant today! I find this amazingly ironic, because Google is willing to link to, and keep a cached copy of, evidence of the very crime that you are accusing them of, long after the top-ranked site covering the issue has ceased to exist!

D) Scientologist have a written policy promoting the outright *destruction* of individuals and organizations that criticize or oppose them in any way. They have a track record of carrying out that policy to the letter without regard for laws, ethics, or morals (although they happily use the law if they can). I suspect that until Google was sure what it was dealing with and that it had a legal leg to stand on, they simply did not want to piss the Scientologists off. No one needs that shit at the office.

F) Maybe the number of search results is dwindling with time because more and more people realized that it is a smarter idea to simply ignore Scientology as opposed to baiting them into coming after you? Maybe just not as many people care about it one way or the other anymore?

Re:Wow

[oasisweb]

Actually, that is not what is really happening. The offending pictures are being actively removed. The single image about the incident you see on page 3 was probably indexed by accident. You will also notice the page is no longer accessible.

The rest of the pages do not have one single picture of the massacre.
Two links worth two million words: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen&hl=zh-C N and http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen&hl=zh- CN

That's not cultural bias. It's blatant censorship.

Re:Wow

[aardvarkjoe]

"Results 1 - 10 of about 33,500 from xenu.net for scientology. (0.06 seconds)"

Yeah, the government's sure doing a great job of keeping me from finding out about subversive, anti-US organizations like ... Scientology.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This could be an issue of cultural bias, not censorship.

On a news program a few months back, the reporter interviewed a group of Chinese college students. All all grew up in the time since Tiananmen. Shown the famous "tank man" photo, it was the first time any of them had seen it, none knew what it was about.

Re:Wow

[Danse]

On a news program a few months back, the reporter interviewed a group of Chinese college students. All all grew up in the time since Tiananmen. Shown the famous "tank man" photo, it was the first time any of them had seen it, none knew what it was about.

Well they definitely aren't being taught about it in school. And they aren't going to learn about it on TV, or the Net. If you're a parent, you probably don't want to talk to them about it either as kids tend to run their mouths all the time and could get themselves and you in a lot of trouble. So I'd say that the censorship has been pretty effective.

Re:Wow

[WilliamSChips]

Actually, the anti-Scientology site's the one being censored. With laws like the DMCA, the US is getting worse and worse.

Re:Wow

[808140]

This is true, unfortunately. Even here in Beijing, where most young people have parents or relatives who were involved or knew people who were involved in the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not uncommon for them to not know what "6-4" means.

Of course, when you actually know something about the incident, it becomes very tiring listening to people parroting it in the west. What western power has not done something similar at some point or another? For example, in my parent's generation, the My Lai incident in Vietnam was a major, major deal, and yet most people in my generation probably have no idea what it is. Similarly, in my US World History class the 27 million soviet soldiers who gave their lives opposing Hitler were not even mentioned -- the only reason I even knew about them is because my German grandfather had first hand experience running from them, and yet somehow I was taught that the US and the UK did all the heavy lifting in the European theatre.

Other examples abound. Up until very recently, the Taiwanese government had an extremely active censor on the 228 incident, refering to a massacre that occurred on February 28th, 1947, in which the Guomindang essentially murdered between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending on whose estimates you believe. The Tiananmen Square incident occurred much more recently -- in 1989 -- and the government already admits that it was "a mistake" (I live in China). The 228 incident was buried by the Taiwanese for more than 40 years (it is now a national holiday on Taiwan.)

The Japanese refuse, for reasons of face, to own up to the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst afronts to human decency the world has ever seen, and many Japanese I've spoken to have never heard of it, or if they have, are not aware of the implications. The Japanese government refuses to allow its inclusion in Japanese history books used for education, and the current Japanese PM makes frequent visits to the Yakusuni shrine, where he pays his respects to the convicted war criminals who were responsible for the Rape and many other similar atrocities.

There's the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British military gunned down 400 peaceful indian protestors, many of them women and children, who were sitting in a walled enclosure and had no means to escape the guns. At this point we're going back a ways in history, but how many British kids are fully aware of the implications of this incident?

It's also a little bit frustrating to hear the Tiananmen Square incident portrayed as a pro-democracy movement when that was really only part of it. It was, in fact, a relatively disorganized gathering of people with wildly different goals. Gorbachev was visting Beijing at the time, and for those of you that remember the timeframe this was around the time that he was pushing Perestroika in the USSR (judged by essentially everyone except some Americans to be a catastrophic failure in the long run.) The faction of students protesting the government were pushing for more transparency and more reforms, including but not limited to democratic and economic reforms. But they weren't the only ones there, nor were they the only ones murdered -- but because the other group (comprising roughly half of the people present) were not pro-democracy agitators, they are never mentioned in the west (their deaths, presumably, are not important.)

The other half were anti-reformists, primarily workers who had enjoyed good and stable conditions under pork barrell socialism and who were suffering under Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms, as they were unable to compete in an increasingly deregulated market place (similar to the anti-globalisation wonks we have nowadays.) They wanted a return to pre-1980s Maoist China! Can you believe it?

How could these two wildly seperate groups get along, given that they had such completely different aims (more reforms, versus less?) The answer is simply that they appealed to nationalistic fervor. They got together and sang the Inte

Re:Wow

[UserGoogol]

It's both. Google ranks websites based on (among other things) how many links are to them. It is not reasonable to suppose that websites which link to websites which the Chinese government doesn't like very often contain content that the Chinese government doesn't like, and thus the rebellious websites which stay around have a deflated number of links.

Search engines aren't the only things which China censors, after all.

Re:Wow

[Petrushka]

Well, duh, what do you think "censorship" means? It is in the nature of censorship to conceal that it has happened. But, as a relatively poorly censored case of censorship, go to http://www.google.com/search?q=xenu and scroll to the bottom.

For an even more striking effect, do the same search on Google.cn and scroll to the bottom. Interesting, no?

Re:Wow

[aardvarkjoe]

Huh? xenu.net is the anti-scientology site, and like I pointed out, Google happily returns 33,500 results for that query, and points to the complaint on the chillingeffects so you can even find the copyright-infringing materials. (And besides, this whole thing happened four years ago.) I may not be too thrilled about how the whole thing was handled, but pretending that it's even in the same ballpark as systematically supressing political views is just moronic.

Re:Wow

[Braino420]

Relax kid, no need for name calling. I was simply bringing up a situation where they have implemented a type of censorship here in the US. I had not realized until today that things have changed (I really don't go looking up Scientology too much). This still did happen. I'm sorry it got you so excited (very entertaining)

Olympics

[TrappedByMyself]

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped. I wonder if China will have free internet zones to avoid bad press.

Re:Olympics

[Zarel]

Considering the number of Westerners that actually want to search for things like "freedom" and "democracy" (as opposed to, say, "porn"), I'd say very few will notice.

Re:Olympics

[Iphtashu Fitz]

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped.

My guess is that they'll set up unfiltered internet cafes in Olympic venues that are only for access by Olympic staff, athletes, and foreign visitors . They'll keep Chinese nationals out of them. It wouldn't be all that difficult for a communist government to restrict access, especially considering the security that Olympic venues typically have.

Re:Olympics

[Charmless1]

I don't think they are particularly worried about bad press. Isn't that what they censor out anyway?

Re:Olympics

[voice_of_all_reason]

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped

Who else will be there, really, except reporters and the athletes? I don't anticipate the Jones family in Oaklahoma getting a cornsitter for the farm and heading off to Beijing to see how the East makes flapjacks.

Reporters likely know to tread lightly already, and I'm sure the athletes have to go to some workshop before the whole thing starts titled "Don't do any of these things in country X or you will be killed."

Re:Olympics

[tutori]

Reporters likely know to tread lightly already

Sure.... I'm sure there will be situations with this. They probably won't involve mainstream press, but there will be someone. Remember, reporters don't just come from the US.

Who else will be there, really, except reporters and the athletes?

Well, I would like to go to the Olympics sometime. I don't know if I would go to them in China or not, but if some people I know are competing, it's certainly possible.

Re:Olympics

[kfg]

Ah, but what about "olympics+porn" (go ahead, try it. I won't tell), or. . . "olympics+pepsi+burger king"?

There may be method in the IOCs madness.

KFG

Re:Olympics

[njchick]

Wikipedia is blocked in China. That's something people would notice.

Re:Olympics

[Anonymous Coward]

China is a right-wing fantasy country. Activists automatically get beaten and arrested, blind loyalty to the government and its leaders is heavily promoted, businesses are allowed to run amok, the military is doted on, workers are exploited to their limits, and information is completely regulated by the government. Republicans must be dying of envy.

Re:Olympics

[Danse]

China is a right-wing fantasy country. Activists automatically get beaten and arrested, blind loyalty to the government and its leaders is heavily promoted, businesses are allowed to run amok, the military is doted on, workers are exploited to their limits, and information is completely regulated by the government. Republicans must be dying of envy.

Umm.. close but not likely. They aren't allowed to own guns, and most of them aren't too keen to worship our lord-n-savior. Those are generally republican deal-breakers.

Re:Olympics

[docbombay]

Lots of Westerners will probably go -- just not Americans.

Re:Olympics

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good old mid-western bashing.....

Oaklahoma... remind me. Is that near Califournya?

For the record, if you were referring to the state of Oklahoma, you wouldn't need a cornsitter. You would need a wheat sitter.

I guess in Oaklahoma they grow corn. Sounds like a nice place. Dumbass.

Re:Olympics

[zanglang]

Gee thank you. Your post has been, um, useful for our research. Scientific research, yeah. Scientific research for the benefit of menkind.

Re:Olympics

[kfg]

Bear in mind that traditionally the competitors in the Olympics were all, every one of them, completely bareass.

KFG

Re:Olympics

[drsquare]

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped.

This firewall only applies to people within China, Westerners will be fine, the Olypmics isn't the World Cup, not many will be travelling to watch it.

Re:Olympics

[chickenandporn]

As a Western user currently residing in Beijing, I can warn you that you may underestimate how often a very common (in the West) tool is unavailable. Consider having spotty access to google and gmail, and zero access to any blog or wikipedia tool.

Yeah, it's more than porn... but that's not to say I don't miss porn too... considering my login...

Allan
Zhongguo Beijingshi Dongchengqu

Re:Olympics

[Zarel]

Strangely enough, the last time I went to China, I didn't have any problem with stuff being blocked. Then again, the last time I went to China, I didn't know about Wikipedia.

Wow

[42Penguins]

Every once in a while I think censorship has gotten bad here in the USA.
Try searching "Tiananmen Square" on yahoo.cn and compare to yahoo.com.

If I had more bandwidth, I'd gladly put up a proxy for these folks.

6-4

[BigNumber]

That's odd... at google.cn 6-4 says 6-4=2.

I can't find a flaw in that.

Re:6-4

[cyfer2000]

In China, if you want to say some one is stupid plus a little bit of foolhardy, you can call that guy "2", which is simplified from "250, er-bai-wu".

Re:6-4

[Supersonic1425]

In China, 6 - 4 = 5.

Re:6-4

[john83]

Well, -1/1 = 1/-1
So sqrt(-1/1) = sqrt(1/-1)
or sqrt(-1)/sqrt(1) = sqrt(1)/sqrt(-1)
or i/1 = 1/i
That's the same as i/2 = 1/2i
add 9/2i to both sides and then multiply both by i
You get i^2/2 + 9/2 = 1/2 + 9/2
which is -1/2 + 9/2 = 1/2 + 9/2
Therefore 4=5. It's not much of a stretch to prove that 6=5, so 6-4=0

It's all a big Chinese conspiracy, I tell ya.

Re:6-4

[BigNumber]

You gotta love that imaginary math!

Re:6-4

[HappyEngineer]

Step 3 to 4 "proves" that -1=1. The error is in the step that assumes sqrt(a/b)=sqrt(a)/sqrt(b). That's only true when a and b are positive real numbers.

Re:6-4

[john83]

Bah! You're one of them - Chinese commies come to poison our vital bodily fluids.

Censoring?

[Anonymous Coward]

"[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or 'Tibet independence', temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond."

Actually, I think that's just how Yahoo! works in general.

OB: Invader Zim

[Ignignot]

ZIM: Well, after I was done with my rampage I put the fires out.
TALLEST: You made them worse!
ZIM: Worse... or better?

Look behind the headlines

[b0wl0fud0n]

Yahoo may not intentionally be setting a strict policy towards censorship. You have to consider how the Chinese state is run. The Communist Party is an exclusive group of members who actively recruit in order to increase their influence over the population.

During China's rapid economic growth as a result of foreign investment and a move towards a free market economy, the Communist Party was unable to cope with the rapidly changing environment and failed to make the transition into this environment and continued to recruit amongst traditional areas of the Chinese economy.

Thus this created serious problems since Communist Party penetration in privately owned companies to less than one percent. This generated tremendous amounts of fear within the organization since they realized that they were falling behind on the times and needed to aggressively recruit from the educated portions of the population.

Without new recruits within the new economy, the hold of the Communist Party on the population would be significantly weakened. A significant problem since the Communist Party's right to rule is derived from mostly propaganda and peer pressure. Few people feel like protesting the government because Chinese culture derives it's strength through strength by numbers. Belonging to a group is especially important to Chinese people and by going against the government, you suffer severe consequences socially, economically, etc.... You can easily see how the lack of Communist Party members within the richest and most profitable portions of the workforce could become a problem.

One of the reasons why Communist Party membership penetration amongst the workforce was so low in privately owned businesses was because of a lack of recruitment amongst the intellectuals in the country. The educated group has always been shunned by the Communist Party throughout it's existence (ie Cultural Revolution/Tianamen/Hundred Flowers Campaign). However, when Communist Party members began to leave their posts to work for private corporations, the party was forced to change and the Communist Party began significantly recruiting from intellectuals. Since this movement started, Communist Party penetration has now grown to the 5-6% range within privately owned companies (although many neglect their duties and fail to pay their dues).

My bet is that the Communist Party specifically targeted Yahoo when they were recruiting for new Communist Party members in order to create an internal system to maintain control and ensure that Yahoo, as a foreign privately owned company, wouldn't go too far out of line of Communist Party doctrine. There isn't much that Yahoo can do as a foreign company can do to change the internal culture of their Chinese employee workforce. You can't fight against the Chinese government.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can't fight against the Chinese government.

Which is exactly why we must.

Although, it is the Chinese people in China who need to do this, while we Americans work to ensure that we don't follow the path China did to get where it is today...

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Penguinoflight]

I'm sure some of what you say is correct, it certainly makes sense. The only problem is that there is no choice but to fight the Chinese government when they commit so many humanitarian crimes. Yahoo has already aided the Chinese government in capitol punishment of those who speak against the norm. It's one thing to deny information from the public, but it's even worse to jail/torture/kill those who use their voice.

If yahoo cannot control their subsidiary company in China, they should formally separate themselves from central control in the US. The risk of being tried for humanitarian crimes here in the United States should outweigh executive loyalty to working stiffs in China. It's unlikely that yahoo execs are that stupid, so they probably support the Chinese government's totalitarian actions.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[r_naked]

You need to worry about what is happening in America before you go and worry about anymore foreign "problems".

If something isn't done soon, we (as American's) will have to turn to Russia or Cuba for help with our oppresive regime.

Don't be blind to what is happening in your own backyard.

--PEACE!

Re:Look behind the headlines

[TheBogie]

You will know it is as bad here as it is in china when you look down and see a car battery attached to your nuts. Until then, I think things here in the US are better than china.

Don't be blind to what is happening in your own pants.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Pink Tinkletini]

There are those in Europe who believe America's habit of capital punishment is morally wrong, and a grave humanitarian injustice (and I'd be inclined to agree). But suppose you testified in a capital case, and your testimony helped send the defendant to the gurney. Next time you fly into Heathrow, do you think you should you be pulled aside, shackled, and tried in the Queen's court of law? Or would you appeal to the fact that what Europe considers morally wrong isn't the same as what America considers morally wrong?

Re:Look behind the headlines

[DM9290]

Yahoo could refuse to provide the censored service. Or to be more accurate,it could if it were a human being. Since Yahoo is a corporation with no ulterior motive beyond the bottom line, ofcourse it will cooperate. Whereever the money is, Yahoo will follow. Plain and simple. Yahoo doesn't need to be in China, it went there seeking RICHES. It went to satisfy GREED.

You'll never see a corporation sacrifice its life for the greater good. Put up its very existence in front of a military battle tank simply to make a point that death is better than life as a slave. Corporations feel no remorse and no shame. CEO's are bound by law to seek maximum profits and put their personal feelings aside.

That so many people are dumbed into thinking corporations have HUMAN RIGHTS is utterly appalling.

By aiding and abetting the continuance of the Chinese Communist Party, Yahoo as an organization is just as condemnable as the communist party of China is. Its shareholders are as members of the Chinese Communist Party, all jointly responsible for the human rights violations taking place there. Doesn't Yahoo seek the exact same thing the Chinese Communist Party seeks? (POWER)

If Yahoo wants to help the people of China break free of bondage, then why does it try to blind them to the truth which the communist party so desperately wants to hide?

Which one is worse? The executives at YAHOO know what freedom feels like. At least some of the Chinese Communist Party members have been oppressed for so long they may genuinely believe that absolute supression of individual human rights to the state is justifiable.

This post is not merely directed at YAHOO but at the very institution of the corporation itself.

Unless a corporation has embedded human rights in its shareholder agreement (have any as of this date?) then it is legally bound to treat human rights as nothing more than a Public relations matter. Whatever a corporation says about CARING about anything. Don't buy it for a second. It isn't legally permitted to CARE about anything except self-interest (and anything else the shareholders agree to in the shareholder agreement).

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Penguinoflight]

You misunderstand. Yahoo is run by Execs in the US. The execs would be fined or taken to court in the United States because they do their business here. I do understand the French citizens find Americans very disturbing and act very rudely to american tourists. I guess it's inevitable for countries of polar opinions to not get along. The only reason that Yahoo execs get away with murder is because they have a ton of money and are therefor above the law. (See Lay, Simpson, etc).

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Pink Tinkletini]

Yes, but I can step off a plane in Paris without fearing for my essential liberty. I'm not going to get dragged to the Bastille for having contributed (via testimony) to the state-sanctioned murder of a mentally handicapped person in Texas. What you're suggesting is much the same--that Yahoo's executives ought to be brought to justice here for things which we consider unjust, but which aren't necessarily considered unjust in the jurisdiction where they occurred.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[zooblethorpe]

Yes, but I can step off a plane in Paris without fearing for my essential liberty. I'm not going to get dragged to the Bastille for having contributed (via testimony) to the state-sanctioned murder of a mentally handicapped person in Texas. What you're suggesting is much the same--that Yahoo's executives ought to be brought to justice here for things which we consider unjust, but which aren't necessarily considered unjust in the jurisdiction where they occurred.

IANAL, but just to play devil's advocate, one could take the stance that what happened in the US, what Yahoo's US execs themselves did, is the aiding and abetting of, possibly including conspiracy to ________ (have a lawyer fill in the blank). This much can be shown to have occurred on US soil, and as such would (at least theoretically) be prosecutable in US courts.

But it is very worth emphasizing the parent's point -- Person A should not be legally liable in Country B for actions performed in Country C. If you want to go after Yahoo's execs this way, find something they've done in the US. The censoring itself is happening in China, carried out by order of the Chinese government (AFIACT); any political imprisonment and / or execution is happening in China, carried out by the Chinese government. Inasmuch as sovereignty means anything in international law (another subject entirely for exploration elsewhere), the US courts can't do diddly about these things. They might be able to take on contributory actions carried out by people in the US -- but this is something that a lawyer would have to look into.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[iminplaya]

You will know it is as bad here as it is in china when you look down and see a car battery attached to your nuts. Until then, I think things here in the US are better than china.

For you maybe. Just what makes you so certain that there aren't a few car batteries attached to some American nuts...in America? You may not be noticing it, but the American government is getting more secretive all the time. You just might have a few "Abu Ghraib" prisons of your own that you haven't been made aware of yet. Don't be too surprised. As it is, the prison population numbers speak for themselves. And both countries have their share of "undocumented" prisoners.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Anonymous Coward]

Or would you appeal to the fact that what Europe considers morally wrong isn't the same as what America considers morally wrong?

If it was the other way around, it wouldn't work that way. The US makes it illegal to leave the country in order to have sex with a minor. So if you flew in to Heathrow, had sex with your 16 year old internet fling (perfectly legal... on UK soil) then flew back to Texas (Where you should have cooled your heels a year), you could be arrested.

So hopefully all the Americans against asking Yahoo to act "American" in China will get busy in their letter writing campaign to have this law abolished, since otherwise they're just hypocrites.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[posdnous]

ensure that Yahoo, as a foreign privately owned company, wouldn't go too far out of line of Communist Party doctrine

Yahoo China is not a foreign privately owned company, in fact it is majority owned by Alibaba, a chinese company.

http://www.alibaba.com/aboutalibaba/press/releases 050811.html

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Petrushka]

But suppose you testified in a capital case, and your testimony helped send the defendant to the gurney. Next time you fly into Heathrow, do you think you should you be pulled aside, shackled, and tried in the Queen's court of law?

Sorry to butt in, but that's a really interesting question, and I'm not sure that the answer is "no". The principle of charging people for crimes committed in another country is fairly well established, and not just in the US (as with the likely extradition of Gary McKinnon), but also e.g. in the case of Australia's laws on child sex tourism.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Petrushka]

You seem to miss the point that by the time you see those batteries attached to your own nuts, it's just a tad too late to start worrying.

I shouldn't be even slightly surprised if the more-than-a-billion people in China who've never had car batteries attached to their nuts feel much the same way about your country as you do about theirs.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Knetzar]

In Maryland it's legal to have sex with a 16 year old. So if a resident of Texas flies to Maryland to have sex with a 16 year old, when you fly back home can you get into legal trouble in Texas?

Re:Look behind the headlines

[sjames]

But suppose you testified in a capital case, and your testimony helped send the defendant to the gurney. Next time you fly into Heathrow, do you think you should you be pulled aside, shackled, and tried in the Queen's court of law?

Apparently, the F.B.I. believes that's EXACTLY what should happen. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Penguinoflight]

Well it's certain that judging people here for what they do in other countries is seemingly overreaching. On the other hand, the US government has been running around settling problems around the world more than anything, but completely ignoring problems being caused by US citizens in China.

When the act is suppressing free speech, a action cannot really be judged in the area it occurs. It would probably be fair to say that if China was a legitimate government, what yahoo committed would be considered unjust.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is more evil than Microsoft in China? Or is it that Yahoo has better code than Google, and Google has better code than Microsoft?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is less evil, more competent. Yahoo is more evil, more competent. Microsoft is just incompetent.

Blocking Is Easy

[blueZhift]

Well, Yahoo! (and the others) are just following the money. And of course cutting stuff out of returned search results is probably not very hard to do, if you really don't care about unintentionally blocking other stuff. We can all be pretty sure that the saavy Chinese internet user knows that the results they get back are censored. It's too bad that U.S. based companies have to be such willing participants. But hey, they're just in it for the money like any for profit corporation. Just stating the obvious...

Re:Blocking Is Easy

[MostAwesomeDude]

Um, sadly, people will believe an untruth if they have it fed to them often enough. Here in the USA, everybody believes that copying copyrighted digital materials is theft, not copyright infringement, and they believe it because the RIAA and MPAA say so. Yahoo! isn't cutting out search results -- they're completely disabling search terms that are not PRC-friendly. If they were just filtering out or refusing to index certain pages, then that wouldn't be as bad; however, what they are doing is forbidding people from using certain words in the search engine. If enough people stop using a word, then perhaps people will forget the word and the meaning behind it...

Ahh Freedom

[dunezone]

China: Filthy Democracy! You have no respect for us Chinese! Democracy: He ripped my arms off! China: Shut up! I didn't rip them! Republic: China, your making it worse. China: Go back to your strip malls... where values are king.

Re:Ahh Freedom

[zelnot]

I don't know if the ATHF reference is really applicable, unless yahoo is peeling skin off of chinese people to record search results.

North Korea has them all beat.

[Anonymous Coward]

North Korea has them all beat.

Yet another anti-China news item

[Pao|o]

Blah blah... Yahoo China follows local laws & censors. Blah blah... Google China follows local laws & censors. Americas & other democracies are outraged and yet not dare do an all out embargo or else goods will skyrocket in price so they go after businesses that follows the legitimate laws of China.

Re:Yet another anti-China news item

[Doc Ruby]

If the government is bad, what's wrong with an anti-government news item? Unless you're the government...

Re:Yet another anti-China news item

[voice_of_all_reason]

The problem is when things that are illegal NOT to do in China are illegal to do in the US. Sure, we have a very selective policy on enforcing our laws on citizens working in other countries. As long as the Google regional president in China isn't availing himself of sex tourism, he should be in the clear.

Look at it this way -- what if Google opened an office in Amsterdam for Google Weed? Promoted it just as heavily as every other service and with the same zeal, and they wouldn't ship to the USA. Think there'd be so many lawmakers insisting they were "just following the local laws?"

Re:Yet another anti-China news item

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
    100% Flamebait

Well, now it's clear that we've got government TrollMods patrolling Slashdot. How pathetic and weak.

how long will it be before they tire of this game?

[cheesegunner]

They can't possibly win this one... sure, "tibet independence" is blocked, but if you search "free tibet" on google.cn, you get nothing but pro-tibetan pages. It may take a while, but I think they'll eventually realize that, just or unjust be damned, it's just plain uneconomical to try to keep up with blocking search terms.

So much for freedom on the Internet

[abstract1]

I wonder when this will all stop...or better yet, what it is all leading up to? A different Internet for each country? A governing body consisting of members from various nations (yea right)? When is enough enough when it comes to freedom on the Internet? I mean, if they aren't even allowed to SEARCH, where will the next limitation be placed? It's only a matter of time before the masses revolt against such restrictions. But then again, (so to speak) - if they haven't seen the grass on the other side how do they know it is greener? Generations are growing up in these censored countries and don't even realize it is happening. Not only are they missing out on a lot of information on the internet, but their entire culture is being CHANGED based on what the government wants them to see and believe. Thoughts?

Re:So much for freedom on the Internet

[voice_of_all_reason]

When is enough enough when it comes to freedom on the Internet?

When technology advances enough for a common person to access it without having to rely on a company. I dunno, beam the information into space and store it as a tachyon field in a quasar. Or something.

Re:So much for freedom on the Internet

[abstract1]

LOL.

Re:So much for freedom on the Internet

[syrinx]

I dunno, beam the information into space and store it as a tachyon field in a quasar.

But the Chinese could probably reverse the polarity of the deflector dish and censor it anyway.

Re:So much for freedom on the Internet

[voice_of_all_reason]

I meant to imply that it would be at a point where people do not need to rely on any person or good to communicate with others (IE - telepathy)

Re:So much for freedom on the Internet

[Petrushka]

A different Internet for each country? A governing body consisting of members from various nations (yea right)?

You're right, the ineffectiveness of ICANN (to name one example), due to top-down political pressure from specific countries, is quite obvious. I suspect the most likely scenario is your first suggestion: a compartmentalised internet for each country, with some overlap. Efforts in the US to make the internet tiered seem to point this way; even if the US go ahead and make its own internet tiered, it's hardly likely that other countries will follow suit. Instead, like China, they'd adopt their own policies -- similar to the US in some ways, similar to China in others, different in yet others. That would, I think, essentially be a different internet for each country.

Naturally that doesn't take into account the fact that in that kind of situation geeks with know-how would make maximised use of those bits of the internet that do overlap. That would presumably have a balancing effect. But it does look like this is the way things are heading.

Microsoft.cn

[Distinguished Hero]

The conclusion was made based on six politically sensitive keywords. A search on yahoo.cn resulted in 97% pro-Beijing results compared to 83% on google.cn and 78% on msn.cn."

Go Microsoft! Then again, perhaps their incompetence is showing...

Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[TibbonZero]

Firstly, I can't stand how any of these companies is just 'going along' with it. Yes, fiduciary responsiblity to investors etc but so would be dealing with the devil.

To the point however, it's funny that all of this happens only due to the world's largest communist country accepting certain capitalist ideas. What i'm saying, is that if it wasn't due to the money factor then this wouldn't be happening, and the search engines of the world might (effectively even perhaps) force China to change some of their policies a bit. However, since money IS the issue (which for some reason in reading Marx/Engles I thought that money wasn't supposed to be controlling in Communisim) then the people are being censored.

Were I a company, I'd just say "Fuck you" to China.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[Pink Tinkletini]

And in so doing, you'd just make life that much worse for China's citizens, by depriving them of whatever services you're able to render. Hope that's something you can live with.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[base3]

And by providing the censored service, you provide the Chinese people that much less incentive to throw off the yoke of their oppressors and bring back the legitimate government-in-exile from Taipei. Hope that's something you can live with.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[bunions]

It's pretty easy to say "fuck you" to millions of imaginary dollars.

As long as there exists no unified effort to isolate China, the idea that a company should unilaterally boycott China is a nice thought, but toothless.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[Pink Tinkletini]

Isolation's been tried before, and inevitably it only leads to greater deprivation and misery. The problem is that people on the inside won't even realize what they're missing. How could they, when you're deliberately withholding even what scant information from them that their government allows them to see?

Hell, North Korea's philosophy of juche is nothing but self-imposed isolation; its citizens should be ready to "throw off the yoke of their oppressors" any day now, right?

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[iminplaya]

Were I a company, I would say "Fuck you" to censorship, no matter what country it occurs. And then I would be developing software and/or hardware to subvert that censorship and make it impossible. And try to remember, despite their claims, China is not communist. They are a simple authoritarian dictatorship. Possibly more brutal than others, but not really any different. The Communist Party is in name only.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[stinerman]

Isolation's been tried before, and inevitably it only leads to greater deprivation and misery.

You must break a few eggs to make an omlette. Things will get worse, but they'll get better if the people care.

Hell, North Korea's philosophy of juche is nothing but self-imposed isolation; its citizens should be ready to "throw off the yoke of their oppressors" any day now, right?

If they're not willing to stand up for themselves and "throw off the yoke of their oppressors" then they deserve it. All people have the government they deserve. We Americans will start to find that out in the next few years.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[shutdown -p now]

which for some reason in reading Marx/Engles I thought that money wasn't supposed to be controlling in Communisim

Indeed, which is why there's no Communism in China. At the moment the best way to describe it is "state capitalism".

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[bunions]

All people have the government they deserve.

The Jews, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and most of Cambodia would like a word with you.

Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[bunions]

Well, the Cambodians would have disagreed, but the government they deserved had their skulls neatly stacked in piles. But you know, those babies totally deserved it for not rising up.

Methodology

[Infonaut]

From the article:

Reporters Without Borders tested Chinese search engines by using the following "subversive" key words: "6-4" (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), "Falungong", "Tibet Independence", "Democracy", "Human rights" and "press freedom". The first ten results displayed by each search engine were analysed and then divided into "authorized" and "unauthorized" sources of information.

This seems like a rather simplistic analysis to me. Are most Chinese citizens going to use such obvious terms to search for information about topics they know the government is attempting to block? My understanding of how Chinese citizens use the Internet is limited, so I'm likely off base. It just seems to me that most Chinese users of Yahoo would be gathering information using terms less likely to be aggressively filtered. A broader comparison might be more useful in determining just how aggressively each engine is filtering results.

what scale of data are we talking about here?

[revlayle]

there comes a point where anything times zero is still zero, and no one is doing any better or worse at censoring than anyone else

Errr... Weird I can get refrences to the massacre

[technoextreme]

Weird... I can actually get refrences to the massacre using Yahoo China by searching Tianenmen Square massacre.

Priorities

[Mateo_LeFou]

The governmental powers who are hot and bothered about "intellectual property" violations in China maybe could apply pressure on the free speech area first. The way I'm seeing it the things that piss America off most are (in order)

1. Be Iraq
2. Develop weapons of mass destruction
3. Support terrorists
4. Infringe copyrights
..
... (Profit?)

...

...
413. Abridge freedom of speech, or of the press.

morally ambiguous

[bigpat]

If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond.

I wonder if it is better to let your customers search for things that will get them persecuted? If there is simply an error then Yahoo could probably get away with simply not logging the attempted search. So eventually when they are compelled to hand over search logs to the police then they can claim that it was simply an error and perhaps not log the attempt in any detail. And, except that it is now documented, it is so subtle that police would be none the wiser.

Then again this is precisely the type of thing authoritarian governments count on, that merely the threat of persecution is enough to suppress most challenges to their authority. Leaving the few real challenges to their authority to be dealt with harshly. Authoritarian and totalitarian governments really turn morality on its head and being honest about even the littlest thing might get yourself or someone else hurt or killed.

Methodology

[necro81]

FTFA:

Reporters Without Borders tested Chinese search engines by using the following "subversive" key words: "6-4" (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), "Falungong", "Tibet Independence", "Democracy", "Human rights" and "press freedom". The first ten results displayed by each search engine were analysed and then divided into "authorized" and "unauthorized" sources of information.

I am not a statistician, but that seems like kind of a small sample set for such a sweeping statement. Each search engine was judged based on just 60 reported websites (6 terms, 10 results apiece). I'd be interested to see what one would find on, say, the fifth page of results. The quality and relevance of the search returns on page five would decrease probably, but some oddball stuff can get through that way.

I do give them serious credit for even reporting the methodology - a lot of places that post stats (aside from tech reviewers) never post how they got those results, or under what conditions.

God dammit! Hotlips! CHINA SUCKS !!

[Anonymous Coward]

God dammit! Hotlips! CHINA SUCKS !!

The Best Policy

[LukePieStalker]

Yahoo actually has the best filtering, technically speaking. All these companies have decided to go along with Chinese government policy and filter antigovernment content. It just happens that Yahoo's filter works better.

Ha!

[calebtucker]

You think the Chinese have it bad... I can only get to slashdot at work from 11:30 - 12:30! In the US even!

Sound familiar anyone?

[SuperBanana]

I was curious about the "hundred flowers" bit you cited, as I'd never heard of it. Wikipedia to the rescue (of my hideously bad middle-school/high-school education, which consisted mostly of "HOLOCOST BAD, REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD" and the US Civil war. (Vietnam war? Haha. Not even -mentioned-. And this was in the mid 90's!)

After the campaign was officially declared over, Mao's resentment for the intellectual population had accumulated. Continuing with an Anti-Rightist Movement he had began a few years previous, he reasoned that the intellectuals were the basis of all existing problems. Mao ordered arrests of counter-revolutionaries on the basis of their letters and punished many harshly, using torture and capital punishment without any form of trial.

Why could I not help but think of the (Bush) White House choke-hold on scientists (literally- someone in the White House censors anything put out by gov't scientists on Global Warming), its favoring of religion over science, and its (or rather the GOP's) constant screaming about how the "liberals" (ie, educated, intelligent, fairly secular people) are out to destroy "the country".

Oh, and the bit about "torture and capital punishment without any form of trial" kinda hit the point home. Granted Bush hasn't gone any massive "cultural" "purges", but it kind of makes you wonder...

Re:Sound familiar anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

massive "cultural" "purges"

Those will come with the next Clinton presidency. It will be ok though, because it will be the gun-toting-right-wing that will be purged.

wtf?

[Chutulu]

In Google.com if i search for 6-4 it displays 6 - 4 = 2 What kind of censorhip is this?? XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (censored) .....

Would this work?

[Astatine210]

As a possible tactic to foil China's crippling of internet searching (or, for that matter, any country's policy of censoring its internet input), set up a number of "code word" euphemisms for events happening in China that match phrases that don't initially look suspicious to the authorities, and which will blend into the background of most searches until long after the proverbial cat is out of the bag.

For instance, set up a website that details the Tianenmen Square massacre of 1989; however, instead of plastering "Tianenmen Square Massacre" all over it, refer to it as the "Hunan Blossom Harvest". The language and pictures will make certain to anyone viewing the site that this is anything but horticultural; it's a depiction of a vicious crackdown on a peaceful public demonstration, with plenty of blatant "clues" to when and where it happened. Get plenty of friends to make websites referring to this event in the same manner.

All it takes is for one returning "dissident" armed with the phrase, and I'm fairly certain the news will spread meme-like far faster than the authorities can crack down on it.

Rinse and repeat with clear criticism of the Saudi royal family in slightly euphemistic Arabic, and other fun stuff.

Re:Would this work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do it in the spirit of Googlewhacking:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google whack

1) Create a set of 5-10 articles (or use wikipedia?) that give information on the censorship and the censored material
2) Create a set of free accounts at various sites: geocities, blogspot, ezboard, anyplace where someone can theoretically post content. (Alternatively, identify a series of out-of-the-way, forgotten, unused guestbooks, message boards, and comment systems). (call them all hosts for the rest of this post)
3) For each host:
    a) post all of the information from step 1
    b) add a unique set of 2-3 words (again, a unique set of words for each complete set of articles) that return zero or one results in Google or some other combination of web pages.
4) distribute one set of search terms to people whose access is censored.
5) whenever a set of search term is blocked, distribute the set of search terms pointing to the next complete set of articles

It should be possible for one or two people working in their spare time to find hosts and post enough sets of articles that there's no hope of stopping them. This is even more true if it becomes a larger phenomenon: imagine if every semi-amateur site author tucked the articles away in a corner of their site with a unique set of terms...how many domains can they really block?

If they start blocking the articles/pages by their textual content, switch to images of the text. While slightly more time intensive, if you start with one good clean set of images of the text, it shouldn't be hard to make plenty of slight variations that would be very difficult to filter for but still easy to read.

The hardest part, of course, is distributing the search terms in such a way that they aren't blocked before people get to see the content. Theoretically, one saavy person with plenty of printer paper could drop hundreds of copies of a wordset with instructions...is that enough? Maybe it's more about getting the information to the right people, so that the general population begins to murmur enough about what's going on.

Cons:
"If enough key people see the effort put into this cause by outsiders, maybe they'll start to change their minds" ....sounds waaaaay too much like the thinking that leads to terrorism.

If you can distribute instructions and the sets of words....why not just distribute the articles?

ahh well, it was fun to plan anyhow.

Re:Would this work?

[shutdown -p now]

You assume that the Chinese people are really interested in defeating the filters, and would be motivated to spread the information as required for ideological reasons. Seeing how weak the dissent in China is (don't forget to consider the population of the country), I'm afraid it won't work simply because people with more loyalist feelings will simply self-censor.

Re:Would this work?

[posdnous]

I am in china, and your understanding of the chinese internet and also chinese government strategy is misguided.

Any dissident who is at least marginally persistant will be able to get around the ban, there are many, many ways to get to sites that have the information they want. There is no need for this euphemism tactic at all. The chinese government isn't out to block ALL dissent, since they know that it is impossible.

Their strategy is to stop the dissent from becoming a major MEME in the minds of the chinese population, and all that is needed is to prevent the spread of these dissenting ideas to a SIGNIFICANT % of the population. And to do this some rather simple search engine filtering, a flawed but heavyhanded firewall along with self-censorship in traditional mass media is very adequate.

The chinese understand the history of revolution better than almost any other civilisation, and consequently through the study of history they understand the how what why etc... I mean do you find it amazing that a communist dictatorship is going to become the dominant economy in the world within the next 20 years?

A Problem of Specificity

[Crash Culligan]

Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.

Point of information...

If you put in "Lincoln Memorial" as the Google search, you get all manner of results (and as others pointed out, the Martin Luther King search result is a few pages in). But... if you phrase the search as "Lincoln Memorial" speech, the MLK speech is the top result. And the same is true of google.cn.

Ahhh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking for loss of freedom in other countries sure does help...

Re:how long will it be before they tire of this ga

[cyfer2000]

What China government doing is far more than blocking.

There are several super computers doing real time analyzation of bits getting in and out of China on the Internet. Right, real time analyzation. So you can read the CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox as long as the super computer thinks the piece of information you are reading is OK. So people inside China feel almost nothing. And people out side of China feel nothing about it.

One thing should be mentioned is that there is Gigabits of data getting in and out of China per second. Guess who is behind those super computers. Intel, AMD, IBM or SUN?

Got to stay competitive.

[megaditto]

[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu.

That's would be like IBM packaging a can of Zyclon B with every punchcard machine sale to the Nazis

Law, but not legitimate law.

[Kadin2048]

You had me right up until you used the phrase "legitimate laws." The laws in China are no more legitimate than the government which creates and promulgates them, which is to say, not at all. Since it does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, but instead through fear and intimidation (and lack of any alternatives whatsoever, even another party within the same political structure), it cannot claim any legitimacy.

To follow your line of reasoning would be to say that I.G. Farben did nothing wrong when it churned out Zyklon-B, because it was following a "legitimate law" of the government in power at the time. Following a law because you have no other choice, and a gun is being held to your head (figuratively or otherwise), is one thing; calling that sort of rule "legitimate" is quite another. (And don't start whining to me about Godwin's Law, this is a completely apt comparison in this situation. Both governments have roughly the same claim to legitimacy.)

I can excuse companies for falling in line with the Chinese regime because they have no choice but to do so, as long as they admit this is why they're doing it. (I will even accept, if not excuse, a company which stands up and says that they are cooperating with injustice because it is profitable to do so, and doesn't delude itself into thinking it's doing good.) Giving the government a claim to legitimacy is far more damaging, and in my mind inexcusable.

Re:Law, but not legitimate law.

[shutdown -p now]

Since it does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, but instead through fear and intimidation

This is an interesting question. What if a government of an otherwise authoritarian, non-democratic country does have "consent" (in form of conscious support) of the majority of the governed? You know, the "popular king/dictator" type of situation - like Ataturk, or, if you want a modern example, Lukashenko in Belarus. Is it still illegitimate because it suppresses the dissenting minority? Would a true democracy be illegitimate if it engages in similar activities ("tyranny of the majority")? And how do we know if China does not fall in that category as well?

Google CN Search

[kbox]

When i went to google.cn and searched "chinese food" it said.. "Did you mean food?"

Let's see here...

[cy_a253]

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition Number 33:

It never hurts to suck up to the boss.

Re:OB: Invader Zim (CORRECT Zim quote)

[SirTalon42]

Zim: I put the fires out!
Red Tallest: You made them worse!
Zim: Worse... or better?

Re:how long will it be before they tire of this ga

[iamdrscience]

The word you're looking for is "analysis".

Re:how long will it be before they tire of this ga

[Anonymous Coward]

Communists are famous for persistence in idiocy.

Very familiar; give it a rest.

[Kadin2048]

If you really think that anything going on today in the U.S. is comparable to Hundred Flowers, you should do a bit more reading. Or do whatever else is required to gain some perspective; there's a fundamental difference between discouraging someone from saying something because it's politically expedient, and dragging them off in the middle of the night and torturing them to death.

I admit, I've engaged in some karma-whore Bush-bashing from time to time as well. He's an easy target, and a lot of the stuff that's gone on recently is easy fodder for tinfoil-hat comparisons. But to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events, by comparing them to something that's quite frankly so trivial in relative impact and suffering.

If you wanted to compare what's going on today to the chilling effect during the 50's Red Scare, or something of similar scale internationally, then I would agree with you that such a comparison is probably apt, or at least closer to being apt than U.S. v. China/Germany/USSR/etc. comparisons are.

Drawing parallels between the U.S. today and actual fascist (whether leftist or rightist) regimes are nothing more than a cheap shot, and intellectually dishonest.

Re:Very familiar; give it a rest.

[Asklepius M.D.]

While I agree with you that many of these comparisons go too far into the foil cap realm, I have to disagree with you on your statement that "to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events." Many, although not all, of these dictators rose to power in political environments not dissimilar to those present in the US today. It doesn't take fancy new flags, songs, "official" statements and the like for a political transition to be valid. While we don't currently have a psychopathic head of state in the ilk of those mentioned above, we DO see a burgeoning imbalance in a system that is supposed to self-correct. Imbalances in "democracies" are dangerous as a charismatic leader who appeals to the mob (a la Hitler) can gain a great deal of power that may be difficult to revoke once it becomes apparent. Don't don your tinfoil hat, but do keep a wary eye on the officials who nominally represent you and are capable of causing great harm in your name. The trick will be to check the power imbalance in its nascent state without resorting to the extremes that are inevitable if we wait too long.

Re:Very familiar; give it a rest.

[shutdown -p now]

What if an ex-USSR (or any of the Warsaw Pact countries) citizen draws such parallels? Because I've seen that happen.

Oh, and get your terminology in order. There's no such thing as "leftist fascism". Fascism is not a synonym for totalitarianism, it's just one particular political system which is totalitarian like many others.

Huh? Try it yourself.

[iamlucky13]

I went to yahoo.cn, which redirected me to cn.yahoo.com, and typed in "tibet independence" and it gave me a 7,690 hits. There were a lot of .cn domains and also some .orgs and .coms, but nothing seemed particularly "pro-Bejing." It certainly didn't block the site.

Meanwhile, a search on yahoo.com for the same term yielded 877,000 hits. I guess I don't understand how they qualified what's pro-Bejing or quantified their censorship rate, but I would tend to think my own query was affected by possible differences in their search algorithm based on language and my use of english characters on the chinese site more than by censorship.

Note that I'm not saying Yahoo isn't censoring searches, and perhaps they're treating IP's registered in the US different than Chinese addresses, but something about this study doesn't seem right.

Re:Huh? Try it yourself.

[iamlucky13]

I probably should have read the article before posting my above comment (so I wouldn't need to post twice), but doing so just furthered my lack of intellectual respect for the study. As I suspected, their test simply took a bunch of largely arbitrary keywords coupled with an arbitrary definition of "pro-Bejing," and apparently made no attempt (like, you know, maybe a control group of "non-subversive" words) to determine if their methods might be flawed. Of course it's hard to tell how they really went about it, because their "full results" is just the same percentage values they list in the article.

Also, it should definitely be mentioned that they only considered 10 samples from each test, and they don't appear to have actually compared yahoo.cn to yahoo.com. They compared everything to google.com, which is pretty blatantly ignoring differences in algorithms. Furthermore, I have no idea how they calculated those percentage numbers. They say google.cn had 5 unauthorized and 3 authorized sites in the top 10 (5+3=10?) and somehow that equates to 83% pro-Bejing.

To further trash the article, I want to point out that Google has already admitted to censorship so the "study" is a moot point in their case, and Microsoft (who admittedly may be bending the truth) says they don't censor, which contradicts their conclusions and should therefore be discussed further.

This is the kind of report you write in high school, when the goal isn't as much learning how to analyze data properly as it is to learn how to use Excel as something other than a fake database. Well, at least the authors figured out how to make pie charts.

Re:Huh? Try it yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this study is either wrong, or they fixed it pronto. I just tried 'Tibet independence' and got a number of results, no problem. Not the same results as Google, obviously but certainly didn't get any error message. I hate the Chinese government as much as the next guy, but this claim is apparently crap.

Yeah, he is the government

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chicoms also blogspam blogs of US politicians that they fear.

Six Keywrods?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're basing this on six keywords?
Now if it was 600, or 6000, keywords I may actually believe it, at least a little.

Another reason...

[acurism]

Just another reason why I switched from Yahoo to Google a few years ago...

Re:Another reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, now you would be switching to MSN, I guess ?
Or was that some kind of moral hypocrisy?

UFOs in China - Yahoo!

[Chemkook]

Does anyone know if you can "Yahoo" for UFOs in China?

How ahount UFOs on "Yahoo Video"? Are they blocked too?

Just wondering.

I have a simpler idea

[robertjw]

Why don't we maintain a list of filtered keywords and add them to every site we control or can find. Rather than makeing code words, let's flood the filters with noise. If they want to censor things, let them censor the whole web.

Re:Errr... Weird I can get refrences to the massac

[Cornelius the Great]

Searching for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on yahoo.cn yielded about 2,000 results.

Searching for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on yahoo.com yielded about 185,000 results.

Yahoo's filtering isn't perfect, but it did remove 98.8% of the results, many of which were probably very critical of China. The Chinese Government isn't trying to erase history, but rather keep a pro-PRC or neutral spin on search results.

Worst Filtering Policy...

[Exitios]

"...Above all, the organisation was able to show..."

They must have the worst spell-checker, too.

Re:Worst Filtering Policy...

[belg4mit]

It's a French group, so they're using Commonwealth English you dolt.

Re:how long will it be before they tire of this ga

[cyfer2000]

Thank you, that's why we need the Firefox 2.0.

Re:Would this work? Part II

[syrrys]

Perhaps Google, Yahoo and the like could put in place an algorithm which would un-jumble or output results for the letters contained in "Tianenmen Square massacre", i.e. "TSiqaunreMeansmseancre" entered as a search would produce the desired hits. This, combined with my parent poster's idea of having related websites without any conspicuous names in the URL, would work for a while. What do you think?

The first result

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what they want you to read

Tibet

[Hoi Polloi]

Try typing "Tibet" and "Independence". You'll come up with scads of *.cn sites all ranting about how the Dali Lama is "splittist". I wonder if they cover the vicious Chinese invasion of Tibet in there somewhere?

The US sure isn't perfect but China shows that it could be a lot worse.

Proof that it's better to be there than not

[booch]

I've been saying during this whole debate that it's better for Google (and the others) to be there, rather than not be there. Mainly because they will be providing the Chinese people with more and better information that they had before. And the fact that censorship can never be 100%. So this study is telling us that Google is providing 17% more "undesirable" content than if they were not there. OK, maybe that math is not correct (assuming Chinese censorship was 100% effective before, it'd be infinitely more content now). But the fact is that Google will allow SOME access to the content in question.

Re:Proof that it's better to be there than not

[Maxo-Texas]

Yes but the fact that they exclude better than Baidu would be the counter argument.

Likewise, it's good to know as the US gets more fascist that Google and Yahoo will march in lock step with them as they suppress our freedoms and make more kinds of information sharing illegal.

No, THIS is the CORRECT quote!

[jdbartlett]

That's "You made them worse, ZIM!"

Get it right! Honestly!

Also mod+1 grandparent who stole a comment/quote I was going to make/reference as soon as I saw the headline! Great minds, etc.

It's not filtering

[stud9920]

Yahoo just finds less results...

Funky math

[SSCGWLB]

Maybe I need to RTFA, but this makes no sense. You have 6 words, you block one that means you let 83.33% through, block two you let 66.66%, and so on. How the hell do you get 97% and 78%? Unless you weight the words differently or it lets a partial through...

Hey, its Friday, im tired of working :/

~nate

Something tells me...

[notBowen]

These results are skewed... http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=I+don't+like+chin a&sm=Yahoo!+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&e i=UTF-8/

Don't censor harder -- censor smarter!

[StreetStealth]

Censoring search terms seems like a very simplistic, even naive method of intellectual subjugation. I don't doubt that far more efficient engineering is just around the corner:

I see artificial semantic analysis as a holy grail to censors, and as available computing power increases, I don't doubt that more resources will be devoted to utilizing it for a more "aware" parsing of monitored traffic.

Re:how long will it be before they tire of this ga

[hobbes75]

Censoring the search results is only the first level of defense. The filters at the service providers will catch a lot more, so many pages found can not be opened. The restrictions vary from province to province and are also depending on different branches of the different providers.

News websites

[babbling]

They will notice. The BBC is blocked in China, and I imagine that many westerners will go there between their porn searches.

Sig

[idonthack]

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