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China Getting 'Serious' About Spam?
Ritz_Just_Ritz writes "Apparently, the Chinese MII (Ministry of Information) is going to crack down on Spam from within China. This will include training for 1000 mail administrators and recruitment of 20,000 'anti-spam volunteers.'"
www.nsa.gov/jobs
Are these 'anti-spam volunteers' real volunteers, or are they volunteering-to-get-out-of-bayonette-testing volunteers?
Just curious.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
With all the censoring China does, it sounds to me like it's just an excuse to hire 20000 people to read through everyone's email and make sure they're not discussing something they "shouldn't" be talking about.
Even if this is true, Chinese people have more freedom now than they did 20 years ago, and things will continue to progress in this direction. Government crackdows are getting harder to pull off, there is a lot of unpublished internal dissent, and the government is begging for a revolution if their response is to just crack down harder. Piss off 1 billion people alltogether, and its pretty hard to keep them contained.
Canada keeps looking warmer and warmer.
Yeah, well, wait till November rolls around. Then you'll be saying, "Screw this freedom crap. I'm goin' to Mexico."
What?
I agree with you.
eldavojohn, I think you're pushing things a bit far. Everyone agrees that the chinese government is opressive. But this is not Orwell's 1984. The government provides stability, which was rarely present in chinese history. There is no mass shuffling of money from the poor to the rich, although there is increasing disparity these days as industrilization makes it harder to make a living in rural communities. The government really does put the well being of its people first. Ahead of their foreign reputation, which is why we all see them as the bad guys.
I believe China will evolve into a democracy in its own time.
May I point out that, although totalitarian regimes _do_ violate human rights and mis-use laws against dissidents, sometimes they actually have to solve an actual problem? E.g., even Stalin's USSR and Mao's China at their darkest hour, while they did have a some of the most brutal suppression of dissidents, they also had laws to deal with plain old crimes like theft, embezzlement, murder, etc. They also had plenty of civil laws too, like for example, divorces, inheritance, child support, etc.
I.e., it seems to me pretty stupid to assume that any law in China is somehow _guaranteed_ be 100% for oppression purposes, and only disguised in a more propaganda-friendly guise. Maybe someone there genuinely got fed up with spam. Maybe a bunch of bosses in the PRC just had one day too many of finding their inboxes full of "H3rb@1 \/i@gr@" emails. Or maybe it was the "Thousands of 18 year old teens waiting for you!!!" mails. China's conservative leadership tends to take a very grim view of pornography, plus they have _much_ higher age of consent.
Are those volunteers paid to either read other people's emails and to point fingers at demand? How do you know that? How do you know it's not just people paid to register email addresses and use them all over the place, and see what spam lands in those inboxes? Or maybe run honeypots to see who's actually commanding the army of spam-bots with Joe-job faked sender addresses? Or whatever? For the size of China 1000 admins and 20,000 volunteers is a spit in the ocean, if their goal was to read all emails. But to run a honeypot net or to get reliable reports of who's been spamming their inboxes, it may be just enough.
Basically the D&D mentality that some people are by definition evil, hence they can only ever give evil laws, is so fucking stupid that it's not even funny. _Noone_ defines themselves as evil, sworn enemy of all goodness, and able to only ever do evil stuff, like in retarded D&D-type settings and cheap fantasy flicks. The Real Life isn't divided neatly like that.
In RL even the most horrible dictator may really think they're only doing just what's good for their country (even if for everyone else it doesn't really count as good), and not just acting out of some Sith-like determination to extinguish all goodness. RL "evil" is more about not caring about collateral damage done than being some sworn destroyer of all that's still good and pure. And sometimes, even if by accident, their notion of "good" may actually be good.
That's all I'm saying here too. Just assuming "The Chinese government is evil, hence any Chinese law _must_ be 100% for the sole purpose of crushing freedoms and harming people" is just bullshit. We just don't know that. Assuming you can "translate" like that, is just some self-righteous bullshit, nothing more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.