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China Moving to Real Name Registrations for Blogs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the defeating-the-greater-internet-fuckwad-theory dept.

dptalia writes "China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering."

3 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Annoying, yes, but... by 808140 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Names are by no means unique identifiers in China -- there are only a hundred or so family names in common use and the characters used in people's names are often recycled. With the population of China being as large as it is, even if you use your real name there could easily be 50 people in your area who have exactly the same name.

    Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?

  2. Re:It's a different society. by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The same thing is in place for registering .us domain names, isn't it?

    http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/01 4239&from=rss

  3. Re:It's a different society. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Prove that. Prove that although we can be monitored, we aren't. Because I can prove otherwise: I worked for a company called ClientLogic that does customer service and Tech Support for Earthlink in Albuquerque, NM. Every single message you send out through Webmail is kept on a server, whether or not you delete it at home. We even had the option of reading your mail and then checking a box to Mark them as "Unread". Because you are such a compliant citizen, it makes no difference to you, I'm sure, but all servers do that. If we didn't like what we read, we were trained to report it anonymously at work or simply to call DHS on our own.
    And just like I'm sure in China they will be scanning large amounts of date for keywords, the same thing is done here. Noone is sitting there reading everything but certain sites and certain keywords or phrases activate surveillance on you. Google Total Information Awareness and Ecehelon...