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China Reinstates Wikipedia Ban
Rob T Firefly writes "The International Herald Tribute reports that the lifting of China's Wikipedia ban earlier this week was short-lived. Wikipedia is once again inaccessible from behind the Great Firewall, along with all other Wikimedia projects. Additionally, the URL of Chinese Wikipedia is once again a banned search term. No reason has yet been given for any of it." From the article: "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday. Beijing blocked access to the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia in October last year, apparently out of concern about entries touching on the country's sensitive spots -- Tibet, Taiwan and other topics."
In Beijing you have the conservatives and the hard-line conservatives duking it out for control. When policy changes it's because one side has momentarily gained the upper hand, or believed they had, and ordered the change.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Could be a "technical" problem...
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Here is the Wikinews link I referred to in the submission. I hadn't found the AP article yet.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
...that which can be explained by incompetence.
Whether the earlier opening up or this latest blocking is on purpose I don't think we'll know. According to the Chinese delegate to the conference in Greece two weeks ago no sites are blocked.
You're thinking of Japanese. Chinese has different 'l' and 'r' sounds, and a 'wi' sound too.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
alright, you heard him, pool's over. who had 2 days?
Let the ban lapse so all the free thinkers and government detractors can post on a popular site, then ban it one week later... sounds like they wanted an easy way to find out who to arrest next!
Looks like they were vandalizing it by replacing all of the text with ?'s anyways...
They haven't blocked it:
d =57869 (posted at 2:18 PM EST)k ipedia-Censorship/story.xhtml?story_id=101009A5G2I Q (posted at 12:19 PM EST)
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parenti
http://www.toptechnews.com/news/China-Abandons-Wi
I don't know if I entirely believe it, but that's another story....
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
You are wrong (I think).
Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions. On the other hand, if you are hungry, cannot get a job, live on the street, cannot cloth your kids... in short, if you have nothing to lose, then all the freedom and democracy in the world will not abate your unrest.
So the fact that China becomes prosperous is a very good news for the Dear Leaders. And very bad for our military.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
According to Wikinews, searching from within China on any non-Chinese search engine (including the English-language Google, Yahoo, and MSN you know and/or love) for the string "zh.wikipedia.org" will apparently get you banned from viewing that search engine for several minutes. I imagine this is to stop people finding references to the blocked site and discussions of its' blocking (like we are now) just as much as it is to discourage people using things like Google's cache to see the blocked material.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Rich, well-fed people do not drive revolutions.
Huh. I could have sworn most of the founding fathers in the US were wealthy land owners. I suppose you could argue that they weren't the ones DRIVING the revolution, merely the ones leading it. But I've also never heard about the American revolution being started because the majority of people were hungry or un-employed. From what I've been told it was that people were pissed off that England was imposing draconian controls on trade, freedom of expression, etc.
AccountKiller
TOR helps people in oppressive countries freely access information and it needs to grow.
http://tor.eff.org/
Who speaks Chinese? Maybe you can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or one of the other languages that are used to vocalize the Chinese written language, but you don't speak Chinese. Maybe you speak to Chinese (people). Maybe you speak of Chinese (people). You don't speak Chinese because that's not the right noun to use to specify the spoken language. OTOH if you do speak ALL of the Chinese languages, you're still wrong because they're not at all similar and I really doubt ri vs. li exists in all of them. I know what you are saying about ri vs. li in Mandarin.
Perhaps the way for people to think about this (in a kinda backwards way) is that you can transcribe spoken English into written American English, written Queen's English, or l33t, but they're definitely different. Or maybe EBCDIC vs. ASCII -- both can be used to record a work of Shakespeare, but yeah they're different.
i'm in shanghai on china telecoms adsl line, wikipedia is blocked for me, and it was going so well :( i used it for creative research almost hourly..
back to tor i guess
Right, if John Kerry and John Edwards had have been elected, China would never have restricted Wikipedia in the first place.
Still, there is a bit of a point there: both types of revolts are often driven by the at least moderately well-off who see themselves as positioned to be even more well-off if the revolution succeeds
Hmm.. I sure haven't extensively studied the founding fathers of the US, but it's my understanding that they were quite driven to establish liberty, and not simply driven by greed or a lust for power. If you read what they wrote about (and argued amongst themselves) it becomes quite apparent they weren't just a bunch of greedy bastards looking to make themselves more rich and powerfull.
That's not to say these guys were all perfect and without self interest. Jefferson had frickin slaves. But to simplify the American Revolution down to a few people trying to give themselves more power is simply not true. You only need look at the Bill of Rights to understand they weren't just power-hungry dictators.
AccountKiller
All major or minor gateways in china uses a gov-appointed security software installed (sometimes by answering to the gov's requirement), from provincial main cable to a local telcom station, from internet service provider to a router of an unit of a building. From up to down, layer by layer, the software can be everywhere, as a combination of firewall, anti-virus, anti-hacking, anti-porn, word-filtering, user access control and so forth. Many network administrators are quite ok with the software since it provides convinence and secrity to work on.
The blockage of some websites could be a side effect using that software suit, some websites being blocked occasionaly might because some word trigger(such like some word might be used against The Party) was accidentially fired. Or else, some websites opening occasionally could because some trigger words are removed from the ban list of the software or from the page of the website , in which wikipedia can be the case.
So maybe the control to release a website from ban list isn't in hands of the gov, since that secrity software suit has already been installed in every level of the network and works independently. It's more like a polical-oriented but technical problem now.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
Slashdot ran a story on how the Chinese Wikipedia because so popular so quickly, now maybe I'm stating what some people must believe to be obvious, but maybe the Chinese gov't saw it as a treat to their power. If you think about it something so community based and free (as in speech not beer) could if it took off in a big way might give the Chinese a taste for unrestricted information, then if the Chinese gov't chose to censor it again then there might be protests etcetera and generally it might reduce their dominative power.
Michael-m.co.uk - Home of Michael Mulqueen
and no, Chinese does not have different ...
Says who? Standard High Chinese ("Mandarin") certainly has differences between r, l, t, d, p, b, g, and k. In detail (I assume you use Pinyin):
r: similar to English r, tip of the tongue rolled upwards, voiced
l: like in land or lung
t: like english t, tip of the tongue touches back side of upper front teeth, but strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound
d: like t but not aspirated; short
p: like english p, but strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound
b: like p, but not aspirated; short
g: similar to english g; not aspirated, not voiced
k: strongly aspirated with audible breath following the sound; speak nearly like kh
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Why doesn't China scan Wikipedia for certain keywords and just block certain articles? Don't get me wrong, I think China should be banning no sites, period. However, if China's government insists on blocking Wikipedia due to concerns that articles that touch on their sensitive spots might pop-up, why don't they at least make the rest of Wikipedia available?
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
oh yes? one who doesn't sound like you is a part of propaganda. where is my freedom of speech in your ideology? we born in here, we does not want to overrun our gov't so hard as you do. sure, we just want these mandarins improving,or better evolving. but we dont want it collapses in the path you americans want. So when i see this website tracking china's cersorship in a fashion like following a popular cult, i feel it's ok to tell others some fact.
Please remember, China has already enabled internet. Dont you understand the fact that there is no way to block information exchange as long as there is an internet connection. Here in China there are more than 20 million blog users. we even have our own wiki-style enclopedias. How can a cersorship possibly block them all. Example can be shown in me, i can directly access this site, throwing my no-so-good english with you. sure, the censorship does hinder the access to some websites. but to a senior interenet user, it doesnt exist. besides we all have our life, not every body thinks to be able to read some western "truth" can turn things better, we just want internet for ourselves learning some stuff, playing games, doing business, making a date or such. Knowing those "truths" is pretty much same as reading newpaper on toilet.
My point is:
Firstly, the censorship is just inconvenient, but cannot be zip-up techonically or practically. commoners like me dont like it, but also it's not a monster that shows how evil its master is.
Secondly, i dont trust americans will do all our good by selling their merchandize of free.
Lastly, we are not all asking that "free" daily. at least it's not my daily pursue or necessity for living, through im not rich.
China, in fact, is very fragile.
And the reason for the US invasion of Iraq or Afganistan was US citizens genuinely fearing for their lives?
Please be serious, every ruling class has their own agenda and they very rarely tell the people they rule.
I dont read