Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Confirms Beijing Blocking Flickr
slashthedot writes "In another instance of censorship against websites about anything anti-establishment in China, Flickr, popular among a growing class of digital photo enthusiasts in the world's second-largest Internet market, has not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week, amid rumors Beijing took action after images of the Tiananmen massacre in early June 1989 were posted. "It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end," a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said in an email in response to a Reuters inquiry."
We knew this a while ago, but still, whenever I hear about my dear Internets being censored, it makes me sick.
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But I have never used Flickr...is it owned or partially owned by Yahoo?
Only reason I ask is why would Yahoo be saying it isn't something technicaly on their end unless they own/run it...
Living With a Nerd
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5627640.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr#History
"Do not drink from Yellow River"
--Hwang Hung-Lo
I keep hearing to many Pro's Con's about China. On one side you have the people bashing the government for it's internet filter system. Then on the other side I hear about how China is the new super power, with the greatest economy growth and potential. Even where I live (semi-major city) the news is ridden with (Businesses start deals with China, China Buying out more than Japan during hte 80's, China best business partner, Outsource to China, China Could Save local economy, etc, etc). Even the local college have signs "China #1 growth market, succeed in the future take Chinese 1 this semester" So is China Evil or Not?
will people post the pictures all over in a rebellion, a la AACS? or will all the image providers cave a la google.cn, where an image search for tiananmen massacre returns pictures of puppies and gerbils...?
"Chinese start-up is preparing to take on the Chinese speaking market with a Flickr-like site."
That wouldn't even surprise me if I read something along that next week.
Who are we to say that our way of life is better? Don't we have rising illiteracy, crime-ridden cities, corrupt politicians, rapacious corporations and wars we don't believe in killing bucketloads of civilians?
Let's be tolerant of other points of view, please! (There may be a large cynical but friendly emoticon attached to this message. YMMV, but TMTOWTDI.)
technical writing / development
For some time now, China has been blocking sites like BBC News, CBS News, Wikipedia, WordPress, LiveJournal, U.S. Department of State, etc. I am surprised Slashdot is not on the list, bunch of freedom-loving Linux-huggers that we are.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Wow, I feel bad for the developers who spent time incorporating Traditional Chinese into flickr. now no one who speaks it will see the site. Terrible timing!
n ational-launch/
http://blog.flickr.com/en/2007/06/12/flickr-inter
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
I'm dismayed that everything for us in the US (and the western world) has to always be boiled down a simple question of either good or evil. These sorts of simplifications then become the basis of policy for a broader audience even though they neglect to see the subtleties in an entity as massive as a country. So to answer your question... China is no more or less evil than the United States is evil. We just tend to be evil in different ways. How you weigh those differences is based upon your nationality, race, gender, religion, education, socioeconomic status, etc. I'm not one to rant on Slashdot but these simplifications are what have gotten us into the foreign policy mess we find ourselves in today. Unfortunately, Christian societies have always focused on having an enemy and this post won't change the 2,000 years ofsocial development.
So does the Chinese government own all the ISP's in China? Or how exactly can they just filter out any content from any website?
There are many other countries outside of China where traditional Chinese is widely used. China uses simplified Chinese.
Yahoo has often said it's better to provide the Chinese partial content rather than none at all. Therefore, shouldn't they be perfectly happy that Chinese users are at least seeing the big white webpage with some text scattered around a broken-JPEG icon, rather than no Flickr at all?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Who cares. They can do what ever they want.
...and that Yahoo! is involved yet again. But did anyone else see the following headline on the front page of the Yahoo! web site and chuckle:
"Nigerian author wins International Booker Prize for fiction"
The first think I think of is a novel that begins: "Dear sir, I request your urgent attention in
the matter of a sum of $20,000,000 million USD..."
Tiananmen Square: The PRC's worst-kept secret.
Criticising Google and Yahoo for capitulating to the Chinese govt. seems to be "the thing" to do on Slashdot these days. But let's see if it is indeed clear what the "right" thing is here.
1. Can we really blame Google and Yahoo for following the law of the land ? What gives an American (or any foreign) company the right to decide which laws are fair in China ? Even democratic countries have different opinions on what exactly freedom of speech is. Should google decide whether it agrees with German holocaust-denial laws, or Indian laws against whipping up religious hate ? Also, isn't it a bit arrogant to assume that American laws are the moral optimum ? Shouldn't Google also refuse to honour DMCA take down requests ?
I recently read an article in the IHT, speaking about how a Chinese official once justified their censorship / torture system by saying that these laws were necessary given China's economic and social conditions (and you can't deny that China has indeed seen phenomenal progress under these laws). The article goes on to then discuss the west's moral dilemma in criticizing China given the recent happenings since 9/11 - basically, when America felt threatened it almost instantly decided that torture was ok for the greater good. I'm not trying to troll with this paragraph. I'd choose liberty with poverty over affluent slavery any day. But who are we to dictate what kind of laws China should have in terms of protection of dissenters and minorities ? Why do we assume that a majority of the Chinese population isn't ok with this tradeoff between liberty and stability - given that half of the US is probably OK with torturing terrorists and holding them without trial ?
2. There's also the dilemma of turning over information that'll help identify a dissenter. Now, does Google get to decide that its more competent and fair than the Chinese judicial system ? Didn't ISPs in the US hand over private customer data, all in the name of "homeland security" ? I'm not suggesting that even with recent happenings the American human rights / judicial system is even a tenth as bad as that of China. But at the end of the day, I think all systems of govt. are imperfect (some a lot more than others) and it is not for private foreign companies to be the vehicles of political change.
3. If Google and Yahoo do not follow these laws, they'll be kicked out out of China(just like they'll be sued to oblivion if they don't honour DMCA takedowns). The Chinese govt. will not be brought to its knees and forced to reverse its policies because of pressure from a freakin' foreign search engine company ! So who will this help ? The Chinese people who will now have no access to google at all ? Is it ok for us (google/yahoo/slashdot reader) to decide for the Chinese people that no access to information is better than tainted access ?
Just my 2 cents.
you should NOT have done it.
people will be seeing what crap you "people's" republic have pulled on people despite your muzzling attempts. get over with it, "party".
Read radical news here
There was no massacre in the square. That is just a theory like evolution. Many say it was a rave by drunk students. They don't know what happened to their friends because they were drunk. Pay no attention to the lies! Especially since now HD-DVD players that cost $20 will come soon due to the efficiencies of Chinese labor! You want this, and to help your ailing relatives, a new crop of prisoners are eager to repent for their crimes by offering their organs to you and yours at very low cost.
"The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope." - Karl Marx
So they say Flickr was disconnected because images of Tiananmen Square were posted. Who knows if it were even a Chinese national who posted them? Now I'm thinking, we could have us some fun, and help to highlight Chinese net censorship at the same time.
Post pictures of Tiananmen Square EVERYWHERE. Upload photos to Flickr, send video to Youtube and its 100 clones, post accounts on blogs, news sites etc. Let's see them disconnect their populace site-by-site until there's nothing left. Only then might it prompt a revolution that China appears to need so badly. At the very least it'll stop all those random port scans. If anyone's in doubt, it really happened
Well, in China they use Simplified Chinese, not Traditional Chinese.
Mandarin speakers in mainland China typically use simplified hanzi, and I have to imagine the literate of the other geographically close dialects do as well.
However, the Cantonese speakers I've known all learned traditional hanzi, which shows up a lot in kanji as well (tho there seems to be some simplified in there, in addition to some other forms, I guess). So really this probably doesn't directly impact the dev efforts vis a vis mainland China.
Yahoo sucked up to the Chinese government by ratting out a journalist. Fat lot of good that did them. Instead the Chinese give them a nice ole' kick in the crotch.
the irony is that, were you to post that in china, about china, you would be censored
...said of a system that doesn't tolerate other points of view
;-P
the west is better simply because you can be critical and have contrarian views of the west, in the west
in other words, i disagree with what you just said, but i support your right to say it
were i in power in china, i could simply shut you down, shut you up
that's superior? no, that's clearly inferior. that a chinese can't criticize his system is clearly inferior and wrong. 100%. no doubt
now if you chose to reply to my comment, be careful how you answer if you have anything critical to say about the west, lest you prove you don't understand hypocrisy
Let's be tolerant of other points of view, please!
doesn't your brain implode under the mass of irony in what you just said?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder if it is...since it posts articles like this?
Only seems fair that if I don't want their spam zombies touching my mail server users, that they can choose not to have Fl!kr photos touch their citizens eyeballs. Hell, I didn't even hear of this photo sharing web site until just now, and I live in the US, and I'm on the internet all the time. Does that mean I'm a victim of censorship?
I was in Beijing on Saturday. Flickr was in fact inaccessible. Right now, China is undergoing Olympics Madness. Particularly in Beijing, they have stores dedicated to Olympics schwag with T-shirts, toys, pencils, bags, you name it. There are posters, TV advertisements and billboards plastering the entire country. China is racing to get ready for the impending event. The week before I arrived, they installed small ratings boxes at immigration, with four lit buttons showing faces ranging from smiling to frowning that you can choose from after the official stamps your passport to rate your experience. We already know the Chinese government takes a rather narrow view on freedom of speech, and in the middle of what might be their biggest P.R. effort in history, they're going to spare no effort to clamp down on negative press--especially when it touches on the heart of Beijing.
Ooooh, so China's COMMUNIST government is right-winger now?
Right now, it would take too much processing power/time to review all the information being conveyed in picture form. Unlike Carnivore or whatever else the FBI and NSA are using to illegally spy on American's text communication, pictures aren't so easy to trace automagically.
Not that I agree with the censorship, but if you're going to run your society that way, you've just taken care of a major leak in individuals ability to communicate on the sly.
As always, I'm happier when the Chinese are blocking things than when the companies self censor....
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Every time the issue of internet censorship comes up on /., I think of the experiments they've done sending quantumly-entangled particles across some distance X, trapping them locally, and then pinging them to communicate faster than the speed of light. Would it be possible to create a network of quantumly-entangled particles that don't subsequently rely on optical fiber to transmit information, and which can't be blocked, jammed, surveilled, or otherwise censored?
The arms race toward quantum encryption would then be almost totally irrelevant, because there would be no discernible signal to encrypt/decrypt, just a quantumly entangled particle in a basement talking to another quantumly entangled particle in another basement somewhere else.
And if you could separate infinitely variant states from a particle and dish them out to whomever requests an entangled state, then it seems like you could theoretically create a massively interconnected panopticon where each node is directly connected to every other node. Hey presto, instantaneous communication with no possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, no possibility of back-tracing packets. Total anonymity, total security from big brother.
How nodes discover each other in the first place is another question, but IANAP (physicist) nor IANANE (network engineer).
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
You are misinformed. The two major users of Traditional Chinese are Taiwan and Hong Kong, neither of which would be affected by this.
However, I haven't managed to get my connection to get reset via IRC, yet.
My father lives in China and he told me that they had blocked Yahoo! altogether for a while, but had to unblock it again because it was a major PITA. Take that with a grain of salt, though.
I suggest you search for a Chinese proxy server, and see for yourself. If you manage to get an IRC proxy, you should try to get someone to copy and paste something from a known "evil" site, just for further experimentation. (Not too familiar with the IRC protocol, it may be enough to send the text yourself, too.)
China was politically and culturally weak during the 19th century, and Chinese fought one another over foreign money. This has largely attributed to the downfall of China as a nation.
With the Patriot Act, mishandling of the Iraq War, and companies forfeiting principles for the pursuit of profits, are we destined to follow China's footsteps as well?
Is the sole purpose of firms to pursue profit for shareholders? Or do firms have social responsibilities domestically and abroad?
http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/ says it is available.
:)
Doesn't look serious like Harvard one though
Germany was in absolute shambles after WW1 with scores of people dieing from starvation etc. so you could also argue that by grabbing power in early 1930s and establishing a national socialist dictatorship (aka nazism) to pull Germany out of the economic doldrums he simply rebuilt the Nazi-Germany into an acceptable or even admirable powerhouse. Invading territory lost in WW1 and more (in cahoots with "Uncle Josef"), or aiming to invade the oil fields of Caucasus was perfectly fine since Germany was becoming powerful in economic and military terms?
When the UK declared war against Germany in 1939 (the US wouldn't do that until after Pearl Harbor) it was based on a treaty with Poland and the coming large-scale holocaust was still a hopeful twinkle in Hitler's eyes.
"Communist" (at least back then) China OTOH started the expansion of their Lebensraum with multiple invasions immediately after the world most murderous dictator Mao had completed his bloody civil war in 1949:
None of these invaded and now for generations oppressed nations which are still being systematically wiped off the map were related to the Han-Chinese ethnically, culturally, linguistically or even religiously (although historically Tibet was the source route of buddhism to China among other East Asian countries, how's that for a payback).
Now back to your original opinion: The fact that the Nazi-China regime has managed to raise the material living standards of maybe 25-30% of the population (by promoting consumerism of mainly chinese-produced goods while leaving larger number in poverty, while removing free healthcare, while creating massive problems with pollution and endemic corruption, while continuing to push twisted and hateful propaganda and "history" by strictly controlling all forms of media and education etc.) while also amassing foreign currecy (USD) reserves of over a trillion dollars makes them respectable and no less evil than other former (actual) colonial or expansionist powers? The current regime in Washington is certainly covered in warts but as far as I know even they aren't systematically and intentionally wiping (peaceful) nations and whole cultures and languages off the map and history books... and how many foreign countries was imperial Britain still occupying when they declared war against Germany in the name of "freedom"... should that have stopped them from standing up for the Poles?
Chinese dictatorship's role in protecting the Janjaweed genocide in Sudan (oil!) or the Pol Pot regime committing the unimaginable "killing fields" genocide in Cambodia (ideological reasons) have no bearing in your compass? Or the fact that China's current Party- and military supremo Hu Jintao earned the nick-name [b]Butcher of Tibet[/b] for his bloody suppression of Tibetan uprisings while being the Party overlord of the ludicrously
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
If the Chinese voluntarily wish to have dictatorship as their preferred form of government (forgetting the rights of the Chinese "political minorities" for the moment; I'm not talking about the 60-odd ethnic "minorities" aka former nations China has invaded and largely assimilated over the aeons) it would be hard to argue with their choice.
However it is not a choice the Chinese are either allowed to make (it's either Communist Party rule or prison/death) nor are they informed of the factual deeds of their regime thanks to the all-pervasive propaganda and Party control of all media and education.
So while the Party continues to spread hateful propaganda against the Western Imperialists and especially the Imperial Japan (which was forced to end their partial occupation of China - by those evil western imperialists as it happened - already more than 60 years ago), the Party rather conveniently forgets to inform its people of China's own genocidal imperialism that continues to this day. I already responded ("Nazional-Socialism gets forgetful approval") to another laissez-faire sinophile in another thread about the supposed respectability economic or military muscle supposedly brings without any moral aspect.
The point being, it's not just their country a long as they continue wiping out their neighboring peoples and lieing about it to their own people, not to mention bullying other free nations e.g. simply for allowing exiled Tibetans to visit and speak about stuff like non-violence!
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Meh.... wake me up when Netcraft confirms it.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
China is a deeply troubled country in the midst of pulling itself out of much deeper trouble. I live in Beijing right now, and I have to say that the social, political, economic and environmental situation is both somewhat hopeful and somewhat dire when compared to the US, Canada, or most West European Nations.
The Chinese government is a totalitarian regime where elections, when they happen, are fixed, and citizen's input is directly related to their income. On the other hand, Chinese citizens enjoy a broad array of freedoms, and in large cities enjoy a significant degree of personal freedom outside of politics. On the other hand, half the population lives in the countryside, where local officials tend to be more corrupt and dictatorial.
The same goes for things like healthcare, minority rights, and other basic freedoms/services. Most of the cities are doing okay, but the population in the countryside does much worse. Pollution is out of control, everywhere, and there are periodic riots and protests not reported in the media about all these issues.
China's economy is booming, and the new generation of Chinese people have a much better understanding of the outside world, and are not at all committed to Maoisim or Communisim in general. Their idea of what might replace their current system is hazy, though, and they've been taught to be deeply suspicious of "Democracy", and they often have a deep streak of nationalist belief that often tips over into absurd racisim.
So there's some hopeful stuff, but some problems. Their economy can't keep growing at the pace it's been going- in the absence of the rule of law (or even strong accounting principles), there's just incredible amounts of fraud and dirty dealing that can't sustain itself. Companies "fry their accounts" (i.e. cook the books), pollute like crazy, sell defective goods, and generally behave very badly. The stock market is way overvalued, and natural resources are pretty much strained to their limits.
China censoring flikr is just one example of the trouble. The authorities desperately want to suppress any popular dissent against the current regime. But pervasive censorship means that Chinese people generally don't watch Chinese-made movies (most of those come from the US, Hong Kong (which has a freeish media) Taiwan or Korea), and they're poorly informed about important stuff like bird flu. In general, the effect of media censorship may be to allow critical issues, like health issues, to go unaddressed until they're destabilizing in and of themselves.
China's in trouble.
To somehow poll Chinese citizens, perhaps by distributing ballots, to see how the majority of people want to run their government...
Oh wait.
...worse is (IMO), that flickr started to censor images for users from Germany, Signapore, Hong Kong, and Korea!
Traditional Chinese is only used in Hong Kong, where Flickr is not blocked. China simplified it's writing system a few years ago.
To elaborate: countries where Chinese is widely spoken and the traditional characters are used include Taiwan, Hong Kong (part of China but I doubt the censorship applies), Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and even Canada.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
You completely avoided any response to the fact that the Tibetan people, who are in every single way non-Chinese, have never wanted to be occupied, oppressed and flooded by hordes of alien Chinese settlers any more than your own ancestors wanted to becomes slaves to the Japanese.
So you want "justice" for your expansionist China but don't give a shit about the neighbouring people that you, without a least bit of remorse, continue torturing, raping and wiping out. Some might find such violent heartlessness and greed as a strength but I find it to be thoroughly rotten and sick. Mao himself, the world's most murderous dictator is history, would be proud of you.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Since Traditional Chinese is used mainly in Taiwan, HK, Malaysia, etc and NOT the mainland (which uses Simplified), you shouldn't feel bad for the developers. Their target audience will see it quite well (and uncensored).