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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."

11 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:flickr just added traditional chinese to its li by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are many other countries outside of China where traditional Chinese is widely used. China uses simplified Chinese.

  2. Re:Their country, their choice by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 3, Informative
    "Their country, their choice" doesn't work when, for many of them, it's neither.

    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?

    They have rampant illiteracy, crime-ridden cities, corrupt politicians, (the same) rapacious corporations, tens of millions of intentionally murdered civilians shoved under the rug, and censorship that dwarfs the crap the FCC tries to pull.
  3. Re:China Evil or Not by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Informative

    So is China Evil or Not?

    China, the country, is by no means evil.

    The political leaders of China have some policies which border on evil, or at least not very nice as it can be quite repressive and the like.

    The individual people in China are probably, on balance, rather quite nice, hard-working people.

    China, as an economy, can't be ignored, no matter your stance on the behaviour of their government. It's simply too big, and too significant.

    Tremendous amounts of manufacturing take place in China of products destined for us in the west. They're growing at an amazing rate. And, they've got all of those people, so they're considered to be a huge market if you can get your products in.

    Unfortunately, it's overly simplistic to ask if they're evil or not -- there are aspects that suck (like, suppressing internal knowledge of Tiananmen Square or especially that it happened at all), but no big country can really NOT have China as a trading partner.

    Cheers
    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. Re:Their country, their choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dude, I am in China right now. Trust me: our US way of life is better. All the college educated people I talk to, a population that is growing and growing, say things like "I never watch the news because I don't believe it is true" they buy short wave radios to get the BBC, etc. The media they watch is US media (they can tell you all about Friends, Lost, Sex in the City, you name it), they try very hard to emulate western culture. Their goal is a western standard of living. You have no idea how much poverty there is in china, even compared to the united states, where it is pretty bad. In china, the standard working day is 9:00 - 6:30 plus usually one day a weekend. Why do they work so hard? If they don't there are three desperate chinese willing to take their place. You speak of Wars. China is arguably even more imperialistic than the US, with the invasion of Tibet, tension at Taiwan, etc. Have you ever seen a soldier from the People's Liberation Army? Their dedication, and skill, and unity, are scary to behold. These men shoot, and won't even ask questions later. Killing civilians? Can I say Tien a men square? Corrupt politicians? A friend of mine just quit his job because he learned that the reason his company got all the exclusive government licenses they needed was because all the ministers in charge of that decision had shares in the company. Do not mistake economic progress with the quality of life of living in a country.

  5. Re:Old News... by superbus1929 · · Score: 2, Informative

    They don't know any better. They don't know that their wages are horribly below what they should be getting in a global market. They don't know that their government treats them like pawns. They don't know that American capitalist companies are giving them table scraps for jobs simply because they're so cheap and expendable. They don't know ANYTHING other than propaganda and lies and what the state tells them. Younger people don't even know anything happened in Tienanmen Square on June 4 of 1989. They simply DON'T KNOW. Three reporters were recently let go from a paper for letting an advertisement go from some group, something like the Mothers of 64 (64 = June 4). One of the people let go didn't even know what the significance of that was because she didn't know of the Tienanmen Square massacre. No wonder they're trying to censor their people! If I had the wool pulled out from my eyes and was made to see that I was being abused like the Chinese people, I'd revolt, too! Any company based out of America that supports these autocracies by sending jobs to them or bending to their will show where their true loyalties lie. And they should be punished in any way possible for their transgressions.

    --
    Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
  6. Re:China Evil or Not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Rural China used to be as poor as sub-Saharan Africa.

    Used to be? No. Still is. And yes, I have been there.

  7. Re:Ah, yes by HungWeiLo · · Score: 3, Informative

    many of them have no idea it ever happened

    That's a bit simplistic, don't you think?

    I've had work meetings/visits to Beijing and other parts of China. Not only have I not met anyone who has not heard of it, I've met coworkers who openly tell me that they were at the protests themselves when they were at university.

    People there just don't care because they're too busy making money.

    --
    There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
  8. Re:Quantum networks by kebes · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
    You've mis-understood those experiments. Quantum entanglement establishes instantaneous correlations between distant particles, but you cannot use this to communicate information (the 'wavefunction collapse' is random). There is no way to transmit information faster than the speed of light (according to modern relativity and quantum mechanics).

    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?
    No. To use entangled particles (e.g. photons) you still need to transmit the entangled photons to the two parties in question. So that means using fiber optics or free-space optics. In either case these can be blocked.

    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.
    Sorry... but there is no known way to transmit information without sending some form of energy from sender to receiver. That's a fairly well-established law of physics, unlikely to be proven wrong. What quantum mechanics does allow for, as you mention, is encryption that is provably unbreakable. Further, quantum encryption allows you to notice when someone is eavesdropping on the channel, so you can be confident that your communication was not intercepted. This leaves the "bad guys" with two options: to block all encrypted traffic, or to block none of it.

    Sorry to be a downer... but quantum mechanics doesn't work that way. On the other hand, the ability of quantum mechanics to enable provably secure communications is quite significant. If quantum encryption became the norm, then censorship would be considerably more difficult. When all transmission are encrypted, spying or censoring becomes rather impractical.
  9. Re:Quantum networks by kebes · · Score: 2, Informative

    The effect is instantaneous, but no information is transmitted.

    Correlation means that the outcome of the wavefunction collapse on the two entangled particles are strongly related to one another. So when you "compare notes" later you'll find a high degree of correlation between what states entangled particles wound up in.

    However the hidden assumption in your train-of-logic is that you can *control* wavefunction collapse and pick out whatever state you want (and then the entangled particle will have the corresponding state). It doesn't work like that, unfortunately. Wavefunction collapse is effectively random. It's so random that it's the basis of the most faithful random-number generators (e.g. data from radioactive decay).

    I agree that at first glance when you read a description of quantum entanglement experiments, it seems like it should be trivial to force a particle into a given state, thereby forcing the entangled co-particle into a corresponding state. Alas, this cannot be done. If a particle is in a true superposition of states (say it is mixed being being 'spin up' and 'spin down'), you have absolutely no control over which state it collapses into. You don't get to pick.

    You may try to pick its state by, for example, measuring it's state and then altering its state if necessary. However the entanglement has collapsed during that first measurement. After that, the particles are no longer entangled, and altering the state of your particle won't continue to affect the other one.

    It's certainly not obvious that this is how it works, but experiments have confirmed this quite exhaustively.

  10. As bad as this is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    ...worse is (IMO), that flickr started to censor images for users from Germany, Signapore, Hong Kong, and Korea!