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."
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
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...?
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
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
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.
Flickr itself is hardly free from censorship problems either...
9 96259/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theunholytrinity/543
Both poverty and repression are bad things, but that doesn't mean that you can't take action against one without first correcting the other. I have no problem simultaneously helping the rural poor and fighting overseas repression. I also have no problem with someone who has decided to attack one and not the other for whatever personal reason they have.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
I'm probably going to get modded into oblivion for this, but here goes. I just found what you had to say very interesting and wanted to post what I thought.
After thinking about it, I really believe that a company like Yahoo or even MS could, as another poster put it, say "Enough is Enough" and draw a line in the sand regarding their involvement in with China's censorship. Make a huge deal of their announcement to stand up for human rights. Issue press releases and hold news conferences. Get Errol Morris to direct a whole series of commercials that air during primetime which specifically calls out google and any other search company as helping to further the oppression of people under the communist system in China. Yahoo could use U.S. national patriotism, pride and the overall desire of the average American to believe they are good and righteous, to completely obliterate Google in the domestic search market. Yahoo could come straight out with a campaign that bluntly says people using google for search or any of their other services, supports the oppression of people living in communist China.
I guarantee that such a move by Yahoo would decimate googles usage by Americans. Google would no longer be cool and people would rally behind Yahoo because to do so would make the average Yahoo user feel better about themselves.
Seriously, its a bold move but I think it would work.
Even if google came out and proclaimed they would no longer do business in China, the damage would be done to their image within days. You can not underestimate the power that such a move would have to resonate with middle america. It would be the PR move to own all other PR moves.
I think that instead of being so concerned with the China market, Yahoo should look at their failing position in the U.S. market and think of some interesting ways to knock google off its pedestal. And what a fall it would be.
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.
Filtering IP addresses is hardly the cutting edge of technology. Which companies are you referring to?
He's probably referring to Cisco and such. What, do you think the Chinese gov't designed and built their network and censor infrastructure themselves? Of course not, they had US companies who value dollars over human rights (specifically Article 19) to build it for them.