Slashdot Mirror
Beijing Police To Launch Animated Web Patrols
Reader geoffrobinson notes an AP story on a new initiative by the police in Beijing to put a visible police presence on the screens of Chinese citizens. Starting Sept. 1, little animated cop figures will wander across the displays of users of a baker's dozen of Chinese Web portals. The program is set to expand by year's end to all sites "registered with Beijing servers," according to the report. The point of the anime-like figures seems to be to remind citizens that their Web usage is being monitored, not to actually implement any further monitoring themselves.
many people have no idea about security and monitoring.
Even in the US the average Joe wouldnt know if it was an animated charactor, or a real person spying on them through their webcam.
Pretty lame though...
I am ashamed that a Government would shame itself by acting like the USA.
I am sure the NeoCons are drooling at a visual reminder "We are watching your every mouse click".
They will have the "Terror level" displayed on a flag carried by a little goose-stepping Uncle Sam.
They're doing enough of that in the media. They'd rather let you pretend you are supporting the "land of the free" with some sense of false freedom feeling.
Honestly, at least the Chinese know they're being watched at every step and don't have a government watching them closely but pretending they don't.
>>every so often a little head would appear in the top corner that was to signify that a "supervisor" was watching...
Fascinating study! I guess the Panopticon would cause people to just freak out. Maybe the pervasive monitoring in some societies (UK, Hong Kong) is both a symptom AND a cause of the very crime it's meant to monitor.
>>What if a majority of students/researchers in China are working on their Internet (yes, their) and the "virtua-cop" fucks up their work?
The short answer is: the officials don't care. Truly. Government is about control, not service, and it's certainly not measured by the results it gives. That's a very "western" viewpoint. And this government has a particularly nasty (and long) history of killing its own folks.
I've voluntarily installed screenmate software before and typically it doesn't last past the day. I can't imagine there won't be plenty of programs written to turn them off.
Maybe you should consider that a country can be fucked up even if it isn't the worst on Earth. Sure, we might be doing better than China based on some criteria, but that doesn't mean there aren't quite a few things seriously wrong. "If you don't like it, leave." No thanks. If I don't like it I'll do what I can to fix it. Pointing out what's wrong is the first step.
i don't know where to begin, either you're a total idiot, or just another ditto-head, and frankly i can't tell the difference anymore. while your rights and liberties are being slowly^H^H^Hrapidly eroded, you sit back and say, "if you don't like it, leave." perhaps you'd care to comment on adequate controls in government as they apply to electronic communications by the executive branch staff? or even more so, on the number of executive orders made by the current administration?
foreigners, nationals of a country widely considered to be the most corrupt in the first world, have said to me, " its not that we're any more corrupt than you are, its just that you're professionals at it."
trust me, when it comes to electronic communications, you are every bit as monitored here as in china. why don't you google 'network packet monitor index'. the vendors returned by such a search will be those that contracted to the intelligence agencies years ago; the chinese use equipment cloned from such specifications.
and while you're on the subject of forced abortions, why don't you think about the possibly of forced pregnancy.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Look, we all know that the Chinese government is going to be monitoring as much as it can. They're control freaks. I, for one, welcome any measures they take to remind the people that they're being watched - maybe such reminders will help the people of china think about what kind of society they live in and what kind of society they would like to live in, and encourage them to take action to try to shape their future.
I'd rather be dead, or live in the stone age, than live under the government in 1984. Are these not the principles by which America was founded?
Without reading the whole thread, I do know that the next step is formulating a coherent statement of what is wrong and why it is, in fact, wrong. The third step is proposing a solution that will not introduce more problems than it solves. The fourth is convincing enough of the right people that your solution has sufficient merit to be implemented.
One problem that the USA does not have that China does is that the above steps are impossible for a Chinese subject (I hesitate to use the word citizen) to complete. You normally don't make it past the first step before the government comes to explain why there isn't actually a problem to be solved.
Whoever the guy with the fastest missiles hates most ?
Please understand that having 9960 nuclear warheads in no way stops 130 enemy warheads from reaching you. While 130 nuclear warheads is not sufficient to carpet bomb a country the size of the USA, it is quite sufficient to take out large cities, industry, food production and central administration. The end result is likely massive death toll from starvation and plague, and collapse of the USA as a nation, or at the very least its removal from its world power status.
So no, no one dares attack China.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If I end up in prison after Yahoo 'complies' with my government, then I'll reconsider my perception of freedom.
Some people believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want so long as you don't hurt anyone else. Given that definition, the US is far from a free country.
As an example, explain how drinking alcohol is considered fine and smoking weed can land you in jail. (despite stacks of research proving that pot has less negative effects than alcohol does)
Not to mention Guantanamo. Those aren't citizens, so they don't count.
It's not that it's painful as much as it's a giant black mark on Chinese history. The Chinese usually hate discussing ANYTHING that they/the government lost face on. An act that causes a loss of face (even if for a good reason) is something people disappear over in China.
We're learning about Chinese revolution from a really good History teacher at school at the moment (she wrote one of the text books for the course and is mentioned by Richard Pipes =P). Now we have only just finished the Great Leap Forward and started the Cultural Revolution, but from what I understand so far...
The cultural revolution was another one of Mao's 'mad' policies in which he felt his *own* commanders and party officials, intellectual advisors, etc etc were becoming corrupt and to stop this, he called once again for a new revolution. Kinda contradictory to the 100 Flowers campaign (When he was asking intellectuals for criticism).
Mao may have been an amazing revolutionary, but he failed as a leader...constantly trying to create a new radical revolution without any sort of knowledge on what he was on about. Like his "plant deep, plant close" policy in the GLF which even a child could say would not work...
I think he just loved revolution - his policy of the Mass Line implemented, with the peasants rising up to kill someone...if you read Chung and Halliday, they'll describe him as someone who got a bloodlust for revolution during his implementation of the Mass Line in Jingxi.
~Jarik