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China Now Blocking RSS Feeds
Phurge passed us an Ars Technica link covering China's newest internet-based crackdown: RSS feeds. Real Simple Syndication has apparently been a fairly foolproof way to get around Chinese government censors in recent years. As long ago as August, though, access to feeds has been curtailed by the Great Firewall. "More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with 'feeds,' 'rss,' and 'blog,' thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites — including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica — useless ... there are a few workarounds, some of which may be simpler than others. Some of our readers in China tell us that web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, (sort of) help provide access to RSS feeds. One reader says that if he has the aggregator set to display the full post (or however much of the post is made available) and clicks through to read more, everything is just fine."
Change RSS to LSS and we'll call it even.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
All China really has to do in order to control information flow nationwide is to deregulate the media and force them to compete vigorously against one another. They'll be so cost-pressured that they can't really do any journalism; instead, they'll end up so short-staffed that all they can do is publish the stuff that the government wants them to publish.
Barring that, the internet will simply detect the censorship and route around it, just like it always does...
By far the best evidence of a civilised country. Ever.
God, root, what is difference ?
I thought Socialism was about the ideal of giving power to the people rather than an elite oligarchy. What the hell happened? Censorship usually comes from an insecure and weak oligarchy desperate to maintain privilege.
China will have to choose between having the internet and being a world power using the tools of the 21st century, or becoming isolated from the rest of the world on all levels. The internet is becoming the primary infrastructure for a new future. The idea of becoming or staying economicaly and politically viable without it is naive and foolish. It would be like trying to become a economic and military power in the 20th century without an industrial base to build anything.
Safari uses the feed:// "protocol" for RSS/Atom feeds, even though it's still really just HTTP under the hood. It allows you to enter, for example, feed://slashdot.org and it will automatically find the appropriate feed for the site instead of having to type: http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
No, I don't. Creating such a thing would require a large effort involving the collusion of thousands of people. Given that broad set of implementors, and the US traditions of freedom of the press, something like you describe would be impossible to keep secret. I don't doubt that there are probably several neo-fascist law makers in the US that would advocate for this. However, given what I have laid out, they would have to do it in the open rather than in secret.