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China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites?
Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?
This smells fishy, because if I remember correctly, Google owns a significant share of Baidu.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
I know some people in South Africa had this problem when going to yahoo.com they were redirected to Baidu. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/General/1678.html
Excerpt:
Table-ized A.I.
We as a world full of people don't buy "Made in China" crap. Companies buy it and leave us no choice but to buy from them.
When the choice is to have a product or to not have a product, that doesn't count as a choice.
China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works.
But for how long? I think Fascism is unstable on the scale of decades as long as trade is free and easy.
Modern economies depend on economic growth. If the elite capture all of that, you end up with terrible social stresses from the inequality, and you limit growth through lack of consumers and limited productivity. If you distribute the gains more widely, lots of people end up with luxuries like education, time to think, and the belief that the elite is no better than they are.
Once you have a comfortable middle class, I think it's hard to avoid ending up with democracy. South Korea could have been called Fascist during their period of military dictatorship, but they've turned out pretty well. I expect China will go the same route as the gerontocracy dies off.
This is unquestionable true. We see it everywhere in China. Tor saved our life!
This is an imbalance that was counter to the proclaimed idea of equality, and it was very real in the USSR. In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car, a maid or two, and the best living accommodation - this was when people were paid for their worth. After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars, dachas and tourist trips. This was one of those things that doomed the USSR; I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class. Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could; it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around, smoking and crudely joking about it.
Communism goes even beyond that; but enough to say that Communism is based on the concept of unlimited availability of all worldly goods, and on unlimited consumption of those as your needs dictate. We can see Communism practiced on board of Enterprise in Star Trek, for example. Crew members can replicate anything they want and build whatever they like; use Holodecks as much as they want; and they are careful enough to take only what they really need, and not more. This is currently impossible because of many reasons, with unlimited availability of everything as one quite obvious example, and with a need for a "new human" as another concept that has no basis in reality.
Communism (or socialism) works for ants, but humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything. You can't build socialism with those humans. But at least the basic capitalism can channel those human urges to the greater good of the society; socialism and communism just pretend that those urges do not exist. Capitalism is simply socialism with a working method of enforcing the rules.
I agree. This story smells extremely fishy indeed, and not just because the "news source" reporting this has only been around for a week or so. Read here for another possible angle about what's going on here. http://kschofield.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!4C58DDFAA6673C69!1362.entry The fourth comment down is the most pertinent information about what this may be about.
I can't imagine China would subvert such a large percentage of searches - that would be *really bad* for business (and public) relations with the west - also there would be a lot more information out there if this was actually happening on such a large scale.
China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works. China is a vindication of everything the post-Socialist Fascist movement thought was in need of change in Socialist ideology to make it work. As a result, China has many of the benefits of capitalism, but has the state control of the means of production that Socialism provides.
No, it doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination. All China has proved that some organized method of industrialization proves an increase in the standard of living and wealth of a nation. Really, prior to the mid 1980s, China was so screwed up that just about means of exporting goods to the USA would improve them.
Seriously... this sort of myth was really born of the "Hitler Miracle", about, how the Nazi regime supposedly turned the German economy around in the midst of the Great Depression. Sure, Nazi propaganda would have us believe the in the midth of Hitler's German economic juggernaut, but the truth is, if you look at the statistics - EVEN THE BRITISH WERE OUT PRODUCING THE GERMANS. I won't belabor the point of American production, because the Americans had population and other advantages over Germany. Instead, let's look at the British, whom had less population, less natural resources, and still managed to produce more aircraft and more warships than the Germans, ultimately cutting Germany off from the sea and then taking Germany out of the air.
Essentially, all Germany could do was build a bunch of U-Boats that were just facelift improvements from World War I designs (the "modern" U-Boat came way too late to make a difference). Germany built two primary battleships - Bizmarck and Tirpitz. By contrast, the British built 5 battleships of the KGV class, more than a few aircraft carriers, and plenty of not only fighters, but also four engine heavy bombers. Germany could never build 4 engine bombers in number, becuase despite having an entire continent at her disposal, the Germans always had engine shortages...
And, why was that?
It's because fascism is a crooked and corrupt institution, and crooked institutions are not efficient. Tales of Nazi looting of other countries abound, but there was massive disorganization, massive crime... really, just imagine a bunch of thugs in a command economy, telling corporate bosses what to produce for war armaments... eventually, the whole thing would collapse... as indeed, it would have, under its own weight, had not the weight of a few million Allied soldiers and thousands of tons of Allied bombs not helped it along.
And that's ultimately what's going to happen with China. Already, rumours abound about problems in the Chinese banking sector, there's inflation being swept under the rug, and there's all sorts of inefficiencies creeping in that are just swept under the rug.
Bottom line is, fascist regimes always produce good economic results, only because we believe them when they tell us that we do. At some point, freedom really -does- matter, and that will catch up to China.
This is my sig.
Give me a break. Just compare Google.com's top "tiananmen square" result to Google.cn:
This one is for China
This one is for the rest of us
I support China's inclusion into the global economy. It helps raise many millions of people out of poverty, while providing solid incentives to move forward politically. However, let's not fool ourselves... China has a long way to go.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
In the Chinese net culture, full-text being copied and pasted is a compliment, showing popularity of the work. You always find the work of popular online novelists "mirrored" on multiple websites. People usually acknowledge the author but does not always provide a URL reference. Plagiarism, or more specifically, defrauding the reader of authorship of the work, usually isn't the motivation.
This copy and paste culture can be traced to two historical reasons: (1) before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying. This is what student used to do in school. By the time you finished school, you would have copied a number of literature works by hand. And (2), private, unregulated hand-copying is the only way literature can survive over several oppressive emperors.
The former practice can still be seen prevalent in many CJK education system nowadays, where students are asked to manually copy some text on a regular basis as a part of the learning process. The latter reason still applies today as well; you'd see full-text of an article posted on an online BBS forum only to be taken down later by the authority, and someone posts the full-text again on another BBS forum.
In addition, copyright and authorship are separate issues. Interestingly, the British first invented copyright in order to allow the royalty to regulate printing of books (i.e. for censorship). Copyright granted the print shop a license to print a work. Without a license it would be illegal. Copyright was not invented to protect authorship.
In conclusion, it is not that the Chinese does not respect authorship. Copyright is simply unsuitable under the historical and cultural context. This seems to chime with the notion that real man upload his code on FTP and let everyone else mirror it, as said by some Linus dude.
I once had a signature.
As you point out, every empire has done these things. It is therefore rendered meaningless as a metric for comparing empires (and yes, the US is an empire, albeit mainly economic, its just that most members of the empire are states).
Things like severity are impossible to measure, since most of these events were either poorly reported, or to be frank, ignored at the time. As we can only judge severity on incomplete information, this is again meaningless.
A general rule is, if group A wants something that group B has, and group A is more powerful, group B is going to get stomped. That covers everything from the ancient Egyptians (where this reasoning was in fact central to their identity as a people) to modern day Iraq. They have oil, we want to control it, ergo, we crush them.
If the roles were reversed, they'd crush us.
In summary, we're all barstards.
Like the exceptions which delayed Virgin America? I don't see the threat to national security they posed, yet they were unable to open for business until this year.
OSx86 FTW
Last year and through part of this year, there were reports of some sort of DNS poisoning in China involving vnet.cn. See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=60083 for one report of the behavior. In the link I posted, the user was worried the problem was due to some sort of malware, but I witnessed the same behavior firsthand (domain names apparently at random resolving to a vnet.cn address) where the problem was not due to malware local to a particular user's machine. In the cases I witnessed, the DNS servers were operated by China Telecom.
Enough of the irrelevancies already. The GP was right ... America and China are completely different nations, with completely different traditions, and no, neither is perfect. We made a lot of mistakes a long the way, and yes what happened to the Native Americans and African slaves was tragic: but we, as a society, have accepted that what was done in those cases was wrong. We look back at those periods of our history with distaste, and we don't glorify what was done. Slavery is illegal here in the United States you know, or perhaps that little fact escaped you. Hell, we fought a destructive internecine war to put a stop to it: how many other slave-trading nations have done that? Our Native American friends still have their own territories, have won major concessions from our government, because we do bear some collective guilt for what was done to them. So if you're going to try and slam the U.S. and its citizens find something a little more consequential to do it with. Or are you trying to justify any negative behavior on China's part by saying, "hey, even the much-vaunted United States has done bad things, so it's okay if China does too"?
... well. I have no idea (and neither does anyone else) what ambitions China's leadership may have in that regard: they're about as secretive as one can get. Seems to me they have their hands full at home, but they are in the midst of a massive military buildup, are currently waging economic warfare on the entire planet and, well ... you never know.
Furthermore, neither the United States nor China qualify as Empires in the classical sense. I really wish people who don't understand the term would just stop using it. America will never be an empire: we're too far past our prime for that and in any event we no longer have an industrial base capable of supporting the requisite war machine. Perhaps you don't realize how far the U.S. has cut its military since the Cold War days. And even if we still had that capability, the American people would never stand for it. We're pretty pissed off about Iraq, as it happens.
You know, a lot of people around the world are completely confused about that, because pretty much every other nation in history that has had such a relatively massive military has done so for the express purpose of acquiring territory. China now
Look, the Romans had an Empire, a real one (join us or die.) So did the British. So did the Russians. So did a lot of other countries over the centuries. When America or China starts moving some heavy military equipment and lots of personnel around, annexing other countries by main strength, killing anyone who opposes them and forcibly making them part of some "North American Empire" or a "People's Empire of China" I'll agree with you. And no, I don't count the occupation of Iraq as being anything similar, in spite of any ambitions Mr. Bush might have. That was just stupid.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But of course you refer mostly to the modern situation, where F/OSS distribution model has certain likeness of Communism (from everyone according to his capabilities, to everyone according to his needs, and there is no Government.) I guess the p1rate scene also follows, including music, at least on the consumption side.
Back on topic: China's experience is not that of the West. The West looks back to the success of Athens, of the Roman Republic, and of the near-democracy of the northern European tribes (the Saxons, for instance; even the Iriquois Confederacy in America). China on the other hand looks back to many centuries of imperial glory that were far in advance of anything the Roman Empire ever achieved. Unlike the Romans, the empire wasn't degenerate from a republic. Unlike the Romans, posts under the emperor were largely based on merit - anyone who could score well on the exams was given authority to match their proven learning and intelligence.
The Chinese went wild for Mao because they have fond cultural memories of life under great emperors. Mao didn't work out so well, yet still their cultural memory has little place for democracy. The Nationalists - their one "democratic" leadership - were mobsters through and through. Mao was a relief after that. Even Hong Kong was only given democracy as the Brits left; it had been under thoroughly imperial governance up until then by the Brits - and quite prosperously and delightfully so as far as the inhabitants were concerned.
The saving grace for the rest of the world is that the Chinese have most often been an inward-looking, rather than expansionist empire. But what they're looking at as examples of progress are Singapore - not exactly a Western democracy in fact, despite pretenses - and what the Brits did with Hong Kong - an unelected government favoring largely-uncontrolled business operations. Taiwan would be a bright light, except Taiwanese businesses are so invested in the mainland now the last thing they want to see is a truly democratic government there that might do something drastic like expropriate their factories in favor of "the workers," or some other throwback to the Maoism that's still given some respect there.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Socialism has at least one major fault: it depends on people taking their share of the common wealth, proportional to their contribution.
No. Control by the workers of the means of production is designed precisely to tackle exploitation. Only under capitalism can people take a "share of wealth" grossly disproportional to "their contribution", through asset investment.
A genius scientist can be entitled to millions of dollars, but he is not married, lives at his lab and needs nothing.
You'd be hard pressed to find a psychologist that doesn't consider "genius" to be identifiable by about the age of 5-6. A genius is formed of a mixture of good genetics and early nurturing environment. He will always receive greater admiration than the average Joe, and he will always have an easier time conquering problems; to give him lots of money in addition to these unearnt gifts is nothing to do with entitlement. It's merely the capitalist way of making sure he's on your team.
A family of janitors with 8 kids needs everything they can get from the society, and they are hardly earning anything from the society for their work.
Last I checked, society needs janitors. Since you put so little value on those who keep the buildings in your neighbourhood clean, I suggest you lobby for them to all be fired. Meanwhile, to keep things balanced, I'll lobby for AstraZeneca to fire all its scientists. We'll see who among us feels the effect first, OK?
In Stalin's time, for example, a professor could afford a personal chauffeured car
Why? Did he need his equipment to be carried around? Was it because he was often taking his underlings on field trips? Please, reveal to me why a dedicated professor would be interested in a chauffeur.
After Stalin things changed: a scientist went hungry (130 R/mo) and an uneducated metal worker at a factory (400-500 R/mo) started buying cars
So the problem was that during Stalin, millions of workers went hungry, but after Stalin, a few professors went hungry? And to you, this is a retrograde step? (Except they certainly didn't - the professors always had it better. But never mind.)
I can't imagine a more stupid idea than to herd your best and brightest into the lowest class.
Quite, you're revealing your fascist colours; you'd prefer that the weaker starve and only the stronger survive.
Many of them escaped to Israel and the USA as soon as they could
So some academics see their jobs as a means to an end (wealth) rather than an end itself (scholarship). Never encountered a good academic with this attitude, however.
it was simply insulting for them to remain, be paid a pittance, and see their skills wasted on picking up potatoes in the field with locals just sitting around
I recall one of my better tutors, Cambridge grad, deciding to work as a miner for a year or two straight after graduation. Why? Picking potatoes / mining coal might be below your brilliant mind, but to his brilliant mind, every man could pull his weight wherever it was needed; he didn't see his brain as a "get out clause" from doing dirty work.
Communism is based on... unlimited consumption of [all worldly goods] as your needs dictate
There is sufficient wealth in Sweden, say, for no man to starve, nor to die from lack of medical care, nor to go without shelter. So, taking "needs" to be those things, it is possible to create a socialist country in which there can be consumption "as your needs dictate"; and a more capitalist country, such as the USA. You're complaining that a goal is unattainable, when it has been reached already - assuming one were to redistribute a tiny proportion of wealth for remaining cases of homelessnes, etc. - by many first world countries.
humans are possessive animals, with urge to own everything and control everything
I have no urge to own anything beyond
*sighs* Germany's problem with production was that it kept trying to produce the best and strongest, which is no way to win a war you're in the middle of.
But that's NOT TRUE at all. If it were true anywhere, it would be only true in the case of tanks, where the contractors were heavy machine makers and so treated each tank as a hand crafted thing. But even then, the Russian T-34 was a far better tank than the Panzers Germany entered the war with.
Beyond that, Germany sacrificed a lot for expediency. The entire U-Boat war was a concession to not build the best. The famed type XXI U-Boat, which could have been a game changer, was kept on the drawing boards to build the earlier designs. Germany cancelled construction of potential aircraft carriers, never built additional battleships... her whole naval strategy was to fight a sort of a guerilla war.
German infantry, for example, went to battle with a bolt action rifle, whereas her Yankee counterparts had the superior M1 Garand. And, you say, the "best"... German logistics trains relied in large part on steam locomotive engine and horse drawn transportation. Last time I checked, a truck was better than horse. The careful researcher will also note that the USA, incidentally, developed steam locomotives that significantly outperformed their German counterparts.
And have a look at aircraft, again.... the BF-109 and Spitfire were fairly close aircraft going into the war and throughout the Battle of Britain, but, again, the Germans had no equivalent to the Lancaster Bomber.
It goes on and on and on... Really, we have to look at the German Armed Forces for what they were. It had some modern tactics to help it early on, but, ultimately the whole thing was a mishmash of some misapplied high tech propaganda pieces to mask the overall inferiority of the whole thing. None of German's high tech weapons - the King Tiger, the V1 and V2, the ME-262, and the type XXI U-Boat, did a damned thing to change the outcome of the war, and her low tech weapons were simply not up to scratch.
Germany had an army that entered the war with tanks that weren't even as good as their French counterparts, a fighter aircraft that only matched the best the British could produce, had no real logistics support, a navy that lacked the capital ships to challenge its obvious rival, radar and signals intelligence nowhere near as advanced as her British counterparts. German communications was so bad that not only were all of their tactical communications read by the allies, the Germans didn't even realize that they were being read, despite obvious failures.
This is my sig.
I have a personal ICP licence and I am a UK national.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
*Sigh* Actually it is a lot more complicated than that.
Currently, there is an economic war going over China's industry and, while the US is currently winning (as near as anyone can tell), it is not very obvious. As part of that war, you are going to see a lot more reports like this in the next few months showing up as a runup to a McCarthy like campaign next year, with Chinese replacing Communists. That's doesn't mean it is not true, even "Tailgunner Joe" actually nailed lots of real communists along with the innocents.
On the other hand, that does not mean this is what it seems on face value. Google has a lot of "side deals" with China on various areas, which means, if this incident is not some individual entrepreneur (the question is why would anyone bother, China would not really care, and Baidu is hardly threatened by Google) then the PRC was applying some pressure against Google for some reason, and I am fairly certain it was NOT about internet sites.
I have absolutely no evidence except my intuition (and decades of studying Chinese institutional economics) on this, but I really think it is something involving that 700 mhz spectrum Google is bidding on. Either one of their competitors wants them out of the bidding if they win, or Google is bidding on behalf of some third party. Or maybe they just want to hurt Google, big time.
Whatever the cause, the plot twist is that it is probably part of a corporate espionage "boobytrap" set up by one of Googles competitors, I recognize the MO. It will be real interesting to see how it plays out. Bet it blows up in Googles face (figuratively speaking), and Google ends up in very hostile Senate hearings next year.
...before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying.Um, the Chinese have disseminated printed literature for more than a thousand years now. The copying by hand stems from the central position calligraphy has in their culture. The only way to attain a hand that will not expose you as an uncultured clod is by copying whole books hand-written by masters of the art. It is a learning method, not a way to keep literature in circulation, since those Confucian classics etc. would be massively available in woodblock print versions as well.