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China Anti-Corruption Web Site Crashes On First Day
An anonymous reader tips us to news out of China that the Web site of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention crashed on Tuesday, just hours after its launch, as droves of people logged on to complain about corruption among officials. "The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations," an anonymous NBCP official said.
China Anti-Corruption Web Site Crashes On First Day
It didn't crash. it just got corrupted.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"We didn't expect too many people to know about the corruption, or the website. Damn."
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Found it.
http://yfj.mos.gov.cn/
the website is showing chinks in its armor
"The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations,"
Oh no. And now the slashdotters are comming!!!!
... and capital punishment for officials caught corrupting.
(I hope the above isn't construed as a death threat against Bush! And his staff. And Congress. And the Senate. DHS... TSA...)
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
The common sense solution involves getting arrested or tased? I somehow doubt that. It may in fact involve blogging on the net about it until your voice is heard. Standing out in the cold and waving signs is the -old- way to protest. You can get a LOT more attention with a good blog, or bunch of bloggers blogging the same blog. Blog blog blog.
Do I have a blog? No, I don't have any extra time in my day to talk to myself. I've better things to do.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Perhaps it failed the WGA check
This web site was only meant to pacify the citizenry, by making them feel heard. It's no different than here in the USA when you write your Senator or e-mail a company's technical support address: it's not like anyone really cares what you have to say, or will actually read it or do anything about it.
If anything, the corrupt Chinese government officials were just going to use the information to decide which citizens to throw in prison next.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
In a part of the world where government corruption is hideously rampant, I think this is a wonderful sign. I suggests that China's national government and many citizens want to reduce corruption. This program might not take down highly connected corrupted officials (only a free press can do that, I think), but I bet it could make lots of people's lives better.
Assuming that the complaints are actually investigated, that the investigations are fair, and that most people don't make false accusations of corruption, that is.
To complain 'on paper' like that?
With that government, i know i wouldn't. Hell, I'm almost afraid to complain about mine these days..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Speaking of China and corruption, I had to laugh out loud when I read the quote at the bottom of the [Slashdot] page: "Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife." There once was an actress named Jiang Qing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing
...the Chinese character for 'pwnt'?
one should install pristine officials right from the original CD, and then periodically CRC them to make sure they haven't been corrupted. It's especially important not to download your officials from any old site on the Web, because they might have been deliberately corrupted.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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The bureau has been entrusted to collect and analyze
information from the banking, land use, medicine and
telecommunications sectors, among others, and to share
it with prosecuting organs, courts and the police.
Share the information with police, who might actually come after the people making the most complaints?The cynic in me says that this is probably merely an initiative by the government to see where the problems are, rather than a true attempt to end corruption. A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but the rest will be window dressing. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the loudest complainers are quietly dealt with.
I think the Chinese authorities are realistic enough to know that they face an impossible task. Witness the first 'death penalty for corruption' laws enacted, with great fanfare, well over ten years ago. In spite of much PR and many executions, corruption remains as widespread as ever. The death penalty certainly doesn't seem to be a deterrent against corruption.
One of biggest problems facing China's government is ensuring its own long-term survival, and corruption is a big danger to the government's survival. They should know. The communist revolution itself was a reaction against corruption.
As they say: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
how can people tag this article with "humor"?
corrupt public servants are being executed in china,
so we are talking about a webinterface to a death-list here!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Wow. I'm reading this comment at -1. W00T for the Slashdot groupthink. Apparently, AC, you should have mentioned what the civic duties are. If you live in a democracy, as this poster (though not TFA) is referring to, and you don't like the people in charge, you VOTE FOR THE OTHER GUY in the next election.
Whine about things on the internet is +3 Insightful and this is -1?
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The PRC has a poor track-record with government-endorsed whistleblower campaigns. Poor, as in thrown in jail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
I think its still crashed, it's got all these wierd squiggles instead of proper writing...
I'm fairly sure it was planned as a publicity stunt
Or perhaps they actually want to do something about corruption, but hadn't counted on just how many would try access the site. Corruption is widespread in China, and very unpopular. The only people who want is the people - the criminals - who benefit from it. This is the people, nor is it the national government, because it causes unrest, which the national government has to deal with; and I don't think they want that.
The chinese government are like most governments in most modern nations - they by and large want to do what is best for the people, or what they think is best. They are not monsters that enjoy making the population as unhappy as possible, despite the picture that gets painted in the more reactionary media in the west. The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources; that and the fact that corruption has been part of the Chinese society for well over 5000 years. It will probably take at least a generation of modernisation to change this.
Every time there are news from China, it is interpreted in the worst possible light - if they put a man on the moon, it must be because they starve their poor and want to rain death on America, if they tighten copyright laws, it is 'repression', if they don't, they are 'thieves'. Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?
I wonder if the 3 meg jpeg on the front page had anything to do with the crash.
Nice to know that, no matter what part of the world you're in, people are willing to listen to "my brother's little kid, he's great with this world wide web stuff!" and actually pay them to do some work.
I totally agree with what you've said. Especially on Slashdot, news stories about China tend to be interpreted negatively, and in a very 1-dimensional way. The things that Slashdotters associate with China are always negative: the Great Firewall, jailing dissenters, censorship. I don't agree with these things either, but this is just a very small part of China, which is an extraordinarily vast country. For a country that has been growing so fast since Deng Xiaoping took office, there are bound to be some growing pains.
Furthermore, it should be obvious that parties within the government are making an earnest attempt at stifling corruption. Witness the death sentence of the head of the Chinese FDA, who was charged with corruption. China's current president has a reputation for being strongly against corruption, and is well-liked because of it.
It's unfortunate that the anti-corruption website was so poorly designed, but I don't doubt that the intention behind it was genuine.
No. 2007 is now. And yes, in 2007 another public official was executed for corruption in China. Zheng Xiaoyu was probably not the only, nor will he be the last, government official to be executed in China for corruption. Believe it or not, I am aware that China still executes govenment officials (and also the occasional businessman) for corruption.
Please re-read what I wrote:
- A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but
the rest will be window dressing.
The death penalty for corruption was enacted over a decade ago, and, as you correctly imply, remains in force to this day. I didn't mean to imply that executions for corruption have stopped, my point was, that in spite of the the death penalty, corruption is still widespread in China.I further believe that, as one of the other replies also stated, the fix for corruption is transparency. Unfortunately, barring a major shake up in China, massive transparency is not likely to happen in China anytime soon (think about the Great Firewall).
I don't believe that the death penalty for corruption is being applied consistently or fairly (in the sense of all people being equal under the law), and consequently it loses its deterrent effect.
This doesn't invalidate my points:
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
No, they are not. They want to stay in power, and keeping to people from starving is necessary to do that. Everything they do for their people is to keep them from rebellion.
"The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources;"
If they wanted to help the people, they wouldn't spend huge sums of money on monitoring their population, torturing dissidents, and building the world's most advanced censorship regime. India has a billion people too, but they seem to run their country without wide scale torture.
Their big "problem", is that their people are only being kept from rebellion because of unsustainable economic growth, which the Chinese government is pursuing by inflationary monetary policy and environmental degradation on a scale unseen since the industrial revolution.
At some point, the growth will stop, and China's ethnically fractured population, made insane by generations of propaganda, will assert their power. I don't imagine it will be pretty.
"Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?"
Hitler did an amazing job building Germany's Autobahn network, Pinochet lead Chile to a path of economic prosperity, and China has build a great deal of infrastructure. We don't talk about these things, because they are far outweighed by the overall evil of the perpetrators.
The site has too much junk on it. No wonder the server is overloaded.
There are several .swf objects. Some are movies. There's a Javascript picture rotator. There seems to be server-side Java; if you try vote.jsp on the site, you get a Java backtrace.
The "vote" script is amusing. The web designer seems to have copied a "suggestion box" script from somewhere, then commented out the "vote" capability. It's so PRC. The government is terrified of their people voting on anything.
Oh yeah, let's slashdot it... that'll help.
http://www.coderoshi.com/
Oh christ.
It sends a 3504 pixel by 2336 pixel JPEG with quality level 97(excessively high), and the page directs the browser to scale it down to generate the final 200 by 142 image.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.