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China Continues to Shut Down Video Sites
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "It's not just YouTube that's blocked in China. After the unrest in Tibet, at least 25 video sharing sites have been shut down and others have been penalized. While the Chinese government is not admitting that violence in Tibet had anything to do with it, they do have a sudden interest in strictly enforcing licensing restrictions that require video sharing websites to register with the government. Among other things, Chinese video sharing sites must promise not to show videos that inspire fear, contain pornography, or endanger national security."
No to censorship.
Set up a Psiphon node.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psiphon
That will land you in prison in China. You obviously don't understand the level of internet monitoring in China. This isn't the RIAA cracking down on Napster. This represents lives in the balance. Your ignorant comment can get people executed. Please STFU on subjects you know little to nothing about
Jin
Hate to reply to my own post, but I did some searching. I found a blog post on the YouTomb study the GP mentioned, not sure if there's anything more.
A look at the API data reveals that it is the same mechanism used for music videos. I believe these restrictions have been in place for a while now, I believe some Canadians were complaining about not being able to watch some music video links last year (perhaps posters actually in Canada or another blocked country could clarify?). As mentioned in the blog post, I see no way to set country restrictions on an uploaded video myself. A search for "country" on YouTube help reveals information about YouTube's video identification tool which reveals "content owners" can block videos in chosen regions. In addition, this page about filing copyright complaints tells complainers to list which countries their copyright applies to. Although I'm not sure how often that's used as it seems videos removed for copyright violation are totally deleted rather than just blocked in the specified countries (although I guess if the content is stored/served from the US, they would need to remove everything that's under copyright in the US).
Unfortunately, IMO, this is a pure speculation without base. The crackdown is not related with Tibet event. After a few minutes search on the Internet, I find the sites mentioned to be cracked down were cracked before March 14th, when the major unrest was break out. Anyone that can read Chinese, please read this link http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/51236.htm, it is an article about the one of major video sharing site being out of service for one day. It was before March 14th, and before you tube is reported to be blocked. The whole thing is about the government wants to gain more control over web and media, as they suddenly realized that web video sharing site is a new kind of popular media that they do not have control, and some silly rules that they made about web video service. So the whole is not related to Tibet unrest event.
I am from Beijing and I really wish the game could be canceled.
In Soviet China, the games play you. Yes it's true. I live in my college (a public one, funded by the govn't) where more than 80% of the students are from other places outside Beijing, me included. We will be forced to leave our campus before the Olympic games open, because the college's gym shall be used by the athelets as a place of training (some say they are the USA swimming team). The college has decided so, but offers no single bit of solution for our accomodation during that period. I guess most of us may have to go home --- for quite a few of us this means a long journey across the country, at a considerable cost. For those who has a job here this would mean further loss. I feel I'm being treated as an undesirable, troublesome one who is best kept clear from the city in which I have been living for three years. We are not free to travel or stay as we wish within our own country, or even within our own city.
Thanks to the Olympic games China is drawing increasingly more attentions of the world. I hope that, as a result of the pressure from both within and outside, the govn't would take some measures for us. This is hardly likely, though.
Now something on topic. Removing the Olympics from the IOC? Not likely. Canceling the games? The IOC members are very experienced in politics, and politics has nothing to do with human rights. They can't be ignorant to the massacre taking place in China, but that has nothing to do with their business. They have a perfect alibis: the IOC is not an organization for settling political affairs. We do our own business.
Recently, the Olympic firetorch is going on its tour around the world, including Lhasa, Tibet. I can hardly imagine this.
And a tip for some of you who may want to travel to China for watching the Games: you have to be prepared for the Internet experience in China which is far from yours in your home. Want to know more about a game? There's no Wikipedia. Want home news? A lot of media websites banned. Want watch video from YouTube? No way. Want to read your emails? If you've done many "undesirable " searches on Google you may have trouble accessing your gmail account, as some of my friends have noted. Slashdot? I can only hope the best. It seems that they havnt been keeping an eye on slashdot now. I guess most of the decision makers have no idea of what Slashdot is like...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Tor speed is slow in China, not mention there are rumors on the net that the government uses some fake node discourage the use of tor. Using tor for viewing video site in China simply never works in China.
Maybe it's utopian to imagine that the Chinese government cares about its international reputation, but just in case they do (say because of the upcoming Olympics), we might be able to make a tiny bit of difference by expressing our support for the Dalaï Lama and his call for dialog, eg. here: http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/
He's calling it the "Middle Path". Having autonomy instead of independence (kinda like what Hong Kong has right now) is intended to be a compromise that the Chinese government is supposed to find more agreeable.
You can't access Youtube in Turkey. The last time Turkey blocked it, the DNS just pointed to a page giving the name of the court decision that had resulted in the blocking. This time around they've taken stronger measures so simply using another DNS server isn't good enough.
In any case, Turkey is a democracy and it still blocks Youtube because of videos insulting national heroes. That's what you get from an independent judiciary with laws restricting free speech.
http://www.dalailama.com/news.42.htm :/
I'm going to assume you have a source better than the dalai lama on his desires? Try not to flame when you are wrong
Ah, but we are talking about censorship as in hiding information from people.
Here is a more clear example in the logical flaw you made: imagine an article about weed not being free to use in the US, and you'd say "In Amsterdam it isn't free because you have to pay for it, it's obvious you don't understand the word free." you see, we're talking about different definitions of the same word. I hope that was enlightening.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Um, ah, are you calling the Dalai Lama a lier then? Be cause he says it himself *repeatedly*.
Despite what the Chinese have done to *his* country: the rape, murder, and willful and blatant destruction of the institutions most precious to Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama does not see independence from China as possible because he recognizes a hard case when he sees it.
The Chinese constitution guarantees some sort of autonomy, and within autonomy there is no reason why the Tibetan people can not move forward and have some sort of normal existence. The Dalai Lama sees that as a win-win situation. Tibetans get to live unoppressed, and the Han Chinese can still say to themselves proudly "Look, Tibet is ours!".
So the Dalai Lama is more concerned with the livelihood of his people than reptilian territoriality. China has placed such a pathetically small value on human life, that I'm sure they struggle with that concept. Sad really.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Here in my college, many of the students stay at the campus even if it's the summer holiday. Some of them just can't afford the ticket home. We use to have choices, and now they say 'Go home. This place is not for you.' Not everyone can happily accept this.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.