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China's Battle to Police the Web
What_the_deuce writes "For the first time in years, internet browsers are able to visit the BBC's website. In turn, the BBC turns a lens on the Chinese web-browsing experience, exploring one of the government's strongest methods of controlling the communication and information accessible to the public. 'China does not block content or web pages in this way. Instead the technology deployed by the Chinese government, called Golden Shield, scans data flowing across its section of the net for banned words or web addresses. There are five gateways which connect China to the internet and the filtering happens as data is passed through those ports. When the filtering system spots a banned term it sends instructions to the source server and destination PC to stop the flow of data.'"
I would like to know what else they are using. I might learn a thing or two from it.
Now the censors are rapidly going to discover that the firewall isn't working, because suddenly it's blocking all the stuff they want their people to be able to get to!
I don't get why China gets as many breaks as they do, including Most Favored Nation status (permanently!). The 2008 Olympics are looking more and more like the 1936 edition.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Comcast has service in China???
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The expats I've met in China use Firefox with the Tor extension. It slows things down, so they just normally browse, and then active Tor when they want to go to a banned site.
Well,yes, you can do that. But I have a friend who lives in Beijing and he tells me that if you use a vpn and have too much traffic across it they will shut it down. So the firewall is aware of the presence of the vpn and can measure the traffic. Furthermore, too much use of a vpn may cast suspicion on you.
Read the comments by Chinese net users
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7313998.stm
They don't think that their media is at all biased. They believe "western" media is biased and has an anti-Chinese agenda.
Too much fucking national pride is what it is. When I talk to Chinese people, in China, I often get this weird apologetic "our country is crappy in a socio-economic way", but "our morals and cultural values are superior to your hedonistic, non-family oriented foreign ways".
It's creepy. Take a look at the China-daily forum if you have morbid interest. It's full of the craziest ranting racists I have ever seen...and I visited 4chan once.
Bottom line is, I don't think the government oppressing the people with censorship should be looked at in such a simplistic way. There seems to be a need for the censorship for many people on some level. Like they can't take a single bit of criticism of their precious middle kingdom and it's 5000 (actually 50) year great history.
A Chinese colleague of mine explained a simpler way that some Chinese have used to get past the censors. For instance, the character fa of "Falun Gong" gets split into two characters. The left part (the three dots) represents water, so shui is used instead. Without the three dots, fa becomes qu. So rather than write Falun Gong, a message board poster might write Shui-qu-lun Gong. This could be figured out by a person reading it, but wouldn't be found by computer search.
This was a while ago, and I assume that such a simple substitution would get figured out pretty quickly, but I thought it was neat.
Because they hold over $1.4 trillion dollars in US debt? Because they could crush our economy by unloading that paper and their dollar reserves on the open market? Because the US is still going to China to beg for handouts because we can't balance our budget? Because their population of men available for military service exceeds that of the entire United States? And possibly, because our leadership, world famous as staunch defenders of civil rights themselves, really doesn't give a shit about Chinese human rights abuses?
But what do I know? I'm just guessing here...
(I'm just tired of people complaining about this place becoming a police state)
Some things may not be *as bad* in America as they are in China, but they can still be *bad*.
In fact, we are seeing a slow but stead erosion of various civil liberties.
Yes, things could be worse, but that is no reason to avoid making them better now.
Pi Ran Out
Being a Brit, I love comparing US news sources to others around the world, including those of our "enemies", and I regularly find that news sources from the USA are very introverted compared not only to the BBC, but even Al Jazeera and Chineese State news are more outward looking (even if somewhat biased). It's not just the news of our enemies either I look at other allies news, they too are less introverted than their US equivilents. And it's not that you can't produce quality news from around the world, compare the versions of CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/
http://edition.cnn.com/
But who would think to put "edition" at the beginning of a URL?
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me