Slashdot Mirror
Behind China's Great Firewall
DigitalDame2 writes "In light of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, more scrutiny is being placed on China's Web-filtering practices. In May, China's technology minister, Wan Gang, told Reuters China he would 'guarantee as much [access] as possible,' defending Web limitations as necessary to protect the country's citizens. Truly understanding this cat-and-mouse game means taking a close look at what exactly the government filters out, how the Great Firewall works, and how others have found ways around it."
It's more the pity that the biggest threat would be no one showing up to offer support to the Butchers of Beijing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've noticed that theres a small contingent of very nationalistic Chinese Slashdot users who get butthurt whenever anyone says anything remotely negative about the Chinese government. Usually its with a "OMG Why do you hate us so much!?" sort of mentality that I previously thought was exclusive to blindly patriotic Americans (yes I'm American). Thats probably who's doing the down-modding.
I'm a bit amazed at how hesitant a lot of Chinese guys I know are to say anything remotely negative about the Chinese government and get really upset if you insinuate that its not all fluffy bunnies and flowers with the government. But then again I'm used to pretty much everyone complaining about my government.
I was also in China last month.
... I didn't go looking to hard for anything that would raise flags.
I had a hard time accessing:
- Some blogs as well
- Some earthquake news in the days immediately following the event (Some was accessible, some not)
- Some other misc news sites would not load. (Google world news page was out on me for days, while most other google news and google sites worked fine)
FWIW I think the blocking is mostly keyword based.
...necessary to protect the country's citizens. It's not protecting Chinese citizens that's the problem. It's protecting the rest of the world from the Chinese citizens that concerns me.One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
That's interesting. I was in Beijing in April, and stayed at an "international" hotel there across the street from the Bird's Nest, and documented some experiments.
My television received NHK, TV Monde, and CNN International. Once during a CNNi story about the protests in Tibet did the cable cut out. I have heard of the government doing that, but the images were later shown on CCTV, but of course the accompanying commentary would very likely be different.
Wikipedia was accessible, except for certain pages. Google.com was accessible, but if you googled a certain phrases, the connection would be reset, and you couldn't access google for a few seconds.
Domains like tibet.com simply wouldn't resolve.
Seemed like every Taiwanese forum/blog was blocked.
Actually just about every ISP outside of america has internet filters in place (even those in the supposed "free" the Netherlands).
For starters if a country has 50% muslims, you can assume it filters the internet.
If a country is not free in speech (and that qualifies quite a bit more countries than you'd think, including all European countries), then they have either ISP or judicial filters, that in practice means their isp's filter.
Even Canada, matter-of-factly has ISP filters. Let's FIRST fix Canada, then we should move on to the UK or so, where there was one site that qualified as hate speech for advocacy against Blair.
I don't think what China does is good, I just question singling out China. And there are many countries where you actually might make a difference.
Besides slashdot users where by far in favor of sensoring stuff if it endangered people's safety, like when death threats were made by muslims about wilder's film. That was in the UK.
Let's start there. Then, AFTER that, and all other European countries and after Canada, then we can move Canada. What point is there in saying as a non-free country to China that they should be free ?
I've noticed that theres a small contingent of very nationalistic Chinese Slashdot users who get butthurt whenever anyone says anything remotely negative about the Chinese government.
Not just Slashot users, but Chinese in general. I watched a news program or documentary recently that covered the subject, and it turns out the Chinese, the young and college educated particularly, exhibit the same reaction.
It turns out that, and I'm generalising here, the Chinese, if they don't "like it that way". have few objections to strong government control. For a westerner that might be hard to fathom, but I think it's unfair to dismiss their preferences as absurd or characterise them as the result of some sort of brainwashing.
What shouldn't be hard to fathom is that for someone who's Chinese, China is their country. Last I checked, national pride is a universal phenomenon, and treading on other's sense of identity or pride, however enlightened or well-intentioned, is always bad form and inevitably leads to conflict.