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China Does U-Turn, Lifts Ban On Websites
krou sends in a Guardian (UK) article reporting that overnight talks with the International Olympic Committee have resulted in the Chinese government lifting a ban on websites such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the BBC Chinese language service "in Beijing, Shanghai and possibly further afield." Websites with information on the Falun Gong, Chinese dissidents, the Tibetan government in exile, and the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests are still inaccessible. (We've been discussing Chinese Olympic censorship right along.) Quoting: "A spokesman for Amnesty International said: 'It's good news that our site has been unblocked in Olympic venues and perhaps elsewhere in Beijing, but it is still a long way from the "complete media freedom" promised. It seems public outrage has succeeded where the IOC's "quiet diplomacy" had failed.' Chinese engineers quoted in an article in the Atlantic Monthly said they had been told to prepare to unblock access for a list of specific internet protocol addresses to used by foreign visitors. But Andrew Lih, a new media author in Beijing, said it seemed the authorities might have simply decided it was easier to lift blocks for everyone. 'It's possible [to block individual locations] but would be very complicated,' he said."
That's no U-turn. At best, it's a hard left.
What better way to nail subversives ?
Let them convict themselves by allowing that whicvh is is deemed illegal in China ?
The Historical approach..
Didn't they say they were going to spy on visitors' traffic too? Nothing about that here, maybe they're hoping we'll forget.
If I was going, I'd take tor with me on my laptop. Also I'd buy a laptop first.
Right now I'm browsing the sites mentioned on TFA and nothing happ&/"$%& NO CARRIER
Maybe these useless reporters could do some real investigative reporting on dissent treatment while they are there and see how long it takes the hammer to come down rather than the useless nationalist sporting nonsense.
China Does U-Turn, Lifts Ban On Certain Websites
Title is way too optimistic.
You mean people actually doing something had more effect than other people talking about doing something? Color me shocked.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
But Andrew Lih, a new media author in Beijing, said it seemed the authorities might have simply decided it was easier to lift blocks for everyone. 'It's possible [to block individual locations] but would be very complicated,' he said."
So, in other words, we'd do it if we could but we can't.
I sincerely hope that the Olympic Committee doesn't think this is a major success. As long as China remains blocking web sites and other types of censorship, they should be banned from ever setting up the Olympic Games while such governing is taking place.
I'm looking forward to the Olympic Games in North Korea 2012. Apparently, Kim Jong Il is expected to beat 52 world records.
Full Tilt
Free Tibet!
We are no longer filtering Western propaganda. We want to show you how corrupt the Westerners are and how they lie.
We are a peace loving people who love freedom and human rights. The Western Countries are saying bad things about us because they want to keep us down.
Now, considering how nationalistic the Chinese folks are and how they consider that they should in fact rule the World, and the PC folks out there who are offended easily (they like it because they like to bully people), I expect this post to be modded down into oblivion. See current issue of the New Yorker for an article regarding the Chinese (especially younger folk's) attitude.
1) Ban 1000s of websites
2) Unban 3 of them
3) Claim the ban is lifted, as the other sites are only inaccessible
4) Fail!!!
Note: for those not familiar with the pun - For Dummies
I'm surprised none of the stories about this mention how easy it is to VPN out of China and thus bypass any blocks they throw up.
I don't see how Falungong or dalailama has anything to do with Olympics. Come on people, watch the sports! Stop bullshitting about politics.
The Chinese firewall doesn't block encrypted traffic. A far superior solution is to simply VPN to somewhere. That's what I do when traveling if I am in any location that I don't completely trust (airport or hotel network for example). I SSH to a server I have at home and tunnel traffic through the connection. It is then as though I was surfing at my house.
At least they are being consistent about being inconsistent.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I'm surprised none of the stories about this mention how easy it is to VPN out of China and thus bypass any blocks they throw up.
The problem is that ordinary citizens in China doesn't know what happen on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Do you seriously expect the average Chinese citizen to be able to get VPN out og China, and risk his/her life/career on it because the sites are illegal.
remember the Chinese Government is not just censoring the net, they are censoring every other avenue of the media, you can watch BBC news in China but every now and then it blacks out for 20 minutes when they have cut something they don't agree with,
the internet in china due to the nature of the internet is a lot harder to moderate so they need to be much more opressive about it and it therefore is much more obvious
The ties need to be lifted on the mediums that are 100 years old before the net will ever get liberated.
This is my sig, there are many like it but this is mine
See what a little pressure does to a country in the spotlight.
all we need now is some way to make the Tiananmen Square "incident" essential to reporting on the games
maybe that will count for something against the indoctrination of the chinese people
The Dude: Walter, the chinaman who peed on my rug, I can't go give him a bill, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Whenever it faces a country big enough, strong enough or mean enough to stand up to it, the brave men of the IOC have a standard negotiation strategy that can best be summed up as "I'll blow you now. You can pay me back later."
To absolutely nobody's surprise, the IOC is still waiting for its first oral experience that doesn't involve gargling with 3 gallons of Listerine afterward.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Yeah... Must be it. I mean, it couldn't be an host country trying to please the commitee at least a little. There must be some kind of terribly efficient strategy behind all this...
That's what SSH (and most VPNs) use. It is the most tested cryptosystem in history. It has been signed off on by, well, everyone pretty much in the crypto field. After years of concerted effort, still no way to break it has been found.
Now if you want to life in AFDB land, go right ahead. However it seems extremely unlikely that anyone, much less the Chinese government, can break AES. As such, a VPN is a good solution.
(1) Allow the entire region freedom online while the Olympics are going on
(2) Profit!
(2) Remember which of your own citizens accessed dissedent material,keep tabs on 'em.
(3) After the Olympics leaves China consult the list of new dissidents.
(4) Have them quietly made into unpersons.
Sure, I get it. China feels like it is getting a black eye. So they think they can put makeup on that black eye by suddenly opening access. We're not fooled. They are a censoring country and they're going to stay that way. The Leopard can't change his spots and China is not going to change what they're doing.
At least in China it's obvious when a site has been censored. At least in China it's fairly clear when whole domains are/aren't blocked.
Back in England, there's a two step censorship system, with flagged sites re-routed to a proxy server which may or may not deliver according to specific URL. And if the site is censored, you get a faked 404. It's called Cleanfeed, and it's implemented (via government-backed IWF) by many major ISPs.
It is claimed that the system is restricted to blocking child pornography, and because no government-backed scheme or Act in Britain has ever been used for a wider purpose than originally intended - such as using the Terrorism Act 2000 to perform stop-and-search or to disperse small groups of protestors - we can be assured that that's how it'll stay. I, for one, sleep safely at night, knowing that the IWF has dozens of employees dedicated to spending their working hours looking at child porn so that no-one else has to. God bless the Queen!
That's all any of this is. The minute the ad for China -- aka the 2008 Olympics -- is over, it'll be right back to status quo ante.
And the public outrage won't be any more evident than it was before. It's only one billion or so PRC citizens being kept in the dark, not several hundred reporters.
This small advance for freedom (for some privileged people) in a tiny sector of China (in Beijing) for a brief, extraordinary period (while the whole world is watching) is better than nothing. And it's the result of pressure on China's mafia government by people who expect freedom, and won't accept less. Not even in a tiny sector for a brief, extraordinary period.
This tiny victory might not last long at all. But it does prove that there's at least one way it can be done.
Now the harder part is finding the other ways. For everyone, everywhere in China. That last.
The proof of concept, though, is the hole in the balloon. Better than nothing, and perhaps the window into a future with the whole jail's walls down.
--
make install -not war
+1 on Informative
When I lived in China from 2003-06, I felt that every social issue there is so intrigue and inter-related that there's simply no solution than to wait out for population to shrink and grow economically prosperous on average. People I talked to about this issue generally have contradictory feelings -- on one hand they like the idea of "democracy" -- on the other they don't think it is the solution for China; they could point out failed examples like Mexico, India, Russia (under Yeltsin,) Philippines, Thai, eastern European countries, ... or maybe the US political system (long before Bush). In short democracy is good on principles but does not do much better on what the people found really matter -- quality of life, jobs, education, health care -- than China's current way of doing things.
Given that there is no fool-proved democratic system for China's problems and full freedom in expression will eventually lead to call for democracy -- because it is always easier to motivate the disadvantageous mass on some bright promises (ref. to US elections) -- so people generally feel the currently level of control is OK even though they don't like it much.
These are just some of contractions in China, like all other issues.
That means that all that needs to be done is for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the BBC Chinese language service to immediately and constantly start showing scenes of Falun Gong, Chinese dissidents, the Tibetan government in exile, and the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests.
If you haven't already noticed, China has a habit of promising not to do something, then going and doing it anyway. What makes you think this time is any different? It'd be just like them to turn it off anyway just before the games start.
It's amazing how easily Western politicians and bureaucrats are duped.
Proof. So there you go. Slashdot runs an article announcing China has lifted the ban, Slasdotters swallow it and then...
"But the IOC warned that while these sites may be accessible to journalists in Beijing, the rest of the country would still be subject to China's filtered version of the Internet. Additionally, certain types of sites will remain blocked across all of China, including porn and those that are considered "subversive" or against national interests (such as sites related to the Falun Gong and many Tibetan organizations). Gosper attempted to justify this by adding, "That's normal in most countries in the world." Um, yeah... right." http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080801-china-opens-crack-in-great-firewall-for-olympic-presschina-opens-internet-for-press-ioc-declares-issue-solved.html
(The Guardian)
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tze Tung launched a program called "Let One Thousand Flowers Bloom", where he encouraged dialog and dissent. It was, in fact, a ploy to let the real enemies of the government identify themselves so they could be further repressed.
I think what could be happening here is a short program to appease foreign countries while the Olympics take place, and where thought-criminals will be identified by their web-surfing behavior.
People DO know what happened on Tianmen Square in 1989. It was a tragedy. People died in that event, but as many as you may think or the biased western media propaganda machine wants you to believe. It would be a real disaster for China if those now infamous "student leaders" took control. People are now more interested in making money and would rather leave that tragedy behind.
Ick, it's like the country is run by Comcast.
I'll believe it when I see full retraction of internet bans.
They're just trying to look good for the press, just like in all the other stories about china lately.
Uplifting humanity with entertainment and cooperation with the totalitarian oppresion with the worlds most populous state. Remember, the great firewall of China was designed and built by US Firms and it is being implemented everywhere else too. 2012 is the year all major ISPs will strangle the internet by making it look like a calbe TV subscription.
M$, because life is too short to type icrosoft frequently.
I configured Tor to use a Chinese exit node. Here are my results:
- Chinese Wikipedia: accessible (used to be blocked)
- BBC Chinese (via bbcchinese.com): blocked
- BBC Chinese (via direct URL): accessible
- Article on Tibet in English Wikipedia: accessible (used to be blocked)
- Human Rights in China: blocked
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
it is not about nailing subversives. It is about manipulating the mind of Chinese people.
After the olympics, they'll go back to being their good old RED COMMIE selves. And, we will continue to appease them because we're scared shit of them.
And that's why I am able to get my Internet Service through Parallax , Oh wait...
A surviving DSL company, what a cute little thing. I see they have managed to get around the ATT last mile block by using wireless. A whole two counties worth of freedom, I bet they get twice the usual inspection at the ATT splitters.
I think most people realise that as soon as the games are over any lifted restrictions will go straight back on.
However, I was was in China for 3 months from January to April and found http://www.freeproxyserver.ca/ to work fine with all websites I tried it on.
I'll be going back for another 4 months in October so I hope it's still working.
Cheers,
Alex
A surviving DSL company, what a cute little thing. I see they have managed to get around the ATT last mile block by using wireless. A whole two counties worth of freedom, I bet they get twice the usual inspection at the ATT splitters.
Then there is also Bridgemaxx and Verizon on top of Comcast. This is in little ol' Richmond, IN. On top of that, there is also Hughesnet, StarBand, and WildBlue. Despite your wild claims Twitter, America is not run by Comcast.