Slashdot Mirror
Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Others Blocked In China
An anonymous reader writes "Two days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square 'incident,' several high profile Internet sites have been blocked in mainland China. These include Twitter.com, Flickr.com, Live.com, and Bing.com. While Internet blocks are common enough in mainland China, blocking such high-profile sites is unusual. In addition, blog reports suggest even state-owned television broadcasts are suffering multiple instances of muting lasting several seconds (again, not unusual for some foreign stations broadcast over cable, but unusual for local state-owned media) suggesting state security, online or through other technology, has tightened significantly, perhaps in anticipation or discovery of protest plans."
Sounds a lot like Facebook being blocked during the elections in Iran. I wonder if banning sites just long enough to restrict the flow of ideas for the season will become more popular/acceptable than perma-bans?
... must be a "democratic" election coming up!"
"Oops, I can't access social sites today
My work here is dung.
That's it, I'm going to block China
I am in the UK but currently experiencing disruption to some HTTPS sites. I wonder there is something more widespread going on?
I wish the US would block Twitter too.
"While Internet blocks in mainland China, blocking such high profile sites is unusual" seems rather incomprehensible. Maybe it was an attempt at In Soviet Russia...
Doesn't it draw more attention to it when these sites are blocked. The imagination usually fills a vacuum with a bigger more damning picture than reality. If they did nothing it would likely be ignored.
Two days ahead of the Tiananmen Square 'incident'
Glad we can reliably see into the future now ;)
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships? Why do we continue to support reigimes of tyrrany?
Oh yeah, because they make shit on the cheap and we're a nation of greedy slobs with a humane streak which lasts up until that $5 is taken from your pay cheque to buy your "morality token" for the month.
Flamebait or not, if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I suspect that this will have unintended consequences like a Streisand effect. Some people who might not think about the Tiananmen Square incident might wonder why they can't get to certain sites. They'll ask a friend about it who will respond "Maybe because it's the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident." The listener's memory will be refreshed and the chance of people forgetting about Tiananmen Square and the date the incident occurred will be lessened.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Freedom of expression on the net is a very dangerous thing. If you don't tighly rein in and control social websites, your population starts getting the impression that they don't need a benevolent communist overlord to tighly rein in and control them. We can't have that now, can we?
Is this blocking/unblocking done manually or is it based on an automated set of rules? I suppose it might be a state secret how the blocking actually works, but I picture a few people sitting in a room updating some configuration files that says "block the following IP address or domain names". Is that how it works?
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
God help us! Now their productivity will double and everything will become cheaper as China takes over the world!
One a more serious note, I'd think that in a communist framework, it would be reasonable to restrict sites that drain significant amounts of time from your life. The Chinese govt. simply thinks that the benefits are outweighed by the drop in productivity due to social networking sites.
Although I am against censorship, this is a cultural thing. I can imagine how shocked people in some societies would be to find out that pornography is covered by free speech in the USA.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
Surprising.. no.
"Two days ahead of the Tiananmen Square 'incident'...
So, slashdot is predicting incidents now? Or should that read, "Two days ahead of the anniversary of..."?
Yes, I'm picking nits, but the overall quality of journalism seems to be declining on a daily basis. Despite what some here may think, accuracy IS important.
Please block twitter here in the US too.
has decided China doesn't need any stinking imperialist silly names.
Why are we buying the products of these fascist dictatorships?
Part of the answer to your first question is also availability. There are some markets where the Chinese goods have such a lock on production that it is nearly impossible to not buy something made in China.
Sure, you can buy a Chinese made widget for less than an American made widget almost without exception. However, there are times when no amount of money will buy a non-Chinese widget because no such item exists.
Furthermore, your statement
products of these fascist dictatoriships
Is itself an absurd over-simplification of the situation. Just because a product is made in China does not mean it inherently supports the Chinese government. Sure, taxes are (generally) paid but your $.99 widget almost certainly profits a greedy western capitalist much more than the Chinese government.
if you buy Chinese goods, you support oppression
Not always true. As I said, there are times that you don't have a choice in the matter. Sometimes the only way to purchase the item you need for whatever task is at hand is to purchase a Chinese made version of it. If you don't believe me then take a look through the tool section of your favorite home improvement / hardware / discount / general merchandise store. There are some items that if you need them today, you have no choice but to buy Chinese - and if your choice is to buy Chinese or allow your basement to flood with water, I have a suspicion on which way you will likely choose.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
My folks are over there for a year and haven't been able to post on their blog the last 2 weeks. I think they said that YouTube has been blocked since March.
"We" are not buying products from "fascist dictatorships". Regular businessmen -- Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Germans, etc. -- are buying products from (and selling products to) regular Chinese businessmen. They're not buying from the Chinese state, and they generally don't care what any of this world's authoritarian regimes -- whether Obama's, Jintao's, or someone else's -- are up to so long as they can make an honest living.
It's highly disingenuous of you to suggest that the Cantonese factories my clients hire to make their products have anything to do with the shmucks in Beijing who are banning Flickr. People are individuals and ought to be treated as such.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
As many have pointed out on TFA, Gmail is still OK for the moment and it can be set to collect your Hotmail.
Summation 2
doesn't seinfeld have a patent on that or something?
Seriously, almost no Chinese use those sites. Twitter doesn't even have a Chinese language version, and has barely begun to grow in China (though it may, there are already several Chinese clonewares out). Nobody ANYWHERE in the world uses Bing, and the Chinese use QQ, Sohu, Xinlang, or other IM/Portal/Blogging services instead of Live/Blogspot. Flickr is the only one Chinese might even notice, and there are plenty of alternatives.
The only Chinese that use these (now blocked) services are educated, and probably have decent English, and know how to get around these blocks. The vast majority of Chinese users use other websites, or have alternatives. The contrversial stuff has always been hosted on non-Chinese websites for obvious reasons, and people who want to see it are well aware of how to get around the blocks.
Far more telling was the 7 hours of downtime Xiaonei went through yesterday for maintanence. They've already been shutting down certain Xiaonei groups and blocking users for doing political stuff, I wonder if the maintanence included any updates to help with censorship?
Probably "off topic," but it's interesting that they promised quite a bit in order to be allowed to have the Olympics. Makes me wonder about other promises. Makes me glad to live in the US. :)
The fact is people are lazy, if they can't get to it on first attempt, they might just stop. The goal is not to stop all the internet users, but if it blocks a few, they have reached their goals. Same deal as iPhone firmware updates, ps2 revision updates, wii updates, psp firmware updates, they know there are still hackers, but the goal is make their life hard.
... I thought they were the interweb socialism?
The Party probably just doesn't want the people to hear what the rest of the world thinks about what ( US government bonds ) their money is invested in. Geitner has the Party line.
Politics aside, the blocks being imposed are somewhat irritating to those who live and work here (I do). For example, blogspot.com has been blocked for the last few days. I have memory of other examples of say, all wordpress sites seeming to become inaccessible. We don't use proxies at work, so it means being unable to share news with all colleagues who don't have their own proxy setup. As a topical example, that puts the google keynote out the window. You'd be surprised how much business related knowledge ends up getting blocked. Most irritating is the 'google sin bin'. Try and use a cached link, and google is blocked from your IP address for around 5 minutes. For a company with a shared proxy server, that gets old, very quickly.
Of course, there is a big commercial incentive to keep the blocks coming. Effectively it provides protectionist support for the Chinese alternatives on the internet[1]. That part I find more concerning, I think. If people here wanted to bypass the great firewall to read no blocked information, they can do so - I get the impression most people aren't really so interested in doing so though. The commercial aspects, however, would seem more sustainable.
[1] http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2006/05/12/a_new_form_of_protectionism
In a completely unrelated incident, a report published today claims to observe an 80% rise in productivity of Chinese office workers. Here's Jill with the weather.
It isnt in the Chinese history books and frowned upon talking about. Now there are good jobs, the internet (censored) and pop culture, to occupy students. These werent really around in China 20 years ago.
Not so much different in the USA. A couple weeks ago was the 40th anniversary the USA Tianamen- Kent State- when the US military shot college rioters dead. It was barely mentioned in the news and most young people hadnt heard of it.
Both incidents have iconic images: The civilian blocking the row of tanks; the hippie girl putting a flower in the barrel of the soldier's gun.
GRASS MUD HORSE, Tiananmen, Tuesday (NNN) — BT, Britain's biggest broadband supplier, has thoughtfully averted complete congestion of the Internet by throttling all use of the Internet on its cheapest broadband package.
Customers on the I Can't Believe It's Eight Megabits package have all Internet data flow cut off entirely under its "fair use" clause during "peak periods," defined as being between the hours of 12:00 midnight and 11:59pm. "However," said a customer service telephone voice menu, "the connection itself runs at the full eight megabits. That we guarantee absolutely."
BT has recently sold the technology to China, where it was put into operation toda, blocking Twitter, Blogger, Microsoft Bob Hope and the live webcam of the coffee pot at Cambridge University. "We will not put up with the drop in productivity social networking sites cause," said a spokesrivercrab. "After the terrible onslaught of blue screens at the Olympics, we will stop at nothing to protect patriotic citizens from the influence of Microsoft. And they love us for it. Just find one who doesn't!"
"Besides," said the BT phone menu, "we're still better than Virgin. A high bar to aim for, I know. You get so much better fail whales over a phone line than a cable."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Yes, we all think it's terrible that the majority of the youth in China don't even know about the Tianamen Square "incident"
But within America itself, how many of you know of, or recognise the following incidents?
1) US Government (ATF/FBI) burns to death 76 people in their homes, and the FBI lies about it for six years, when it finally comes clean. No one is ever held accountable.
2) 4 plain-clothed officers shoot an unarmed man standing in his doorway. They shoot a total of 41 times. He is hit 19 times. After the officers are convicted, the court orders them re-tried, and the second time around they are all acquitted.
3) Unarmed students at an anti-war protest, are shot at by the National Guard. 4 die, 9 are injured. Again, no accountability. No convictions.
My kitty update posts are the most popular on my blog, sometimes even garnering a comment!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I have always feared that someday /. may end up victim of our censorship too.
But of course I paean the omnipotent Party, Sir!
Cowardly Yours
Lt. Anonymous
... and nothing of value was lost.
(Ok I was only talking about Hotmail and Twitter, but if we had to lose Flickr in order to get rid of Twitter, well, I don't know about you, but I would be tempted!)
You BING em back now....
"blocked in China" what else is new
Now there are good jobs, the internet (censored) and pop culture, to occupy students. These werent really around in China 20 years ago.
It's not that surprising that the Chinese government is not in favour of youth movements - and in favour of pop culture, to the extent that they allow it.
Crude summary: The Cultural Revolution was a strategy implemented by Mao Zedong, with the help of his wife Jiang Qing to get his career back on track. The Red Guards were recruited from students (I wonder if he got the idea from news reports from the US?) and went around the place with a little red book of Mao quotes. Eventually, Mao had to send in the regular army to help disband the Red Guards. Then he implemented a forced dispersal of "intellectuals" (read "students") to rural areas for the following 10 years or so (to make it harder for them to congregate/communicate).
Why is everyone calling what happened in Tienanmen Square an 'incident'? It was a MASSACRE!
You must be new here. Blocking of high-profile sites happens *all* the time - wikipedia, youtube, blogspot, flickr, bbc - the list goes on and on and on, and has been happening in China since the Internet has been available.
Censure is a bad thing, and stupid too - but I think one has to try to be a little bit more nuanced than simply condemning them for being Chinese and Communists.
Looking back at the last few decades, I think it is clear that the Chinese government are working towards an ever more open society; but it would be madness just letting go and changing everything overnight. There is a significant part of the population that are against that openness, and whether we or the Chinese government like it or not, it takes a long time to change society. After all, it took us several generations in Europe to go from feudal monarchy to modern democracy, and clever as the Chinese may be, they are not going to be able to make that change overnight. And seeing how they have gone from a closed society to what they are now in about 30 years (~a generation), it should probably take at least 10 years more.
Just look at what happened in Iraq: Saddam Hussein was a fairly standard dictator and as foul as they come, but society worked. Then the Americans came and ripped out the bad bits, but couldn't replace them with anything - and we all know the horrors and the chaos that followed. Democracy and freedom is something you have to learn; any society has to learn to handle it responsibly, because freedom without responsibility is just chaos.