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."

Comments

Re:People must notice the block.

[siloko]

remember this is the instant information age now . . .

I suppose by that you mean "don't give a fuck about anyone else but myself" age.

Re:and nothing of value was lost

[causality]

witter, like any communications medium, is what you make of it.

Twitter isn't a communications medium. The Web is the communications medium. Twitter just prepackages it for you, and you can have any color you want so long as that color is black (i.e. like the first cars).

You could start a blog and write about nothing other than the cute things your cat did today, you could write about topics of earth-shattering importance, or your blog could fall somewhere in the middle. You could Twitter about nothing other than the inane details of your life (cue link to the Penny Arcade strip) or you could use Twitter to connect to and keep in touch with a group of people online. E-mail, web pages, television, etc. They can all be used for the inane and valueless or for the interesting and full-of-meaning.

You can do all of that without Twitter. Again you are describing the Web. Twitter just provides a one-size-fits-all way to go about it. That, and only that, is what some people dislike about it.

The rest of your post is more of the "all things are equal and just a matter of taste, even if they're not" that someone chimes in and rewrites in one form or another anytime there is any sort of discussion where someone actually stands up and says "no, I think this sucks." It's cute and all but it's not terribly productive. It is just a way of saying "people have different preferences" and since we knew that already, it doesn't really contribute anything. What it does do is make you look like a nice person who just wants to get along, which is cool, but nice people don't have to be so atrociously bland; they can have opinions too.