Slashdot Mirror
China Starts/Stops Blocking Google
shekared was one of a number of readers to write in to tell a similar story. He says "I'm an American currently living and working in Chongqing, China. As of 9am (UTC +8) China began blocking google.com, gmail.com, google analytics and many if not most other google sites other than google.cn. Internet speed for connections outside the mainland have in general have come to a crawl. Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press. Using an open proxy or VPN for connection to hosts outside of the mainland continues to allow access to google, as does connecting directly to a google.com IP address.
As of 6pm (UTC +8) access to gmail and google.com have returned to normal."
Dear Sir,
We know who you are, we were just conducting tests and installing tools to enhance your dedicated internet connection.
Now that you have made this public, could you come to the local authorities station right away so we can settle things up ?
If you do not come, we will have to go get you at your work place and we would like to avoid this embarrassment for yourself. We also have enabled airport and border checks for yourself so you won't be allowed to leave the country before we meet.
Regards,
Liu Cheng
Security officer,
Republic of China
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'm posting from China. At least slashdot still wo
I find it interesting that their little "trial run" of blocking Google comes so soon after Bing decides to filter out anything sensitive (you know porn, skeletons, pandas) to China. So if we've got on big player playing ball, let the other one know what will happen to them if they don't. Another motive could be a a display of defiance to the West's requests to stop with all the blocking and blocking software? Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's many factors.
My work here is dung.
It seems to me that google is one of the sites on the internet that make china's censorship work much more difficult. It's not hard to imagine that they'd like google gone for good. Unfortunately, google is a very real part of a lot of people's lives.
Is it possible that this (and other similar actions) are attempts to see if they would be able to get away with blocking google for a longer period of time, and not cause a mass uproar?
I have a great idea! Let's show our support for Democracy and condemn the actions of the fascist dicatorship with a big shopping spree at Walmart. Maybe if we give these guys 500 billion dollars a year, they will be nice to us and freedom will reign and shower everyone with joy!
This is my sig.
im traveling in china for the last 6 weeks and the state of internet connections here is very random.
domestic sites, like the immensely popular QQ and baidu, are always _very_ responsive.
google sometimes gets a slow down to the extend that it is nearly unusable (that really help people here to move over to the super fast and slightly more chineese friendly baidu).
the main thing is the randomness, if it is connectivity/ congestion issues, or some conspiracy: no-one knows.
Yes because obviously he's complaining that "The great evil china is violating my rights".
No.. it simply stated that china started blocking google. When one of the most censorship happy regimes starts blocking the biggest search provider in the world IT IS NEWS.
Your rock, go back under it.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Saying that something is okay as long as it's not covered by existing international law is saying "do anything you want as long as the rest of us haven't thought of it yet." Indeed, international law barely exists - at core it's nothing more than the various treaties and agreements between states. It tends to have very little to do with individuals. There is no international Congress that can pass a law that affects all nations - don't even get me started on the UN (or as I've taken to calling it lately, the League of United Nations).
If China wanted to execute all couples who had more than two children, they could do so. It wouldn't be against any international law. Does that make it right? Does that mean humanitarian organizations should back off and shut up? Hell no.
Being a sovereign nation gives you the ABILITY (not the right) to do as you wish in many circumstances. It sure as hell doesn't give a "Mandate of Heaven" that says all your decisions will be correct and good for people.
Sure, censoring Google may seem like a small thing, but compare it to the censorship that still exists regarding things like the Tiananmen square massacre - or as it's euphemized in China, the "June 4th incident." It's still a completely forbidden topic in media and print. That's the kind of BS that overarching censorship can lead to.
They just changed something.
Give them a week with no google, no gmail, no google maps, and see what kind of reaction the chinese government gets. Then say they can have their google back when they agree to stop blocking it.
After living in China for a while, I got the distinct impression that there was the "Great Wall" as well as local level monitoring and filtering (at least for foreigners). A couple doors down, there were always random people coming in and out of one of the apartments, and it would get quiet when my internet was being used. I had trouble accessing some sites, so one night I set everything up with encryption and Tor. The next morning, all of them were extremely distressed-looking and bleary eyed (the first time I saw them like that).
Circumstantial evidence to be sure, but that combined with other things makes me think that there are two levels of monitoring/filtering in China, a possible reason for regional inconsistencies...
It also said that connecting to the google.com IP address worked, which implies that the failure was in DNS. I've had my ISP's DNS cache occasionally fail to return results, or return an invalid cached result a few times. Doing it for a site as big as Google is embarrassing, but not unheard of.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Correct or good decisions for whom? You as an American?
Yes, him as an American, or me as a Brit. Or you as a... whatever you are. Us, collectively, as people with subjective ethical systems. Being aware of certain types of behaviour[1] allows us to make judgements on whether these countries are, collectively, following an ethical system we regard as compatible with our own. If they are not, then we have the option of not visiting them, not doing business with them or (in extreme cases) supporting rebellions in these countries. Making ethical decisions is a large part of what being human entails. If you are not comfortable with it, then pick a mass media outlet to make these determinations for you; it's easier than thinking.
[1] In this case, it sounds like someone just messed up with a DNS cache configuration, rather than doing anything malicious, but let's talk hypotheticals for a bit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2333
Palm trees and 8
making google unreliable is a subtle argument for chinese citizens to depend upon chinese competitors to google, such as baidu
http://www.baidu.com/
does the outlay of that page look familiar to you?
for example, if my gmail account in china is unreliable- due to no fault of google, but unreliable nonetheless, that means i would tend to use some other email provider for that vital service. for baidu, all you have to do is have a fellow nationalist stooge in the government hit the flicker switch on google's traffic every now and then. since china is filtering everything anyway via centralized national authority, that's not hard to arrange
its a subtle and effective form of protectionism, something which the usa and other trading partners of china have noticed a severe uptick of recently, due to the global economic climate. which is especially hypocritical, since china, as a major exporter, is always complaining about protectionism
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/economy/24yuan.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Chinese Govt WANTS that. They are busy pushing Baidu, and about to push Baidu into western world. Right now, Baidu controls ~65% of chinese search, while Google is only ~25%. The reason is that Chinese gov PUSHES Baidu and creates rules to help them. For example, Baidu copied Google's 'Im feeling Lucky', so the gov told Google to no longer allow it because it was leading to too many porn sites, but did not do the same on Baidu. What was interesting is that a study was done, it showed that Baidu had either the same rate or possibly more of porn. The big difference is that Baidu will not lead to anti-gov stuff while google might.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
China is a sovereign nation and can do as it pleases within its own borders as long as no international laws are broken;
Trade restriction. And EU is bringing that up to UN. Just like America did recently about CHina restricting EXPORTS of Steel making minerals. China is cheating all the way to the bank, and the west either needs to crack down on China, or better yet, SLOWLY raise similar barriers. For example, slowly drop the dollar and Euro against the Yuan on imports. That will encourage China to free their money. Likewise, if China does not drop their trade barriers like they agreed to do by 2002, then we should slowly and methodically raise ours.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Second, there's a moral difference between shooting at someone intending to kill them and someone getting caught in the crossfire due to literal crossfire, mistaken identity, or any of a host of other screw ups. Sure, the person is just as dead, but we're talking about moral issues here. No, I'm not saying that all civilian deaths in Iraq were unavoidable, but the US military as a whole is not going out and deliberately targeting noncombatants. China most certainly did.
Third, there is a large time/concentration difference. The violence in Tienanmen square essentially happened in one day, though the protests there had gone on for weeks. There are no hard numbers available (though I'm sure they exist somewhere in the CCP's records) but estimates are that somewhere around 2,500 people were killed and another 10,000 or so injured. Concentration of deaths does play a role in whether or not something has an impact. For example, according to the website you posted, approximately 12 civilians per day are currently being killed in Iraq due to violence. At the height of the violence (after the initial push) in 2006-2007, about 60 civilians per day were being killed. In the US alone, an average of 110 people per day die in car accidents. Does that make any of these deaths less horrible for the families involved, etc? No. But from a societal level, it does illustrate comparative actual impact (though psychological impact may differ, obviously).
Finally, can we please institute a Godwin's Law about Iraq, already? If the conversation is about the war in Iraq and whether or not you like it, fine. If it's not, let's keep it on topic. :P
How do you know it is not a DNS issue from your ISP? You can still access it through IP, don't you. If it is filtering, I doubt it can still working that way. Because it is in China, so any technical issue must be government doing evil.
I'm posting this from China.
Google was off and on all today. Youtube is still blocked, 1 or 2 months since the last /. article about it, thought one proxy easily deals with the issue.
Other random factoids of note from a Chinese computer (not from a hotel; they use different censorship deals for Hotels than private residences).
The New York Times site is fully functional
Wikipedia works on everything except articles specifically talking about Chinese badstuff (IE you can visit the Chinese page, the PRC page, not the page of a certain Square).
Bittorrent will rarely use non-Chinese peers
The Sinfest webcomic is blocked.
4chan is not.
About 3/4 of the porn sites I know off the top of my head are blocked.
The french and japanese wikipedia articles for the Square incident aren't blocked.
When are they going to learn that the flow of information can't be stopped?
Shame on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft if they continue to bow down to the dictators so they can make money in China!
The Chinese governments approach to internet censorship is hardly random, but a heavy handed approach meant to blind just those citizens who aren't savvy enough to get around "The Great Firewall." Many of the other foreigners and even Chinese I know do not bother to employ VPN or proxy setups unless the government is currently blocking certain content or specific domains they are interested in (ie. youtube since March). Keyword based filtering, blocking entire netblocks, domain names, and messing with DNS are all within the usual bag of tricks the government employs. While I was able to get to the google.com main page via an IP address, most google owned sites outside of google.cn were blocked, unable to locate the domain via Chinese based DNS servers or incurring TCP resets at random. Forcing my DNS to my VPN provider's servers did solve the problem, but again, most people within the PRC don't bother to keep a list of proxies or have a paid VPN account, let alone know how to implement these solutions. Even forcing your DNS outside of the mainland, you're still at the mercy of the governments packet snooping, resets, and IP blocking. So while you're now able to connect to google.com via an IP address, you're still hoping the government hasn't begun blocking those IP addresses or started implementing random resets based on search content. The government filtering, censoring and blocking is very quick to adapt to methods of getting around whatever it is they're intending to accomplish.
I submitted the original story to inform rather than question the PRC governments right or ability to implement censorship. This is not a political matter for me, but rather an annoyance. I realized rather quickly just how much I depend on google (and how much I might need to change that). Google is the default search engine within my browser, my main email address of 7 years is handled through gmail, and I've become accustom to asking google to settle any fact based arguments that come up throughout my day. Whether or not I search for objectionable content via google is besides the point (I can get all of the same content out of China's dominant search engine, baidu.com), it was simply a shock not to be able to get to ANY google property.
On another note, this comes just days after the PRC government demanded that google give them more control over what is displayed on google.cn and/or remove all 'pornographic' content which appears within search results. If this was a move to point out how quickly the government can eliminate google's estimated 48M users within the PRC, it certainly worked on me.
Free trade with nations that are not free is call exploitation. It's collusion between an authoritarian government exploiting its silenced population and the merchants exploiting the ignorance of their consumers. Authoritarian governments rule by force and it's naive to think that there will not be a corresponding rise in military prowess with every net inflow of economic dollar, yet we continues to feed countries like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as if freedom is indeed free. One day, we are all going to wake up and find ourselves jobless and in debt to some of the nastiest government in the world. What are we doing to do then? They've already caught up to us economically and technologically. Their citizens had all been taught, with help of modern censorship, to believe that we're all a bunch of lazy arrogant bums that deserves whatever is coming to us as deem necessary by their governments. But, that's way way down the line in an uncertain future so who cares right?
At the end, the executives are the only ones who benefits from trading with authoritarian regimes. The executives are the only ones making continuous withdraw from the company coffer via salaries and bonuses while the shareholders play the musical chairs in the stock market. It amazes me to see nationally known companies using chapter 11 filing as if it's part of a normal business plan, never mind that the stockholder's equity are wiped out in such reorganization. The executives don't cares because they know their salaries are guaranteed and there's an endless pool of suckers being drawn into the stock market everyday, either willingly through direct investment or unwillingly through retirement plans.
Come to think of it, is capitalism compatible with democracy? . . . i wonder. I think so. It's what I've been taught it's ingrained in my psyche. But. . . how come it doesn't seem as true anymore.