Slashdot Mirror
China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day
TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."
It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.
to honestly sit here and put forth the idea that the level of censorship in the west is anything remotely near what china does, you've arrived at intellectual fail. the SCALE of the effort matters. if the west, for example, tries to find kiddie porn, it is entirely in your right to debate that effort and question its relevancy, effectiveness, and the direction of such laws
now, if you were to actually engage in such criticism in china, a nice young man or woman in one of the many banks of party loyalists who actually monitor signs of dissent on the web would make note of you, track you, and actually admonish you or outright punish you. simply for stating your political opinion
do you really think that's anywhere remotely the same thing as trying to control kiddie porn? again, i'm not saying you don't have a right to criticize to western internet controls, but you have no right, in the least, to compare it to the colossal amount of censorship and control in china. the SCALE of the effort over there is off the charts
as proof, if you were in china, you would never have written what you just wrote in terms of criticising the chinese government. you'd be too scared to. but here on western servers in a western political environment, you have no problem criticizing western politics. as you have every right to. but don't be an ludicrous about your criticism by trying to mention it in the same breath as the lockdown environment in china
for example: i can call obama a moron if i want to. i can rant until blue in the face about how he is the devil incarnate. no big deal in the west. most wouldn't even care. now if i attempted to do the same about wen jiabao in china, they would actually track me, perhaps even show up at my doorstep, perhaps even send me to some prison camp for "political reeducation". do you doubt this is a reality? then why do you think chinese internet controls is a parallel to anything in the west? be intellectually honest. consider the idea of "scale"
now, if i actually sat here and threatened obama's life, someone in the west might try to track me. a case could be made that that's a valid reason for internet monitoring. a case could also be made that that's not valid. but at least in the west, i can actually question my government and its policies, argue about it in an open environment, and not worry about goons showing up at my door. well, besides the paranoid schizophrenic amongst us
<knock, knock/>
sorry, be right back, someone's at the door for some reason
pfffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement. This would bring at least two benefits:
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Well, it is clear that the CCP is implementing a more strict online blocking and censoring policy, OCT.1 is just one example of those that is exposed to the outside world. 2009 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square 4JUN1989, CCP instructed all website in China, to disable comment functions through out the country, majority of the websites complied and rest of the simply shut down the their website claim as 'maintenance' as a protest, it was the official 'Chinese website maintenance day'. I would expect such policy to carried out repeatedly in the future. I am lucky enough to personally experience the internet, CCP style from Jun to Sep this year! Let me give you an example what it is like: 1st thing I get online I openned www.google.com and dare you search for anything, I really mean it, anything, you will be reset to death after click into page 2, 3 of the results if you are lucky not to be blocked immdieatly after click 'Google search' or 'I'm feeling not so lucky in China' button. Google image search is worse, you are assured by the CCP to not see anything that is in anyway related to harm a harmonious society. Youtube is certainly not working for like a year now, as long with victims such as blogger, worldpress,livejournal, facebook,twitter, basically anything that can help people find useful, uncensored information, or anything that can help 'words' getting around. Picasa was among the laest victim of the GFW, I have about 7G of photo stored on it, which I cannot show or share with 1/4 of the world population. I rarely use flickr, but words are it was ultra-unusually unblocked by the GFW afetr I fled China before OTC.1, my assumption is the journalist all over the world flocked the OCT.1 ceremony may get very very angry when they find they cannot upload to flickr. And when you just about to think can media freedom in China to be any worse? The answer is YES. Media censorship extents to movies, tvs, newspapers, almost anything you can think of! The Summer Olympic Games was as much as freedom the CCP can give to foreigners, which CCP immediately took back after the event, followed by the unrest in Tibet and Urumqi, and Taiwan. It is very likely the conflict between those parts I mentioned to get worse in the near future, and the GFW will further enforced by the CCP as a way to maintain their one-party-ruling.
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.
Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.
The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.
Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.
The enemies of Democracy are
The problem is they are NOT "helpless innocent" as I will point out from a tale my great uncle told me about WW2. He was one of those crossing into Germany when Goebbels had pumped everyone up with that "fight to the last" BS. He said he was talking with the guy next to him in the jeep when the whole back of the guy's head came off, splattering him with brains. He saw where the flash had come from and opened up with his BAR. When they got to where the sniper was they found it was an 8 month pregnant woman, still clutching the rifle in her hands.
I asked him "did it bother you to have killed a pregnant woman? and he said "Hell no. I had already lost more friends over there than I could count. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that the war was lost for Germany and those crazy bastards just kept fighting. And I had decided I was gonna go home on my feet and NOT in a body bag."
And let us not forget the Japanese had this little thing called Kamikaze and I'm sure would have had NO problems with getting men, women, AND kids to be used as human cannon fodder in an attack on the mainland. Just look at the amount of casualties we suffered on Okinawa and multiply that several times over for an invasion of the mainland. So while I am sorry civilians died from the bombs, the death count would have probably been even worse with a full scale invasion, and of course by that point it was pretty clear even to the most optimistic leaders in Japan that they had lost. They could have surrendered but THEY chose to continue the fight.
So I'm sorry, but the American military needed to worry about keeping American soldiers alive, not how many casualties the enemy that refused to surrender would take.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.