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Anticipated Closure of BitTorrent Sites Spurs Panic Downloads In China
hackingbear writes "Beijing Internet users are scrabbling for downloads from BitTorrent websites following speculation that authorities will shut them down as early as this week. Internet experts told China Daily the failure might be caused by an overload of users seeking last-minute free downloads. As the largest BT download website in China with 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD has been on the verge of closure after the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) shut hundreds of similar peer-to-peer file sharing sites, including the 50 million-user BTChina, during the last 10 days in its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online."
I remember something similar happening in the US (and probably worldwide) when TPB was about to go down. Leeching increased by substantial amounts across the board for the last couple days.
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
Some Internet policy experts are suggesting that Internet officials might have gone too far.
"I suggest the government apply less harsher rules on rapid-sharing websites, beause they still need nurturing the market," Fang Xingdong, a Beijing-based Internet analyst, told METRO.
Huh?
Is the internet analyst saying that piracy is good for the market?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Kill one head of the hydra and two more will just take its place.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
China does nothing to stop the sale of pirated movies, music and software on physical media. But as soon as it's not on a cheap DVD-R, it requires a crackdown? Get your priorities straight.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ~Friedrich Nietzsche
... for those not in the know, the SARFT is basically a bribe-as-you-go organization. Plus, they hate the cute and adorable Cao Ni Ma (the Grass Mud Horse)
when the hydra in question also has a state police force that has no problem getting involved in cultural and human rights issues and government control over the network.
has been downloading those A.Q. Khan plans for days.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
This country is turning more and more into the US every day!
er, wait a minute. :p
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Once the bittorrent trackers in China are down, I'm sure the professional counterfeiters will appreciate the boost in business as everyone heads to the streets for their warez. For the first time, the pirates and the **AA both benefit from the same political action!
Advisor: "Sir, we don't need to stop 100% of Pirating sites, we just need to stop the top 50% so that the underlying 50% are so overburdened by requests that they can't function! It's like a DDOS attack without hacking!"
Hu Jintao: "Hooray! Promotions for everybody!"
There's got to be a triple word score joke in there somewhere!
BTChina and its mirrors are already down. Many of the forums have closed their sharing forums,etc
The crackdown is on any site without an Audio/Visual distribution license. Which you probably cannot get without paying some unknown bureaucrat somewhere
So I assume they're not able to get outside the Chinese Internet to use overseas P2P trackers, etc.?
Poor guys.
Not that it'll hurt them all that much... aren't the copyright holders selling their work at much lower prices in China, in an attempt to make legitimate purchase more attractive than piracy?
Seems like they could just go across the road and pay a couple of Yuan for the real thing. Or even less for a bootleg. (Except porn, I suppose.)
More locally, however, cutting down piracy in China could be bad for all of us. Their ridiculously high piracy rates were forcing content creators to build more effective and convenient distribution systems and reduce prices significantly, just to make a profit in that market. Without that incentive, and with the rest of the world working hard to censor their own Internet and prevent the need for the entertainment, music and publishing industries to adapt to new technologies, we may never have a legal download methodology comparable to the convenience, breadth and scope of illegal downloading.
We've known for years that BitTorrent has this weakness of relying on tracking sites that can be shut down or blocked. As far as I know, nobody has come up with a de facto distributed, anonymous replacement for trackers. Now some of the biggest BT trackers have gone down or been blocked. Does anyone know of efforts to solve this, and how they stack up?
Living in China myself, I can access a few BT trackers in English, so that's fine for me. But of course the native Chinese use their own sites, just like they use their own search engine (Bai Du) and their own IM client (QQ). The government here can easily block out the biggest BT sites, just like they block out Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, and many other popular western sites. Tor is slower than molasses, sometimes taking up to a minute to display a page here, so that really isn't a replacement, and anonymous web proxies aren't a long-term solution.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
So China is, as probably prompted by the US, shutting down file sharing.
Yet that is also a backup distribution method for information in this near-totalitarian society.
I'm glad we have our priorities straight in pressuring them for reform.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
its latest attempt to fight pornography and piracy online.
Blocking piracy I can see as being a noble goal (even if blocking all bittorrent is the wrong way to do it), but why would they want to block porn?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I think China is playing by the book. They've seen the USA role in the world (all IP bull etc. yadda, yadda) -- and they want it for themselves.
Good luck becoming China in the future.
Now, what really befuddles me is why are they fighting pornography... piracy, check, pedo, check... but pornography? WTF? (sorry)
When did the Chinese become puritans?
The government does this once in a while. The point is to cut off Chinese people from the outside world's contaminating influence as well as stimulate Chinese domestic producers to fill the vacuum of demand. They'd rather have content producers they control promoting socialist morality instead of foreigners with silly ideas like voting (universal sufferage/if you can breathe you can vote...not like wise Confucian sages ruling because they're the smartest and therefore obviously the best [at least in the eyes of the Confucian sages]). Other corrosive Hollywood ideas include: pervasive contempt for authority figures like police, glorification of criminals and violent mafia, scenes of excessive violence designed to stimulate the dark parts of the human soul, and so on. Be disciplined and law-abiding, not chaotic and lawless; Live plainly, work hard, do not wallow in luxuries and pleasures...what would Hollywood look like if they had to follow government-mandated guidelines like these when making films?
And people can just get it elsewhere? Sure, but remember the Great Wall was only a wall. I mean, you could climb over it if you wanted...it just made your job harder, that's all. Same with the Great Firewall (actually named Golden Shield because it's meant to defend from attacks from outside while keeping China's domestic internet safe) and other barriers. They're not omnipotent, they are but mere cumbersome obstacles.
The site was closed because it didn't have an "Information Network Broadcast Audio Visual Programming Permission Certificate" from...you guessed it...SARFT! AKA The State Administration of Radio Film and Television, AKA the Comics Code Authority, AKA the Thought Police. This wasn't a commercial or copyright dispute, otherwise it would be handled by a different government agency. This was purely cultural in nature.
The funny part is, with all these people on bitorrent at once, download speeds have never been higher! ;)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
VeryCD is for sissies anyway. We 1337 ch1|\|353 c0mmie 3ombie 7err0ristxx0rs know better. We're in ur b0xx0rs (right now) watching ur pr0ns, srsly ;)
Well, joking aside, my formal response as a responsible Chinese citizen was like "What?" I must have been living under a rock for the past N years because I'd never know that VeryCD had a BT service had I not read this story. I thought it was a bunch of ED2K pirates and just that. The only one time I used anything related to VeryCD was when I downloaded the pirate live recording of a concert (that I attended and paid $$$ for) using aMule, and saw a bunch of pirates with "VeryCD" in the username strings.
And yes, I use BitTorrent for pirate movies -- ones that I just couldn't have purchased legally since there are NONE FOR SALE. Old movies that "won't sell" (heck, I even paid a local film archive money to watch one and I liked it so much I pirated it later). Independent movies that were not intended to "sell", e.g. the low-budget scifi "Primer". Foreign movies that did not cater to the local market or did not pass the regulatory authority's "audit", e.g. "Magnolia" (I watched movie critique programme on TV that mentioned "Magnolia" and heck, I just can't find a legal copy available for sale here.)
But when I go pirate I use openbittorrent et al., and before that TPB. I never knew about the VeryCD. Did I miss something?
That just makes me laught. As if people cared in China. The fact that they close p2p sites is just because it's using too much bandwidth on an already saturated network. But have a look at these 2 sites:
http://www.pps.tv/
http://www.youku.com/
and realize that nobody needs p2p to watch films. It's better to watch them with live, free streaming! pps.tv works extremely well and has very nice films, with often very good Simplified Chinese subs (according to my Chinese friends).
When will you stop sucking?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Instead of taking the Japanese model, where every single genital shot is reduced to blocky 16x16 pixalation (though they bizarrely get around this by using demonic/alien tentacles where possible) they should use the blocky pixalation on faces (there will never be the equivalent of a porn star in China. Too much shame and the possibility of life imprisonment.)
Home made porn, without faces, can then be sold on the black market without running the dubious risk of trying illegal imports where you're never sure what you're going to get.
I mean, can you imagine the poor Chinese guy who got 2 Girls 1 Cup on High-Def by accident?
"This is what Westerners find sexy? I am glad we are communist china"
spend a few bucks and ship porn on DVD to a random address in China.
If you're worried about getting someone in trouble? Send it to a political figure. Or a chief of police.