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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?
... 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)
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
The difference here is not the medium: the difference is OUR content versus THEIR content. They have no problem letting their citizens pirate OUR content, even resell it, but when it's THEIR music in which some CHINESE company holds IP interest, well... that's a whole other story!
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!"
Actually according to Chinese media this crack focuses on eradicating pornography. Now, it's true you can get any DVD in China including 'subversive' movie (like '7 years' with Brad Pitt) , but they simply don't sell porn in those shops, it's a line they never crossed. Chinese people get their porn from the internet, mostly through torrents. As for the "china does nothing" part. I think you need to understand just how poor China is. Despite media hype - this is an extremely poor country with tons of problems and the undermanned underpaid police has much more important stuff to deal with than people copying DVds
There's got to be a triple word score joke in there somewhere!
I think they're doing it right.
Starting at the latest technologies (P2P Sharing) and working their way backwards. If you can cut off Piracy from the internet, then you can focus on physical media afterwards knowing that very little of it is going to be reproduced - since it can't be file shared as easily.
Stop the net and you stop alot of DVD-R's. If you force Pirates to Film by video cam, the quality of pirated films goes way down and eventually people won't want that pirated version.
How many of those Pirated DVD's in China-town do you think were hand-recorded by the owner of the shop? They were quite obviously fileshared.
1980s: Damnit people, stop fucking. We have too many damn people!
2009: Damnit people, stop whacking off. We need more people!
Make up your damn mind, China.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
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.
Stand in the main hall of the Shanghai train station at 9 PM at night before the last trains are leaving (or really any time). The first thing that will pop in to the minds of most westerners, "why is the police not controlling this riot"?
That is just how China is with that many people. It is rather amazing given the population of China there are not more brutal crack downs in China.
I am not apologizing for the crimes of the Chinese government party, but the western media and politicians often fail to distinguish what it takes to keep order in a country that large and that poor on the one had, and real political and human rights oppression on the other. No country on Earth has ever had to face the problems that China is facing, because no country on Earth has ever been that populated.
Luckily the Chinese government does seem to be getting more sophisticated about it (e.g. cutting off porn sites vs. executing someone for looking at porn), and also seems to be (little by little) starting to realize not everything regarding personal freedom is a direct threat to the state or public order. In fact, the shear white noise of free speech can be a very effective way of drowning out descent. Just look at the United States. It is the tower of digital babel.
Living in Chile
Indeed. That's what separates us from lesser nations like China, because our RIAA and MPAA crack down SO HARD on pirated Chinese content.
Pfft.
I've been to Thailand in 2000 and 2007, last I checked they still had a growing VideoCD market of new movies. I don't know how they make them, but a van driver was playing VideoCD movies in a van we rented in 2007 to tour Thailand with. It was one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that had just come out and it was in Thai with no English subtitles. When I went back to the USA it was still playing in theaters so I paid movie tickets for my family to see it, in English and in big theater format. I didn't want to rip Disney off of the price of tickets and I didn't understand enough Thai to get the VideoCD format.
But they sell them in flee markets and mall tables in Thailand and I am told most Asian nations sell them. The VideoCD is in PAL format and wouldn't play on US NTSC systems and modern DVD players in the USA don't play VideoCD formats anymore.
I am told the Asian pirates use VideoCD formats because not everyone can afford the DVD players and VideoCD players are cheaper. In a bad third world country more people buy the cheaper VideoCD players than DVD players to save money and then buy cheap VideoCDs from the street, flee markets, or tables in a mall somewhere. A movie can take up to 3 or 4 VideoCDs because a VideoCD does not store as much as a DVD does.
Yes most people either don't know or don't care that it is illegal, and the local police don't crack down on it either nor does the national government. All they know is for $1 to $5 they can get cheap VideoCD movies in their own native language.
The Playstation systems were sold with a Mod-Chip already in them, and they sell cheap PS1, PS2, and I assume now PS3 games. But I heard that Sony of Japan cracked down on that and sued companies that installed mod chips in their Playstation units, which lead to the population stopping from buying Sony Playstations and switching to PC games that were easier to counterfeit and pirate.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Go to any shop and ask for "huang de DVD" (yellow DVDs - Chinese term for it, think "blue movies"). They have them behind the counter. Usually seem to be Hong Kong girls but the Chinese mafia gets busted for making pornos so there must be mainland girls somewhere. Chinese people get really angry when they see their women debasing themselves in porn (kappa girl). Anyone think their view of Western women is warped due to all the white girls they see doing crazy shit in pornos? Think about all the dumb stereotypes of Chinese people we all got from watching Hollywood movies. Oh, and one more thing...heh, heh...it's funny the guys are supposed to be pornstars but they are not particularly well-endowed.
Extremely poor country? People aren't starving to death, and incomes are rising across the board. The police are neither undermanned nor ill-funded. A country where manpower is cheap and government is absolute? The cops in my town all have new police cars. Cameras are going up everywhere to monitor the whole city - imported products that they paid top dollar for (the guy I know who works on the system said the domestic systems were simply not up to snuff.)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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!
No country on Earth has ever had to face the problems that China is facing, because no country on Earth has ever been that populated.
There are countries with far higher population density than China. But I don't see the Netherlands, for example, shooting dissenters.
Yep. ^^^ What he said. You're suffering from an Americanized delusion of the rest of the world; that's why you didn't know.
India's has even worse poverty and overpopulation, yet you don't see an autocratic government there.
This is a prime example of how knee-jerk reactions to problems are a very bad idea.
Another is the rate of infanticide of female children. One child per family made people do some really messed up stuff.
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