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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."
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!
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.
All sex is best when it involves a little bit of a chase, imo.
You mean like solving a CAPTCHA?
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
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
Huh? Where'd you get that one, buddy? China has been in a vigorous "learn from the West" campaign ever since the Deng Xiaoping took the Chinese Communist Party down the capitalist road.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
New movies and new music I can live without, and I imagine that others can, too.
E-books and audio books, not so much.
I could not even conceive of having to go the library for books anymore.
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!