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China Slams Clinton's Call For Internet Freedom
CWmike writes "China on Friday slammed remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Internet freedom worldwide, saying her words harmed US-China relations. Clinton's speech and China's response both come after Google last week said it planned to reverse its long-standing position in China by ending censorship of its Chinese search engine. Google cited increasingly tough censorship and recent cyberattacks on the Gmail accounts of human rights activists for its decision, which it said might force it to close its offices in China altogether. On Thursday in Washington, DC, Clinton unveiled US initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption. The US will support circumvention tools for dissidents whose Internet connections are blocked, she said. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu called for the US 'to respect the facts and stop using the issue of so-called Internet freedom to unreasonably criticize China.' China's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy, the statement said, apparently referring to the issues raised by Google."
Maybe, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
If Google, because etics, is willing to lose such market as China, could get a huge credibility and respect increase (kudos, Google). Unfortunately, I'm skeptical about it.
Google is not the only organization that is sick and tired of China's hacking and industrial espionage. After seeing in my logs hundreds of hacking attempts a day that originate in China, it really sucks that we cannot just cut them off the Internet. If they attached anywhere near the interest in stopping the hacking that they did in prosecuting the people who dealt in porn, the problem would stop overnight. They supposedly have the most sophisticated government firewall in the world, but they cannot spot and stop these continual hacking attempts? Obviously the Chinese government is behind this hacking activity.
Talk about a non-responsive response: "Our rules don't allow for hacking and violations of citizen's privacy".
Considering the state of privacy there, they certainly aren't lying.
Quick! Get your tin foil hats! I knew the government was watching me!
I'm sure RIAA or the MPAA is behind this push for "freedom".
I have a friend in Shanghai, and it sucks because when I send him video links on Youtube, he can't view them because they're firewalled from Youtube.
Kudos for giving countries like this access to freedom of information.
It's like being only allowed to watch State-sponsored TV and government approved books in libraries, and then suddenly being allowed to experience the wealth of the world.
4chan and the dark underbelly of the internet aside, I hope this gives people a taste of culture/information other than what's force-fed down their throats and see what they're missing out on.
http://www.object404.com
But since its america, no one complains because "god bless america". If china had this kind of propaganda there wouldnt be as big of a problem.
Does Australia get no Google? And the UK, we are getting pretty poor at this freedom thing.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
it took some phone calls to stop the censorship.
Trust me, if it was government censorship you were experiencing, it would take an act of god to stop the censorship. Not a few phone calls from Mr. TheWebSiteIsDown.
Would it actualy be cracking (I assume it's what they ment ;-) ) for internet users in china to get around the great firewall? The owners of the information the people want to access has effectivly given universal permission for the access of the data and the use of say a proxy site or ssh to a server in the US wouldn't realy be modifying any software at all.
Because Hillary would never want anything censored now would she.
(Not the same league as China, but its still the same sport...)
Oh come now. Think of it as natural selection, weeding out the less competent network security policies and practitioners. Those that remain will be stronger, faster, and smell better between showers.
If Google can fend off the People's Army, then your Gmail account is probably pretty proof against plain old identity thief hackers from Chicago. So this is good news!
I really love what Hillary Clinton said in the article:
:)
"Ultimately, this issue isn't just about information freedom -- it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit," she said.
"It's about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors."
Really lovely and Charles Stross-ian, brings a tear to my eye
http://www.object404.com
or we might use our tectonic weapon on them :O
For some reason they think they're the world police.
That is an amazing bit of conspiriakii.
There is not references other that some buzz words gleanable from US procurement contracts. No phone numbers, no names, no websites and yet you manage to get a +2 insightful.
I am impressed.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
At least your censor don't act like an idiot.
Hell, the Great Firewall even blocked the "Down for everyone or just me"; last night Amazon's images have all disappeared.
And recently some imbeciles have configured the firewall block CDNs... The results are, bizarre.
I am actually currently in China. Sites which are carte-blance blocked include: Facebook, youtube, wikipedia, blogger.com (as a side note: Wikipedia really is useful--reminded of that now that it is not available).
The reason for blocking Facebook and company is because they are starting to work for serious political change: see today's 'No Prorouge' rallies occurring today in Canada [and at worldwide Canadian embassies] after the Canadian prime minister leader cancelled the democratically-elected parliament for weeks--these rallies are a result of over 200,000 strong grassroots Facebook group support. Concurrent to that is an evaporation of that prime ministers lead in the polls versus the opposition party.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
TFS: "On Thursday in Washington, DC, Clinton unveiled US initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption. "
Quote: "Corruption costs Afghans $2.5 billion a year, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday, with the scale of bribery matching Afghanistan's opium trade."
Probably my poor logic, since Afghans do not suffer from a repressive government.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
China has that mentality too. Probably a majority of Chinese feel that those Chinese dissidents who are bringing attention to government abuses and offenses against human rights are unpatriotic for embarrassing China. Just because there is a substantial number of educated Chinese who want human rights and a better China does not mean they are loved by the majority of their countrymen for pushing for these things, just as the Abolitionists in 1860's America were despised by northern industrialists (the descendants of slave traders) and southern slave owners alike.
So what "stuff" did you find and what websites were you looking at that were mysteriously blocked?
You must be a very important person!
This is very strong language. Google is getting full backing and all other US companies are being actively encouraged to follow their lead.
Well... yeah, I am, actually. But I don't bet against Google. I also don't bet against China, which makes this dispute rather interesting. A company that willingly turns its back on a market of 1 billion people risks having its CEO bludgeoned to death by angry investors. At the same time, any entity that willingly cuts itself off from google also cuts itself off from one of the most amazing information tools ever invented. If I had to call it, I'd say both sides make angry mouth noises for, oh, 3 to 6 months and then quietly settles on a compromise that allows Google to pretend that they're not evil while allowing China to continue keeping information out of the hands of its citizens.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ahh, that would be telling :) but seriously, you can do the google searches for "TETRA modem", "Ontology Classifier", "Knowledge Systems" for a few weeks just as well as anyone can.
and no, i'm not "important", just reasonably persistent and intelligent.
The MafiAAs receive carte blanche from the courts to abuse their customers, Net Neutrality simmers on the legislative back burner, allowing vertically integrating ISP's to throttle traffic in cavalier and arbitrary ways, as well as allowing them to merge with content providing companies to "better serve" their customers.
But we don't have censorship, nope. But we don't give American internet users that tube of KY which'd help it all go down so much easier.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
i know. amazing, isn't it. i put it down to being realistic and mentioning the phrase "statistical sample of one", and specifically mentioning that it's "personal experience and observation" rather than "fact". if i'd said "it's a fact! because i said so!" then quite rightly i'd be called out as being a nut-job and a dick.
it took some phone calls to stop the censorship.
You're either amazingly important, simply summarising a very long painful process up in a few words for the sake of keeping an internet post shortish or you're basically lying...
/. has one of the best censorship systems in existence. Troll mods will rescue us all!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
An analogy like your comparison of China and US: Sweden's government is EVIL!! They KILLED people! The Third Reich was equally EVIL!! Because they also KILLED people!
And the U.S. public endorses it.
Even when people painstakingly obey the laws, the US government has been known to arrest them and throw them in prison. I know of at least two cases where law-abiding American dissidents were arrested or attacked by American agents OVERSEAS because they publicly spoke out against the status quo.
And the American public continues to hate no one so much as kind, gentle men who love children. Worse than terrorists, you know, because terrorists only kill people, they don't LOVE CHILDREN.
Love is very bad, you know. Must outlaw it.
/. has one of the best censorship systems in existence. Troll mods will rescue us all!
:) whew, thank god: for a minute there i was worried that people might think i was being serious. instead, fortunately, people think i'm seriously promoting "myself" and deliberately saying things just for the sake of causing trouble.
paraphrasing aldous huxley: facts don't go away just because you ignore them.
the trouble is that empirical evidence - especially that of personally-experienced evidence and thus the conclusions that can be derived from those personal experiences - _can_ be ignored...
Then I would have found my new home :P
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You doofus.
It's the Black Foot nation. A native american tribe. They have not conducted international naval military action for some time, and certainly never in operations against China.
US Black Feet indeed.
I would venture to guess you got a "troll" mod because you didn't provide any relevant links. If it's well known in some part of the world, some part of the world as big as China anyway, I somehow doubt it wouldn't be on the Internet.
Maybe the rest of the world will follow and leave that communistic country back in the dark ages.
Instead of propping up the government maybe the world will start to do actually do something about it..
Wait, is that the same US that banned the internet poker? Now it wants something called "freedom"?
Says one thing does the other?
the way this argument is going google should take the bluf and block chinas access to gmail, this way the chinese people will see that something is going on and the chinese government will lose face, because as it is now googles side is simply not reported in china if they take the first step and redirect chinese traffic to a site explaing how f**ked up the censorship is then the proper gander will fail, because as it is now gmail accounts are advertised on the beijing subway ! imagen stopping all of that !
to hell with China, this is coming from a nation that puts lead paint on children's toys, makes jewelry for teenagers out of cadmium, makes infant formula with poison in it just to pass a test so they can sell it, makes pet food poisonous too, no telling what else that slipped through under the radar, so fuck china i hope they all die a miserable death!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Cold war flashback! Nobody censors, everybody simply enforces just and reasonable laws. It's all for the people, not against them. If only we could make a stand for freedom, but we have so many skeletons in the closet that we have to tread lightly. Sigh.
of course, nobody's told Mrs Clinton that, before she began getting righteous, which is very embarrassing for her and for the U.S. government she's representing. it also puts the comments made by the Chinese Government into perspective: namely that the Chinese Government know damn well that the U.S. Government also performs Internet Censorship; Ma Zhaoxu is simply calling things "as they are".
Yes, sadly China has a very good argument when they are criticized for censoring the Internet: Denmark censors their Internet. Australia censors their Internet. The US censors their Internet. Norway covertly tortures people who write the wrong thing on the Internet. And on and on. This gives China the very good argument "Why are you picking on us, everybody censors their Internet". The EU and the US can't really say anything as long as they are covertly doing the same thing.
"Australia on Friday slammed remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Internet freedom worldwide, saying her words harmed US-Australia relations. Clinton's speech and Australia's response both come after Google last week said it planned to reverse its long-standing position in Australia by ending censorship of its Australian search engine. Google cited increasingly tough censorship and recent cyberattacks on the Gmail accounts of human rights activists for its decision, which it said might force it to close its offices in Australia altogether. On Thursday in Washington, DC, Clinton unveiled US initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption. The US will support circumvention tools for dissidents whose Internet connections are blocked, she said. Australian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu called for the US 'to respect the facts and stop using the issue of so-called Internet freedom to unreasonably criticize Australia.' Australia's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy, the statement said, apparently referring to the issues raised by Google."
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Let's keep a sense of scale. Guantanamo Bay, and a lot going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, is awful and the information tightly controlled. But given that China willingly and effectively censors political speech and porn, but is unwilling or unable to do anything about the 99% spam email coming from their domains, is an indication that they can't be bothered with censoring criminal behavior. They only censor political or politically embarrassing behavior.
Evidence continues to surface about American and other Western firms cooperating with repressive governments in their efforts to censor and eavesdrop on their citizens. Why didn't Mrs. Clinton mention them in her speech?
We have, for instance, Cisco, Nokia/Siemens, Microsoft, and Yahoo, just to name a few.
HAH! I love how China acts like they are innocent and all. "China's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy, the statement said, apparently referring to the issues raised by Google."" Riiiight. I'm also the Queen of England! China would NEVER hack anyone. The Chinese government is one of the biggest fattest LIARS ever. They constantly say one thing while time and time again they prove that they don't care about anyone's benefit but their own. Whether it is manipulating trade markets and currancy, hacking, controlling the people of the country, human rights issues, etc. Yet whenever confronted they are all "You can't tell us what to do" or "we don't do that!" or "We will change things." but what changes? Exactly nothing. They might sweep it under the rug or shift things around but nearly every time the SAME issue comes right back up. The world needs to basically tell China to stuff it and come back when they learn their lesson. Stop manufacturing stuff in China, stop buying Chinese goods, the whole nine yards. Put the squeeze on them till they show their hand.
I do what I must because of what I must do.
Given China's bottleneck of a firewall, I am surprised it hasn't been DDoS'ed. Routing their entire country through one node is an exploit just ripe for an attack.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
New announcement from the Secretary of State: The Secretary of State will say what she wishes about Internet Freedom. And if Ma Zhaoxu continues to object, the State Department is NOT going to send the Secretary of State's husband over with the Dallas Cowgirls and a few cases of cigars. That is all.
With something like 1.35 billion people you can bet someone there speaks your language.
Hillary's "freedom of information" masturbatory rhetoric is aimed at people who know a little but not too much. It has a different ring when coupled with the knowledge that the US govt has colluded with US providers to eavesdrop on people.
Eavesdropping and censoring aren't the same thing - but knowing that somebody is monitoring your "free and open" Internet access makes it feel a bit less "free and open".
In the west we never heard about the US Black Fleet that was about to conquer Taiwan and got blown out of the water by the Chinese. That happened in 2003 and never hit the news nor the Internet
Wait, the US was about to invade the Republic of China, but then the People's Republic of China defended them? The same People's Republic of China that doesn't regard the Republic of China as a legitimate state? This is about as likely as the USA intervening to protect North Korea from invasion by China, so there's a good reason why it wasn't in the news.
But over here the embarrassment for the USA would be devastating. Loosing a whole fleet to China, them walking away without a scratch, as if they had performed a show.
A US battleship has a typical crew complement of around 2,000. A fleet will be at least ten ships, so that's 20,000 members of the navy. And yet, none of the families of these dead soldiers mentioned anything to the news? No one noticed a load of naval vessels never returned to port? Russia's spy satellites, which track all surface fleet movements of both China and the US, didn't notice a US fleet disappearing and didn't mention it to the press to score political points?
There is lots of stuff happening in the world that would embarrass the USA and the west in general. But none of it hits the news-stands over here
Have you ever read the news? There's lots of stuff that embarrasses the USA in it every day. Most recently it was coverage of their meeting with Pakistan.
And where is that guy that transformed the good old telephone network to a high-speed digital IP-network?
It's now widely deployed. It's called ADSL.
I worked with him at the time
...but you can't remember his name
till the USA threatened to nuke the Netherlands if he ever got a hand on his money. A nice personal message from then president Clinton.
Right, President Clinton threatened to use nuclear weapons against a country that has a mutual defence treaty with at least two other nuclear powers and they just backed down? There was no diplomatic outrage?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
First when you're a guest you have to play by the house rules. And China can't handle CIA sponsored like Iran or Venezuela had. So for the greater good bye bye google.
In the way that they are rated 1 / 5 after i write them and nobody reads them.
Remarks by US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton on the occasion of the massive hacker attack on US companies by an unspecified national entity. Translated for your convenience.
On Monday, a seven-year-old girl in Port-au-Prince was pulled from the rubble after they sent a text message calling for help. The spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet. And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.
Amid this unprecedented surge in connectivity, we must also recognize that these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing. These tools are also being exploited to undermine human progress and political rights. Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns, or nuclear power can energize a city or destroy it, the same networks that help organize movements for freedom also enable al-Qaida to ruthlessly copy American songs and movies in “M-P-Three” format.
Freedom of expression is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. No — they must be able to give their full name and credit card number and put them on the Internet as well. A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity — one cell phone in a remote community can enable people previously unavailable access to Monsanto seeds.
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress — but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas, paid for at 99 cents — I’m sorry, $1.29 — a song. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.
Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits. We do not tolerate those who incite others to violence or copyright violation, such as the agents of al-Qaida who are, at this moment, downloading songs at a furious rate, and setting their sights on cracking the patriotic protection of Blu-Ray discs. Those who use the internet to recruit terrorists or distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities.
States, terrorists, downloaders and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks. Those who disrupt the free flow of paid information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government, our civil society and our economy.
Increasingly, U.S. companies are making the issue of internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions. The most recent situation involving Google has attracted a great deal of interest. And we look to the Chinese authorities to conduct a thorough review of the cyber intrusions that led Google to make its announcement. And we also look for that investigation and its results to be China signing the ACTA treaty like our campaign donors want them to.
The internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it is fabulous. There are so many people in China now online. But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users to be protected from being able to download any song ever released, any time, anywhere, risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.
So let me close by asking you to remember the little girl who was pulled from the rubble on Monday in Port-au-Prince. She’s alive, she was reunited with her family, she will have the chance to grow up and pay the going rate for a licence not a sale see end user license agreement of a song in a given format on a given device. We cannot stand by while people are separated from the iTunes store by walls of censorship.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Those people really lack diplomacy, freedom is not seem the same way everywhere in the world which makes the use of that word to have different meanings.
I don't see the US supporting the freedom in the internet to selling illegal drugs, sending spam, prostitution, DMCA, ...
Likewise is totally acceptable that other countries impose restrictions to Internet use where there is concern to that community, like to pornography until issues of age checking and privacy are addressed.
Surely China's censorship is outrageous but US needs to make a point: What exactly are you talking about? How that compares to others country sovereignty and general laws?
This kind of "freedom speech" is just for the internal audience.
''China's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy"
China's constitution also says all sorts of interesting things, such as freedom of religious worship, freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, association, etc. (Look up the "four bigs" and Article 35). The ability to exercise those rights is rather limited. Really, the whole thing reads like some kind of bad joke.
Let's just say that the implementation and enforcement of China's laws leaves much to be desired, and when the law is inconveniently contrary to the wishes of the dictators in charge, they change or ignore the laws more or less at will (including the constitution). So, I'll be impressed when the Chinese government actually uses the laws against "hacking and violations of citizens' privacy" to track down and bring to justice the people responsible for this episode of widespread corporate espionage. No credit for anything less. Unless met by appropriate action, these laws are just words on a page, like the "rights" that exist in the Chinese constitution.
I suppose someone will pipe up and say that isn't much different from some western countries, but at least we're allowed to openly talk about and protest the fact, and the expression of the problem isn't quite so egregious.
Harm US/China relations? We hate China... China hates us. They are stealing our jobs, subverting our government, having into our military instillation and business systems... stealing our intilectual property, subverting our monetary system by artificially manipulating their currency. They're dumping toxins into the air and water, not to mention into the toys and babyfood they sell us. They financially support North Korea, one of the countrys most likely to be involved in whatever event eventually destroys the world. How on earth could we do anything to harm relations with China? And how could access to the internet somehow make their citizens any more aware of what a bunch of asshats their government officials are?
China may have laws but they have no one who actually implements them. The police are uneducated and corrupt. They know nothing and extremely bribable. The officials are often quite corrupt and bribable. Yes there are corruption call in lines but that's just useful for the communist party intel people to give intel to their buddies so they can leverage corrupt politicians and officials. Then there is the communist party and govt who make all the rules and follow none of them.
You cannot have rule of law til the govt must follow the very same rules that impose on everyone else. This will not happen in China for at least another 20 to 30 years because it also requires societal change. Society has to expect rule of law, and currently they don't. Most people don't realize it but China is self-ruled at a social level and it is the communist party who fights against this social rule for power over China.
If you doubt any of this, buy a ticket to Beijing and learn some Mandarin.
Results 1 - 10 of about 141,000 for tetra modem
Random checks on first few pages show no issues.
Troll
We all should know that preemptive use of Hilary Clinton is against everything we stand for. This is the worst thing since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. http://www.theonion.com/content/video/u_s_condemned_for_pre_emptive_use
Just boot China out of the WTO and drop their MFN with America. Look, CHina is NOT going to give freedom's to their citizens. Their move towards capitalism was to prevent their citizens from revolting. There is ZERO intention of ever restoring their freedoms. OTH, China is in a cold war with the rest of the west, and most likely with the world. Their goal is control. Even now, they had LEGAL obligations under MFN AND WTO, to which they have not honored any of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It was, instead, a very crude (embarrassing, for western standards) attempt at Orwellian revisionism substantiated by a direct threat. Their claim that Clinton's comments contradict their constitution just shows how worthless that piece of paper is under a dictatorship.
Like China is the only part of the world where censorship is in action. In the west we never heard about the US Black Fleet that was about to conquer Taiwan and got blown out of the water by the Chinese. That happened in 2003 and never hit the news nor the Internet. At least the part of the Internet over here. In China this is all well known. But over here the embarrassment for the USA would be devastating.
Hmm... 2003? I seem to remember the US Navy having its hands full with something else in 2003.
Seriously, the US military was stretched seriously thin in 2003. I'm not in on high level military strategy meetings, but I somehow doubt that the US had a spare fleet kicking around for anything. (Especially one that they weren't going to replace. Believe me, if the Navy started ordering a new fleet of ships, we'd know about it.)
And finally, what good would conquering Taiwan be to the US? They don't have appreciable natural resources or particularly strategic territory. Their main export is electronic components, which we already get from them extremely cheaply. The reason Taiwan is important to the US to the extent that it is is because of some combination of "They piss of China, and the US government doesn't like the Chinese government" and "The US supports free people everywhere."
Finally, Wikipedia has a page on the US as a state sponsor of terrorism, where a lot of ridiculously tenuous links made by people with actual death squads are listed. Whatever else you may think of Wikipedia, it doesn't have a pro-US bias. Pro-US censorship is not employed on Wikipedia. It also doesn't have an article on this Black Fleet nonsense you're spouting.
It's pretty sad how the first thing that came to mind was "Country's educated despised and not trusted by majority, uneducated. But first in a new study, scientists have discovered water is wet..."
I guess humanity, as a whole, just doesn't trust people more educated than they are.
When American business start charging the "premium" for manufacturing toys without lead or cadmium, or baby food without antifreeze, Americans will be ready to pay!
I'm beside myself with rage that I cannot find anything that's made in America that resembles what I'm asking for. Search for American made toys, and you'll find toys made of wood. Great, now my 2 year old gets splinters in her throat instead of lead poisoning. For a technologically advanced nation, it's insane that we can't produce safe childrens products that people in a middle-class income bracket can pay for.
If it's a battle of proxies, rather than a battle of proxy wars, it might not be so bad.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I did said Google searches and everything turned up just fine. Perhaps you aren't being censored, but rather your internet connection sucks?
Many US politicians, corporations and intelligence agecnies loooove to talk about how China should allow internet freedom, while at the same time they're looking for ways to curtail our freedom online over here. Their whole wet dream is for the US internet to be like China's.
6 feet underground, Henry Kissinger is tapping morse code on the casket lid, "Let me out, that fatass cow is going to get you all killed yet".
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
From my perspective, hacking and censorship are one and the same issue here.
Those who want to express opinions that the ruling party doesn't want people to hear are the targets of hacking. In this case, hacking is just the means of censorship.
Get rid of the mindset that censorship is OK and you get rid of the motivation behind the hacking.
I'm no expert on China, but when people start getting this touchy, it usually means they sense they're in trouble.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I have attempted to post the reports that Google has backed down in China and re-enabled Chinese search result filtering in Google.cn despite of the lack of real actions from the Chinese government in the few two days, but /. editors keep refusing to put this relevant in the front page. This story casts a doubt on Google's stance, motive and commitment. Right, how can we be critical of our new found American hero defending the precious "freedom" and fighting the "evil" China? How can a hero backing down to the evil? Hero can't make fundamental principle error, or you are not allowed to know when it does. How could the evil have not taken any real evil action on this particular matter? It would hurt our national morale, and so we should do self-censoring and forbidding to put it in the front page of any Western media outlet.
(Even your WSJ story does not mention that google has re-enabled filtering; while every Western media reported the (now temporary) suspension after Google announcement. It is oversea Chinese media that reported it and I picked up and verified with the exact same Chinese query I tried right after their temporary suspension back then.)
At first I thought of this mostly in jest, but then I'm not sure anymore, but let's imagine that we have tech-savvy Chinese individuals who's only access to unfettered information is out there, somewhere on the Internet, but direct access to it is blocked, monitored, or otherwise frowned upon (if not quite risky).
What if these guys figured out that the best way to get the info, is to use some sort of random proxy, so to speak, such that the data is good, and such that this relaying host may not garner too much interest form the great firewall...
Wouldn't the best way to do that involve pwning other people's computers, outside of China? Would blocking all traffic from China actually result in helping a regime bent on massaging its subject's perception of reality? Wouldn't allowing this traffic be the democratic thing to do?
I guess that's why so many don't update windows or refuse to install IE8, right? They're just trying to help a brother out! ;)
How will she backpedal this time after we make menacing statements on how reliable we think T-Bonds are? How will Obama clean up her mess?
If you want to get real progress on the real issues between China and the United States (i.e. NOT HUMAN RIGHTS), keep Hillary out of it. We'd like to discuss and make progress on those issues but not when Hillary the irrational China-Hater is out there spewing garbage about "human rights".
Until China straightens out its human rights issues we should bar all communications of any type with China as well as all trade. Frankly buying products made in China supports a form of slavery that is not acceptable at all. Governments of this type are haters and enemies of humanity.
In order to win the net neutrality fight, we will need to to educate the general population on the reasons why it matters to them, and national officials making highly publicised speeches like Hillary Clinton's go a long way toward that goal.
Also, Hillary Clinton publicly stating that we'll support anti-censorship tools on a national level is a huge diplomatic middle finger to China in direct response to the Google situation.
I, for one, am extremely proud of both Google and my government's handling of this situation so far.
It is far past time to stop free trade agreements with countries of repressive governments. They are destroying the economies of the rest of the world.
If you're a "guest" in a country ruled by a one-party dictatorship that doesn't like people to see (legitimate) views that aren't necessarily the ones the state-controlled news agencies and state-approved opinion leaders dish up, then yes.
They will naturally take a dim view of you if you allow their citizens to learn about those dissenting opinions. You have to abide by their "house" rules that you don't let their citizens have access to uncontrolled information.
Oh yes, of course any rumours about systematic, large-scale, well-coordinated cyberwarfare dressed up as "random hacker activity" are just samples of malicious slander, yep? And if you're hosting an e-mail service and find your systems subjected to systematic attack from "hackers" (who just happen to target email accounts of regime critics), that too is no more than a big spiky everyday coincidence, yep? And making noise about being hacked like that is impolite, yep?
You've gotta be soooo careful to "abide by their rules". We all understand that, don't we? Yep Yep !
Look at how well that works in the USA: we all have access to the facts about global warming and mercury and abortion and health care and bribery and this-and-that, and yet there is still "debate" because there's always someone else publishing whatever the hell you want to believe.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
So when
Clinton unveiled U.S. initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption.
Does this mean that when the USA government shuts down your internet connection for using bittorent, that you can use this to undermine the gov?