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China Hits Back At Google
sopssa writes "After Google yesterday started redirecting google.cn users to their uncensored Hong Kong-based google.com.hk servers, the Chinese government has now hit back at Google by restricting access to Google's Hong Kong servers. 'On Tuesday mainland China users could not see uncensored Hong Kong-based content after the government either disabled certain searches or blocked links to results.' China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the country, has also been approached by the Chinese government to cancel a contract with Google about having google.cn on their mobile home page for search. China Unicom, the second largest carrier in China, has also either postponed or killed the launch of Android-based mobile phones in the country."
Google, it's your turn ...
This will end when Google is completely blocked (or 'filtered') by China. I really don't see any other outcome. China will never budge on these issues (at least not in my lifetime) and Google has already burned some of its bridges to China.
This war could be really hard. But in the end, it's the Chinese people who lose, not Google nor the Chinese "government".
I'm not sure how in the hell capitalists here in the U.S. decided we could do fair business with a totalitarian communist nation. They don't value workers rights, free speech, or even a fair marketplace.
OK, here are your standard template responses:
They obviously know what's best for their people, and you're just interfering. (sarcasm) Just let it go, pull completely out of the market, and call it a day. Besides, the longer this lingers on, the more Chinese black hats are gonna slam your servers.
Just "concede" defeat (and Chinese ass-hattery) and call it a day.
Sent from your iPad.
But hey, when the labor is cheap and can do almost the same as our expensive labor, who cares?!? North American citizens? Mmmmmmmm wait a minute.... nope, the WalMart parking lot is still full....
You forgot about the icing on the cake: they don't care about their environment! Since their officials are all corrupt, it's just a matter of greasing some of the bureaucratic wheels and those heavy metals in the drinking water aren't a problem! Not only are we exporting unskilled labor, we're exporting our pollution!
*cough*
What's that you say? Their people are suffering? China uses the same planet we do? We'll eventually suffer from each other's pollution? I liked it better when my point of view was limited to my immediate surrounding area where I can find a coffee maker for $12 at Walmart.
My work here is dung.
The information on how to build nukes hasn't been that hard to find since the seventies. There are actually some full designs that are declassified, due to some weird loophole in Swedish (I think) law. The difficulty has almost always been materials. There is not yet a way to transmit plutonium over TCP.
I think Google and everyone else knew this was a losing battle. The point however was to call the CCP out in the open and force them to bleed a little. The blood is fresh, but will anyone from the inside the party attempt reform? I find it hard to believe there is no descension among the party. Question is, how many and do they have the courage and fortitude to see this through?
Life is not for the lazy.
Of course they understand it. The purpose of the Great Firewall, like the Australian filtering, is to cause sufficient inconvenience and paranoia in the average user that they simply knuckle under. The map for this sort of thing is from Orwell's 1984. What counts is that you're never sure you're being watched, so you must always assume you are. That is how the Chinese government and that gang of liberty-haters in Rudd's government in Australia operate. Make it difficult enough and make it sound much more technically imposing and encompassing than it really is, then who cares about the 1-5% of computer users with the technical knowledge to circumvent the filters. They still basically have to keep it quiet lest the thought police come along and knock on their door.
This is what you get when you have a government that is stark raving terrified of its citizens. All nations should beware of politicians who show those classic signs of fear and loathing of freedom. Most politicians and bureaucrats are precisely of that nature, because the freer the citizen is, the more contained their own power is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You made the assumption that the US government would allow such a move. We have several client states that would revolt if we provided democratizing influences like free access to information. These states include: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey...
The US Government would now allow such a move against China either, since they are our most lucrative trading partner, and damn close to becoming more than that. Money matters to us a hell of a lot more than freedom.
The one reason the Chinese government could care is that it is extremely sensitive to foreign criticism. Look at how it reacted to criticism of the Beijing Olympics or, heck, even at a stupid film festival in Melbourne that nobody had ever heard of before because it showed a documentary on the ethnic Uighurs in China, to the point where the Chinese government even authorized hacking of this speck-on-the-wall festival's website (I'm sure the organized were thrilled by the Streisand Effect). It's precisely this that Google is likely hoping forces China to loosen restrictions. Of course, Google has probably miscalculated to some degree. As much as China hates foreign criticism, it acts all the worse at internal criticism.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
First of all, I'm not an American. Second, I never said Western governments are pure and good (I mean, I did directly name the Australian government). But I can tell you this, you can type "George Bush waterboarding Guantanamo" in Google in the United States, and get some pretty damning pages up right off the top. Try typing "Tienanmen massacre" in China and see what you get up.
It's night and day, no matter how much you pathetic Chinese government apologists try to assert differently.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why not? So Google will finally require https as opposed to http for their search engine front, just like they do with Gmail. A couple less eavesdroppers in the middle can't be too bad.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I don't think you've been paying attention to our news and politics lately. Criticizing the government has almost replaced baseball as our national pastime. Of course, the reason it has become so popular probably has to do with the fact that we can do it without getting arrested and interned in a re-education facility. Unlike in, say, China.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The goal would be giving access to information for the Chinese people. NOT gaming... I know this is /. but even so priorities!
I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head.
While I generally agree with this (witness the former Soviet Bloc, the American South etc.) I sometimes wonder if it always applies. For example, the conditions in North Korea have been appalling for 50+ years. How much longer before the people rise up and cut off the sovereign's head?
I've watched a few interviews with people in North Korea, the people there honestly believe that the rest of the world is filled with starvation and that North Korea is the only place with "plenty" (even though many starve) they are told that their leader is a best selling author (I remember on one of the interviews the Korean asked if they had read Kim-Jung-Il's books because they were said that they were worldwide best sellers) and basically told that Korea is the best place on earth. They have complete isolation (embargoed against most western countries, no internet, no outside TV/radio) and honestly believe the propaganda.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Nice strawman. Slashdot is full of left-libertarian US citizens, and we've been wailing about our less enlightened national policies for years. I for one would love to see Dick Cheney sharing a jail cell with Hu Jintao and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but every time one of the latter two gentleman is a topic of discussion, I always see dozens of comments saying "what about Guantanamo Bay/Abu Grahib/warrantless wiretapping blah blah blah?" - as if that excuses any amount of misbehavior by other governments. Well, I think we should withdraw all our troops from foreign countries, try or release everyone at Guantanamo, and send the entire Bush administration to the ICC. Do I have your permission to criticize the Chinese government now, or are you going to start whining about something else?
Besides all that, the simple fact is that the US legal system continues to be more permissive of unbridled free speech than almost any other country in the world. We send people to jail for all sorts of stupid reasons that I certainly don't support, but you can march through Washington DC with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler, and mutter about a 2nd American Revolution, and you won't be hauled off to jail. Most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
h. Those that live in the US will be quick to point out the heinousness of Chinese policy, but very slow to recognize anything untoward in their own country's policies, foreign or domestic. Way too much Kool-Aid.
Nice attempt at the appearance of "balanced viewpoint", but it seems like you are either a. ignorant of the United States and its people, b. just America-bashing for the fun of it or (and this is my personal favorite) c. just ignorant. Either way, you're the one sucking down the Kool-Aid. As it happens, a lot of us are pretty damned dissatisfied with our various forms of government here, and we're pretty damn vocal about it. We can talk about it on public forms like this one. We can call the President of the United States a porchmonkey if we want to, and nobody will arrest us (although some of our neighbors might burn down our house.) We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate. It's not easy, to be sure, but is still a lot more than anyone living in China (or any other totalitarian regime) can say for themselves. So watch your tongue.
And we have every right to point out the heinousness of Chinese policy because it is heinous. Whether or not you like the United States doesn't change that fact one little bit.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, your government just bombs the fuck out of countries that disagree with them...
Only if they have something we want, just like every major power since the Roman Empire has done, all throughout history. We don't agree with North Korea, for example ... they don't have a single goddamn thing we want, but do keep making threatening noises about nuking our allies, so we keep buying them off with free food and diesel fuel. So we don't bomb other nations just because they disagree with us: fact is, most of the world is full of complete assholes who disagree with us, and while actually do have enough bombs to take care of them all, there wouldn't be much left when we finished the job.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The key is you have to keep most of the people relatively satisfied. Based on latin american dictatorships, if you can maintain a base of 30% that actively supports you, plus another 50% that is indifferent, then you can maintain power, even if the remainder are dying miserable deaths.
Qxe4
You better check again the provenience of each component of your computer. Odds are at least one of them was made in China.
Dilbert RSS feed
But in the European Union you can do that, and you are protected with medical care to boot. Your way is not the only way, even with the many good things you can do.
What's your point? I would never claim that the US government is anything close to a perfect system; the debate is about free speech and laws restricting to it. And while I think the EU is mostly very good on civil liberties and better than us on some other unrelated issues, it's worth mentioning that they are far more willing to restrict speech - and I'm not just talking about Germany's prohibitions on Holocaust denial. Google "Ireland blasphemy" if you're curious. On the moral scale, this can't compare to the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's one instance where the US clearly is superior.
Worth remembering that most people in early-to-mid USSR believed all that, too.
We can even, if we get sufficiently worked up about it, change how our government(s) operate.
Almost certainly false. You can't even muster up a viable third party, something your neighbours to the north have been doing with clockwork regularity every thirty years or so for the past century.
The American system of government is broken. Congress has approval ratings that regularly dip below 20% and sometimes into the single digits, but incumbents are returned over 80%, sometimes over 90%, of the time. That is the reality of your broken governmental system. You can SAY anything you damned well please, so long as (a very few of) you vote for one of two almost identical parties.
The only reason the anti-conservative radicals of the Republican Party and the sometime budget-balancers of the Democratic Party look so completely different to you is that they are the only two tiny bumps on the otherwise atomically smooth surface of mainstream American politics. You have a populace so politically naive that a set of minor tweaks to your broken for-profit health care system is considered "socialism", for heavens sake!
All of which said: obvious the US is in pretty much infinitely better shape, culturally and politically, than China, who are shooting themselves in the foot with this ridiculous policy. The Chinese people need access to information to prosper, and by attempting to restrict it the Chinese government is in epic fail territory.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The American voting system is completely broken, but that example you give has nothing to do with it.
As a whole Congressional approval is always low because no one likes those 98 senators and 434 representatives wasting our money on pork-barrel projects in their districts. But what we do like are those 2 senators and 1 representative bringing money and jobs to our district, thus individually they tend to have high approval and are easily reelected. That's one of the few parts of our system that actually makes sense.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Nice straw man, but these laws aren't really enacted (Downfall, the source of the angry Hitler videos broke all the German taboo's and with near universal accolades in Germany, also the angry Hitler video's are quite popular with ze Germans). Same with Ireland, when was the last person charged with blasphemy (HINT: Ireland is holding a referendum to have it removed from their constitution). The only difference between saying something immensely stupid in Europe and saying something immensely stupid in America is the American police wont take you to safety before some redneck takes it upon himself to correct your thinking.
The US has as many restrictions on free speech as Europe, they are just enforced differently.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yeah - but things like software patents and out-of-hand patent system in general is starting to make a difference.
I already hear screeching noises when developing houses are more and more attacked by patent trolls. The same for medicine and other stuff.
At the end the country with the less restrictions will will stay in first gear with R&D, while an increasing stringent patent and other suppressing system will bring development in the USA to a grinding halt, or at least slow down considerably.
You can say a lot about China (and you would be right), but they are not so stupid to let big company's and patent trolls decide what can be researched, developed and build - or not.
Sure - the government is keeping those things in hand, but general you will see a increasing development and research cycle with little restrictions. It would not surprise me if China would surpass the USA in certain fields in not too far distance.
Unbridled greed can be as much devastating as a totalitarian government.