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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:
China hits like a girl.
The next obvious move for Google is to launch their own satellites and provide free satellite internet access for everyone in the world.
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.
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.
If you really want to hurt Google, don't completely block access... just filter out all their ads.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Does it matter? Chinese outnumber Americans 4 to 1...
Depends on how you count. If you count total body mass, the number might be the other way around...
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.
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.
But look at -what- the Chinese government are censoring. Terms like the Tienanmen Square massacre where people died, that can certainly spark protests. Religion is censored, and as we know from history even small differences can lead to large problems.
People would and have risked their lives in the name of religion. People have and would risk their lives in support of those who they believe died for a worthy cause.
If it stayed like this, I doubt it would inspire revolutions. But with all of the talk about it, it is going to make people wonder -what- they are censoring. When they figure out what, they won't understand why. When they finally understand why they will see that the Chinese government is corrupt.
Think about it this way, if you don't know about curse words, there is no need to look them up. But how many of us once our parents told us that one word was a "bad word" tried to look it up in the dictionary? None of us would look it up otherwise, but once we know that it is "forbidden" knowledge we will look it up. The Chinese government and Google are effectively telling us that there -are- "curse words" tempting some of the citizens to look it up.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
Ever since I watched Tiananmen in horror, I have tried to boycott China. That boycott has failed miserably.
I just fixed my brakes last Saturday. I literally tried every auto parts store in town. I could not find rotors not manufactured in China, not in my town on a day's notice. I have no doubt I could have gotten some mail-order, but not in time to get to work on Monday and still keep my job.
I bought a camping knife as a present from Buck Knives, a "Made in the USA" company last year. Despite the advertising claims, the knife came stamped "Made in China."
I bought a set of Carhartt work clothes last year, another "Proudly made in America" company. They arrived with manufacturing defects. Did some checking, sure enough, Carhartt is moving it's manufacturing to China.
I got so fed up when a 14mm wrench snapped in my hand last year I was ready to cough up for Snap-On tools. Guess where Snap-On is moving their manufacturing?
Even the "proud-to-be-an-American-we-support-the-troops" redneck favorite companies Spyderco pocketknives and Surefire flashlights are moving to China.
Neal Stephenson was prophetic. The only thing we know how to make in this country any more are pizzas and movies.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
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.
China has worked out how to be protectionist without being provably protectionist to the WTO. So, rather than offer an (illegal) export subsidy to it's manufacturers, it lowers its currency by regulation to give the same mathematical effect without allowing retaliation from other WTO countries. Rather than applying illegal tax or tariff penalties on foreign corporation, it uses clandestine hacking attempts, trumped up charges tried in closed courts (eg, Rio Tinto), and creates an environment where anybody could be arrested at any time at the government's whim, to make life uncomfortable for foreign corporations on its shores, while cosseting its own companies that have close ties to the government.
And, sadly, Obama, Brown, and other western leaders just play along, making comments like "we mustn't go down the seductive but damaging path of protectionism", not realising that their largest trading partner has already run gleefully down the path of protectionism and the west has just been too blind to notice.
Also known as producing and shuffling paper. :-)
But seriously, I've heard your argument since 1975. "We're losing the low-value grunt work. The high-dollar brain work will still be here."
Except it didn't work out like that. We lost manufacturing. We've also lost research. The simple fact is when you're facing a labor pool of four billion desperate people with little-to-no-civil-rights and the same genetic possibilities as you, you're not going to compete on quality alone.
Your argument -- "They ain't never gunna be as smart as we are" -- has already been put to the test. It failed. The opposing viewpoint -- "It's a race to the bottom" -- has already been proven.
I'm just hoping we can pull up short of impact.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."