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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."
OK, here are your standard template responses:
China hits like a girl.
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....
The next obvious move for Google is to launch their own satellites and provide free satellite internet access for everyone in the world.
I remember when reading cyberpunk novels felt like escapism.
:T
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
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.
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.
As any Slashdot Libertarian will tell you, corporations are more efficient than governments(and this is often true, though neither so often nor so dramatically as the Slashdot Libertarians would have it).
And that, in short, is why clever governments tend to try to shift much of the implementation work on to the corporations. China may be ostensibly communist; but they aren't morons, and they follow this pattern. To a nontrivial extent, the greatest triumph of the "Great Firewall" is not the ability to block content(at which it is rather mediocre); but the ability to block particular companies. User studies consistently show that even minor inconveniences(delays of a few seconds, little site usability glitches, and the like) deter consumers on the web. Being put on the "Great Firewall"'s hit list would definitely qualify as an inconvenience to any web-based business. Nice site you have there, wouldn't want anything to umm, come between, you and your customers...
That's the real trick. If you have leverage over the companies, they will be oh so careful to toe the line(and if the line isn't clear, they'll just toe extra carefully). The "Great Firewall" gives leverage over web-based companies. Wireless telcomms are, presumably, beholden for spectrum and tower siting permissions, and they know it(presumably, there are fat state and military comms contracts, as well).
If you try to emulate the East German model of "Hey, let's have something like half the population working, at least informally, for state intelligence" you'll spend so much of your GDP on guns that your people will run out of butter and turn the guns on you. That just doesn't work all that well, medium to long term. However, if you create a system where there is real money to be made, just by following a few little political rules, suddenly the profit-seekers will go from being your enemies to being your hatchetmen. Any successful police state will work in this fashion(or be literally starving and falling apart, I'm looking at your DPRK..)
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.
Wong wong wong... I mean wrong.
China had a republic for a few years after the end of the Qing dynasty (1912-1949 to be exact.) Had they stayed with it, this conversation probably would not even be happening right now.
The revolution was violent sure... But far less people died overthrowing the Qing than have been killed by the Communist Government in even the last 20 years (Uygurs, Tibetans, Zhuang, Falun Gong, etc. have all been victimized by the government in all manner of ways including straight up murder.)
China's current political stability is a ruse, nothing more, you go into southern China (Guangxi, Yunnan) and it's basically the wild west right now.
I lived in Yangshuo (Guangxi) for almost three years, and Beijing for one year, and lost count of how many times I saw government personal of one for or the other behaving like heshehui (mafia.) I can elaborate more if people care, the point is, the China's government is hurting its people.
Google isn't exactly doing right by them, but at least they're taking a moral stand.