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US Gov't Orders 73,000 Private Websites Offline
joeszilagyi sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"... according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities. Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months, but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. ... Due to the fact that the authorities aren't sharing information and BurstNet are sworn to secrecy, it is proving almost impossible to confirm the exact reason why Blogetery has been completely taken down. The owner does, however, admit to handling many copyright-related cease and desists in the past, albeit in a timely manner as the DMCA requires."
The difference is, we are talking about the incident right now.
Mark my words. This is only the beginning of high-profile shutdowns.
The nest has been stirred and the wasps are now out in full force.
There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel.
You cannot get by with stuff like this without angering a lot of people.
Enough angry constituents and things will start to change.
Lets just hope for the best as that's all we can really do.
~The roAm
I'll grant that the US does bad things, but when you say things like "just as bad" as China you're basically saying "I am viewing the world in an over-stark black-and-white manner and am thoroughly incapable of understanding nuance, and willfully oblivious to any differing *degrees* of badness".
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Twist it how you want to, but the fact remains that both countries act like assholes and US is in the same level.
Oh my. There differences are many. For starters, the quantity blocked in China versus what could be considered blocked in the United States. In the United States, this sort of thing happens in isolated cases for criminal reasons and the end result is that the website might be vindicated. Point me to one case in China that ended up where the government was wrong. I'm waiting. At least YouTube was vindicated by the government against Viacom. There's some semblance of justice in the United States with regards to blocking websites. In China, it's a bizarre "unharmonious" label or anti-PRC speech that gets you blocked (and oftentimes worse than that).
I could not disagree more with your analogy.
I'm guessing users were trading child porn or the owner wasn't handling his taxes correctly. His user name in the forums is a marketing site between the US and Canada. I'm guessing he could have been pulling down big ad money and not reporting it correctly between the two countries. Hosting websites is a business and businesses always get into trouble. When there's money involved, there's lawyers. And with lawyers come lawsuits and with lawsuits come temporary injunctions.
My work here is dung.
Labeling people as enemy combatants and detaining them without trial sucks and is deplorable. I'd be at a total loss for what to do if I, or someone I cared for, was in that situation. But comparing what happens to a relatively small group of people (GITMO detainees) and what happens to the entire population of China (freedom of speech/access to information) are again, in two totally different leagues. I'm not in any way suggesting I support, let alone tolerate GITMO, but we're talking apples and oranges.
What you have to understand about China is that their government is an expression of their religious philosophies. They believe that social order is a moral expression, and something worth dying for:
In Confucianism, human beings are teachable, improvable and perfectible through personal and communal endeavour especially including self-cultivation and self-creation. A main idea of Confucianism is the cultivation of virtue and the development of moral perfection. Confucianism holds that one should give up one's life, if necessary, either passively or actively, for the sake of upholding the cardinal moral values of ren and yi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism
In America, we have a culture that values liberty, which has become quite distorted in modern times. We've also retained some very puritan ideas, which is why nipples are somehow more offensive than gun violence. More recently, our only main moral metric has become profit.
This instance illustrates the point perfectly. Mose Chinese, if begrudgingly, accept the government's right to censor their speech so that the social order is maintained. Most Americans accept the government's right to censor free speech in the interest of profit.
So, if you want to stop the march to DRM and the loss of basic rights in the face of corporate rights to profit, you're going to have to convince fellow Americans that profit isn't the only thing that matters. Good luck with that.
In the US, you are free to criticize the US president publicly. In China, you are also free to criticize the US president publicly. See, they have an equal amount of free speech!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This happened about a week ago. The owner of the single server (that's right, it was all on one single server, with no backups) posted to WebHostingTalk.com to complain because BurstNet wouldn't violate the government's order to keep quiet.
The authorities ordered BurstNet to take the server offline for what appeared to be very, very serious violations. Based on BurstNet's demeanor and seriousness when asked about the issue, it could be anything from national security to child porn. BurstNet also appears to have been hit with a gag order, as they've only made one (perhaps two) public comments on the situation, and absolutely refuse to make any more announcements.
Don't take my word for it - read up on the situation at the original WHT thread (which is now closed).
Labeling people as enemy combatants and detaining them without trial sucks and is deplorable. I'd be at a total loss for what to do if I, or someone I cared for, was in that situation. But comparing what happens to a relatively small group of people (GITMO detainees) and what happens to the entire population of China (freedom of speech/access to information) are again, in two totally different leagues. I'm not in any way suggesting I support, let alone tolerate GITMO, but we're talking apples and oranges.
The point is we are doing the very things we say we are against when other nations do them.
If terrorists can drive the US government to abandon its principles and find clever ways to justify it, then that's a victory for those terrorists. It's a real shame, for they do not deserve any victory of any sort.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
In China, if you say the wrong things, you can be arrested and then executed. That simply does not happen in the US. There IS a definite difference.
Don't take me for some cheerleader of the US. I'm horrified by other abuses, like warrantless wiretaps and rendition... but that has nothing to do with a real China vs. US rights comparison.
There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Here's a time saving summary of about 90% of the posts here today for those who don't feel like doing them one by one:
I haven't the vaguest idea what actually happened here, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the fascist/conservative/liberal/communist/megacorps/illuminati/mole-people have usurped our freedom once again by taking down a half a billion websites that hosted nothing but honest discourse that they, the aforementioned fascist/conservative/liberal/communist/megacorps/illuminati/mole-people don't want YOU to read. Clearly, the U.S. is as bad as China/Soviet Russia/Somalia/Cuba/The Romulan Empire/The Sith/Microsoft, and any ideas that you live in a free society stem from the idea that you're stupid and just another sheeple being led about by the nose by THE MAN. If, somehow, it turns out that the server in question was hosting Child Pornography/Snuff Films/how-to guides to build Nuclear Weapons/Disney Movies, you can safely assume that those things were just planted in order to steal your freedom, except that you didn't have any, so it's just there to steal your imaginary sense of freedom. Since this sense of freedom was imaginary, it's just Imaginary Property anyway, and couldn't have been stolen from you in the first place, so really, nothing of value was lost. I know all this because years ago I threw out my TV because it only showed mindless pablum like American Idol, and worse yet, they make you watch ads, so now I download American Idol on Bit-torrent instead and watch it on my computer, which is inherently better than watching it on TV, so I'm smarter than you. Something about Old People In Korea, Natalie Portman Naked and Petrified, and Hot Grits. In conclusion, in Soviet Amerikkka, websites view you, and this is probably all Steve Jobs' fault.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
We're deep enough into this thread where this may not be read, but allow me to offer my view.
Marriage has been for years a way to ensure an equal distribution of males to females. Attraction develops from ancient rites of selection which favored those that were stronger, faster, and more likely to survive. However, as a requirement for society to develop, we suddenly need "experts" in various fields not directly connected to survival -- i.e. the person good at farming may not be "attractive", the person who knows how to predict the weather may not be "attractive", and so forth. We'll call these "beta mates", and under a non-rigorous system they would simply never mate, and therefore have much less reason to participate in society -- depriving it of their expertise.
There is another factor, as well. Historically, it has been shown that in unstructured environments, a greater number of females mated than males. The deduction to be made is that females will flock to a male they consider attractive, accepting the presence of other mates in exchange for the higher attraction and potentially stronger offspring. That we don't see this as often nowadays is precisely because of the point I'm about to make:
Structured monogamous marriage is a method of distributing males and females equally, and provides all mates ("alpha" and "beta") with a reward for participating in society -- the "alphas" benefit from the additional expertise brought by the "betas", and the "betas" have a very high chance of successful mating. This was for quite some time enforced through arranged marriage, and I would even make the argument that arranged marriage is what made civilization possible.
Polygamy would lead, ultimately, to alpha flocking again, and greatly reduce the encouragement for beta experts to contribute meaningfully to society. I would further argue that we have begun to see the effects of this in the USA with the considerable reduction in the sanctity of marriage and a (I would postulate) corresponding drop in technological leadership worldwide.
No need. It's called commercial pop-culture. The beauty of it is that everyone gets it beforehand, like you, practically from birth.
You don't see what is right before your eyes. You think that being able to post drivel on blogs is a showcase of freedom. We have among the worst education, medical care, and retirement policies in the industrialized world yet you exclude it from the discussion. We have a deep recession thanks to tyrants and their politician-minions, and you exclude it. We are fighting "The War on Drugs" and "The War on Terror" for the sole purpose of having tyrants loot our society side-by-side with drug traffickers and the financiers of Sunni Islamic terrorism, and you exclude it. We happily allow immigrants to come in and work as slave labor, then do everything to punish them and deny them services they have already paid for via the taxes withheld from their paychecks, and you exclude that as well from the discussion. But Oh My! We can post whatever we want on Slashdot and HuffPost and thousands of other forgettable sites! That proves we are free!
Wake the fuck up.