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China Pushes Real Name System For Online Games
oxide7 writes "Starting from August 1, Chinese Internet users will have to register using their real names for playing online games, China Daily reported on Saturday. The regulation, issued by the Ministry of Culture on June 22, is said to be part of a nationwide campaign to improve management of the virtual gaming industry and protect minors from unwholesome content. It applies to all multiplayer role-playing and social networking games."
Such as democracy and human rights?
This is definately not about "privacy" or "security". We all know what is the reason for such law, so it should be tagged appropriately.
Now no politician in the US can even consider supporting it!
"Ladies and gentleman, my opponent has come out in support of policies implemented in polluting, human rights abusing, communist, totalitarian, job-stealing China! Are you going to let him bring that to our shores?"
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
How is this different from the current state of things in the US, where you so often have to register with your own credit card? That seems like it'll cover virtually all cases. Not that it doesn't really suck that players can mostly be tracked down to their real identities or anything, but that's a different story, I think.
Exactly! People think China's government doesn't care about its citizens or listen to its people, but it's simply not true. They pay great attention to what people say, and responds immediately if anyone expresses discontent.
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of the children, it's China we're talking about here, it's not like it's some country that would steer online information in their own favor.
Like the USA, it's also not a country that would trust parents to decide what is appropriate for their children, supervise them as needed, and gradually equip them to deal with the online world just as they do for the offline world. No, for that parents are thoroughly inadequate. What you need is a large, faceless, unaccountable state bureaucracy with lots of political power. Then and only then are the children safe. Taking over the role of all parents is surely better than dealing on a case-by-case basis with the small minority of parents who neglect their children.
Isn't that the message behind every governmental action that uses "for the children" as its basis?
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
If you steal my loot in a raid I'll know your real name, and with a bit more googling everything there is to know about you:
Many of the vast unwashed masses on the net as spectacularly naive about their privacy. Take Gabrielle Romney, ex-lover of a right-wing political party figure in Australia. She wrote a letter to "The Age" bawling that they published her photo: "I am dismayed by the prominent publication of my photograph accompanying the article. To be targeted by a stalker is invasive, intimidating, and terrifying. As a private individual, one of the most debilitating aspects is the constant and unwelcome intrusion into one's life. Publishing my photograph has been a further violation of my privacy and dignity."
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/man-sent-more-than-100-sometimes-offensive-messages-to-exlover-20100726-10slv.html
Fair enough, but type her name into "Google" and you'll find yourself staring at her mug in facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabrielle-Romney/528810959
Let me repeat what she said: "As a private individual, one of the most debilitating aspects is the constant and unwelcome intrusion into one's life."
If you're on Facebook, you're not a private individual.
Yes, because political activists are going to be kept down and freedom of speech will be DOOOMED if I can't grief in L4D and get away with it!
We are talking about registering for an online game. I see this as a debate of public vs private space, and unfortunately I see many people trying to impose their rights to privacy in public arenas.
For example, if you are walking down the street and a photographer snaps your photo, do you really have a right to expect privacy? When you walk into a store to buy your gimp outfit, do you really expect the cashier to not see your goods as you buy it or your name when you pass them the credit card?
Why are they talking about name registration? Protecting minors from unwholesome content is mentioned. So, yes, to a certain degree they want to impose censorship. You know, maybe to prevent minors from seeing explicit gestures or language like the USA's MPAA rating system does with movies.
Also, it could be used to track down those who are socially unacceptable or political dissidents. I don't know how many times I've overheard these times of conversations in Everquest when I use to play - you know, planning protest marches or talking about the injustice of the communist system while playing dark elf females dressed in all leather armor and using whips. Yeah, if I had a nickle for every time that happened, I'd still be as broke as I am now.
My wife states a good test from private space to anyone with a bit of modesty and manners that I have expanded to the most likely shameless crowd that visits the web - namely do you feel comfortable walking around totally naked, blowing your nose, and farting all while masturbating to your favorite fetish porn? You wouldn't do this in a store, on a public street, in your back yard, or on a video chat site (unless you're on chatroulette I guess - but then you're a criminal deviant who has no respect for public space).
An MMO is not a private space unless you develop the software, buy the server, build your own dedicated network lines, and restrict who can have access to it - it is a virtual RPG store holding events. You should not expect to have any privacy there.
The only issue I would have is if they required you to use your real name for your in-game name. That would defeat the purpose of a MMORPG. However, there is nothing unreasonable about using your real name to register for the game.
One can easily find many resident IDs with the associated names on the Internet & in real life. Copy it, validate it, use it, voila.
And some service providers don't really care about all this real name shit - they just ask for a resident ID in valid format and don't bother to check whether it is associated with the name you provided. There are tools readily available for creation of fake IDs.
There's a larger picture at play here rather than some sort of supposed victimisation of china.
.. this is why articles about censorship in china garner attention, not because people like to 'pick on' china.
In South Korea the real-name rule was instituted to stop people using their anonymity to harm others through defamataion. The worst case scenario is that the aggrieved party, ie. the defamees, can bring legal suits against malicious rumour mongering. In other words it serves to empower victims, and no more than that.
To contrast, what's the worst thing that can happen to someone in China? Unfortunately china is still a country where posting the 'wrong' opinion, particularly for political matters, can have some very real-life consequences. Even posting from a pseudo-anonymous location, eg. an internet cafe, can have the police showing up within minutes of making such a post. This specific article might only speak of real-id for online gaming, ostentibly to ensure defamation doesn't happen, but the issue is that it can far too easily be the thin end of the wedge of yet another measure to stifle political dissent through the threat of physical harm. To illustrate the possible consequences, the Ghostnet report into cyberespionage highlighted the case of a tibetan in china who was convicted through evidence 'gathered' via the botnet. Clearly the noose would tighten around freedom of speech when (not if) the measure was extended beyond game forums into the internet as a whole.
Whilst individuals like yourself might not care about such measures because perhaps it doesn't affect you directly, but there's a clear danger to people who happen to live in china and have a strong social conscience
"The problem with trying to child-proof the world, is that it makes people neglect the far more important task of world-proofing the child." -- Hugh Daniel
Realistically with 1 billion people plus extremely commonly repeated, simplistic first and last names in their language, China is going to have sooooo many first and last name repeats that they still won't be able to pin this down to one unique person based on just a name in most cases. Not even close actually. Just because of how things are there compared to here, it could easily be possibly that for any given person in China, it's 100,000 times (or more) more likely that there's at least one other person named exactly that in the country compared to the probability of that happening in the US. Definitely kinda funny if you think about it.
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