Slashdot Mirror
US Gov't Pushing News Through China's Great Firewall
eldavojohn writes "The US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors has revealed in a completed FOIA request the development, testing and planned use of Feed Over E-mail (FOE) to push news through China's firewall. This FOIA request (PDF) indicates that the US government is interested in making sure Chinese people receive up-to-date news, and it wants to expand the arsenal of anti-censorship tools (for news at least). The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG."
Does making it FOSS make pushing one countries point of view make it right?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
F.O.E.! F.O.E.!
> The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG.
Even in your internets... FOE
Damn you Mongolians! Stop breaking my Wall!
up-to-date news?, lol.
Won't work - it's GPLv3, so all of the Chinese citizens with Tivos won't be able to get the news.
Just tell them to free up political speech or we'll stop buying their lead-filled shit. Let's stop being pussies.
Table-ized A.I.
I just had a quick glance at that rather link packed story. The FOE project on Google Code has no obvious surprises. I scanned that PDF of the FOIA request. Who/ what is the entity in the document header: Governmentattic dot org? Sorry, I probably misspelled that.
There's actually a tradition of this sort of thing, I think. E.g. like listening to the Voice of America on shortwave radio when outside the U.S.A. and starved for English-language news. Although that isn't quite the same as it is our one's own government getting news to citizens who are overseas. Might the signal transmissions be blocked so they won't be received in China? Or is that only in movies? Seems like it would work, for those who wanted to listen, and could do so without fear of reprisal....
tempus fugit
Yeah, 'cos the US is such a good source of international news...
And what is the obsession with trying to make China a mini-US?
Just tell them to free up political speech or we'll stop buying their lead-filled shit. Let's stop being pussies.
It's a nice fantasy. Unfortunately, it'll never happen - it's impossible. Scenario:
Senator Blow gets a bunch of other Senators and Congressmen on board. Behind closed doors:
The Treasury will say, "Um Senator, The Chinese have trillions of our debt. They own our asses and if we stopped trading with them, they'd sell the debt and do very bad things to our economy. Besides, you need them to finance the votes you buy with Government programs (Republican or Democrat: it works with either.) Sure, they'd lose billions but they'd recover quickly."
Second phase of pressure on Senator:
The Chinese Outlet Store (Walmart) and every electronics company including Slashdot's beloved Apple will say, "Senator, we own your ass. Your constituents want their electronic gadgets and cheap big screen TVs to watch their TV shows and crap news. STFU or you'll be out of a job next election cycle."
Congressmen and Senators will all pretty much STFU and start up on some mundane bullshit issue that is spoon fed to them by the pundits on TV and AM radio they'll pump on those big screen TVs. The American public will lick it up like the mindless sheep they are and get all outraged over bogus non-important issues and live they're little cog mindless lives. TVs, religion, and fast food is the bread and circuses for the 2sst Century.
Why is the GPL v3 instead of BSD / public domain?
As long as the US is giving information to citizens of other countries, it's anti censorship. But woe-to-him who gives information to US citizens that the rest of the world already knows, thats treason and terrorism, right?
It's "Hong Meiling", not "China".
that american govt is so sensitive about freedom of information of chinese people, whereas trying to censor/suppress anything that wikileaks discloses about american government, to american people ?
question was rhetorical. it is ironic.
Read radical news here
US government will now feed them information that Chinese government no longer has enough credential to get through. A new era of brainwashing.
It's probably fitting that one of China's foes is doing this.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I wonder if they're pushing WikiLeaks?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Ironic would imply this things are just happening because. These are not accidents.
It is hypocrisy at its worst, not irony. And could even be considered an act of war, since it's pushing US-favoring propaganda on another sovereign country.
The US government's moral superiority is utterly non-existant. China's too, yes, but at least they don't kill people outside their borders on a massive scale.
http://www.GovernmentAttic.org has published a lot of other useful stuff also. Has anyone looked at what's there?
Some American official: I know what to do -- we should SPAM them with propaganda!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This is a natural extension of Voice of America in the internet age.
We wouldn't want to have China believing in global warming, would we?
The problem I have with the US's zeal to "export democracy" is that they go so overzealous with it that there's now a shortage of it at home.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps the Chinese should try to push through the high crime rates of Mexicans and Blacks that the American government is trying to hide from its white citizens.
I can only imagine that the US is trying very hard to make itself look good in the eyes of the Chinese people. There is otherwise no incentive for the US to push "freedom" in China. The last thing the US needs right now is a new wave of "free" Chinese immigrants. All hail China for the time being. For they somehow manage to keep over one billion people in check an out MY backyard. Not get off my lawn!
Or you can just use Alta-Vista or any other not-so-well-known news provider. That's what I did last time I was over there, in China that is. I was reading a lot of African newspapers online as well.
All it requires is a little imagination people. These are dullard Communists who specialize in IT who set the Great Firewall up.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Is the presumption that the US has no censorship or perhaps the US does such a skilled job that we do not think we have any?
While I don't agree with the Great Firewall of China, I also think the Yank Goverment need to keep their nose out of it as well! Where do they get off pushing their POV into place where it is obviously not wanted.
I'm puzzled how this works. the description does not make sense to me:
"FOE is different from the average feed reader in that it's able to fetch content from censored sites without requiring the user to visit those sites to set up the feed. Once FOE fetches the content, it encrypts it and sends it via e-mail much like an attached file. The user's client gets decrypts the feed once it's arrived and displays it on the local machine. Ho adds that FOE should be easy for activists to set up and maintain because it uses existing infrastructure."
Is there some proxy that does the encryption? How does the site know to send an e-mail. very confusing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The U.S. government's reaction to Wikileaks and its current attacks on domain names of supposed P2P distributors has made any efforts against China by it lose all credibility in my eyes. If anything, this only supports government efforts by nations like China, etc. to censor their Internet as they now have additional evidence that the U.S. is trying to feed propaganda to its citizens and waging information war. I love the way its called "news" - lets be real, this is U.S. propaganda coming through.
I don't like the idea of the Chinese firewall and censorship, but seeing how western media outlets control such a large proportion of information, or propaganda being released on the tubes - I can understand why they are concerned and why they do it.
Its not right, but neither is what the U.S. government and its allies are doing either - if they would just let things run their course and ideas spread freely- eventually we will all come to conclusions on how things should work and what system is best for the people.
For those in power - whether they are the corporate capitalist elite, or the authoritarian opportunists - it won't be anything we have today - so keep trying to silence us - you are witnessing the beginning of a worldwide revolution coming as more people start to wakeup to what is going on.
The only article I've found so far that explains this mystery is this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6028780/What-is-the-Feed-over-Email-system.html
But this seems to say it requires a special server. In which case it seems like this is just an encoded version of the 2008 service "feed-my-email". it still has to have a special server that the user must communicate with.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They had "success" in testing simply because nobody is using this. There are thousands other ways to do the same if only you and the few recipients know the route. Chinese government does not worry the information getting it, today you can read CNN or many other English sites in China unrestricted; they worry the information being spread to wide population and cause social unrest, like in Egypt. If it can ever be popular among to millions of people, say a lot more than the number of people using proxies or reading English news over there, they can find way to shut it down and it will be shut it down.
Woohooo! This is the US that I love.
Hope it works as news post explained
Have they asked Julian Assange for help? I Think the US should have hired him years ago... I'm sure he could get information across the great firewall of china back to the rest of the world as well.
V1@GRA
Since the Americans are obviously doing this as an altruistic operation to bring justice and prosperity to an obviously destitute China, wouldn't this just one day make China a formidable competition...oh wait a minute, China is already a formidable competition! In which case I fail to see the logic of trying to "help" somebody who is doing much better than you are.
Last time I offered business advice to the bank holding my mortgage, they told me to get lost and jacked my rates by 20 points.
Agree, and the go-to article on this is always James Fallows' "The Connection Has Been Reset" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/-ldquo-the-connection-has-been-reset-rdquo/6650/ Well worth a read if you're interested in this issue. Short version: The literally Orwellian internal censorship is so effective that the government can shut down almost any unpleasant message from spreading beyond a plugged-in elite (the Chinese equivalent of Slashdot readers). Fetishizing breaching the external firewall is just one small length of pipe needed to reach even the new urban middle class of Chinese.
Isn't that a violation of the DMCA :)
i mean seriously, lets just call it what it is: A daily newsletter
how long have these been around for? (yes, even filtering by certain content)
rss in basic terms provides a list of summaries and links (plus dates) of news
a subscriber's rss reader will periodically check the feed for updates
(that is, has the xml in the rss changed)
FoE dumps those updates into an email and sends it to a user
when there's nothing new it doesn't send an email
the only thing different i see is the email is getting encrypted
so seriously. wtf is going on with the stupid FoE name?
btw. from the project's homepage:
http://code.google.com/p/foe-project/
Technically, FOE is built on top of SMTP and work on most email servers as long as the user has access to POP3 and SMTP.
which is fine except for the current (and only) issue with the project:
http://code.google.com/p/foe-project/issues/detail?id=1
Issue 1: GFW of China censors SMTP transfer
Any computer with an SSH server installed can act as a SOCKS5 proxy.. Seems like it would be somewhat easier to just set up a few of those and allow the Chinese people free roam of the Internet. (of course then they could learn all sorts of things not endorsed by the US government, that can't be good :P)
Comcast here in norcal carries several on basic cable, and you can get more in a package, not just CCTV International.
Isn't this illegal computer trespass? You know, exactly like Palin's email "hacker" and McKinnon wrt DoD?
The Chinese government has said "Do not" and then the US goes and hacks access through. Now China will have to spend BILLIONS fixing all the machines so compromised, therefore the people in the US doing this will have to be extradited.
Yes?
I am not sure if they understand the implications, but let Obama tighten the bonds first before you go muck about in someone else's backyard and ruin not only diplomatic ties, but also alienate a nation that is already control hungry, and needs any excuse to bombard us again with cyber activity.