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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.
> The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG.
Even in your internets... FOE
Damn you Mongolians! Stop breaking my Wall!
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
Great, now I have to go listen to some Touhou. I bet you that's censored in China as well.
Why is the GPL v3 instead of BSD / public domain?
Except the Chinese aren't consumers, that's the biggest problem with their economy.
http://www.mhall119.com
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?
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
i think u mean
"GREAT, now i remember i GET to play touhou for 20 hours strait. i bet that WOULD NEVER be censored in china as only evil people would censor touhou"
warning pointless sig
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/
That's not really a problem. I know that it's popular to claim that consumer spending is important, but that's only in countries like the US where we're pillaging foreign countries for wealth, what little work is left tends to be service sector. An ideal economy would be balanced such that there's as much being produced as there is being consumed and that increases in efficiency would lead to decreases in actual work done.
This is a bit simplistic as it doesn't account for trade and that it's more efficient to raise somethings in say New Zealand and ship them to the US than it is to produce them domestically.
I wonder if they're pushing WikiLeaks?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
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.
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.
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.
With theirs? With OURS!
Because in the equation of current global economy, we're the consumers, they're the producers. What people didn't figure out apparently is that to consume, you need money, to have money, you need to earn it, to earn it, you need a job and for a job something has to be produced HERE.
It baffles me how nothing was learned from the depression of the 30s, which had pretty much the same reason: Good produced cheaply by people who cannot afford them due to wages that did not allow them, a saturated market with those that could and a shrinking number who could. Add a dash of wild stock speculation (also amazing that nothing has changed in that respect, btw, we don't even have any sensible laws against it yet), and welcome to the 1930s.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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 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.
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
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.
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)
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.