Slashdot Mirror
China Pledges To Step Up Internet Administration
angry tapir writes "China says it will step up administration of the Internet this year while continuing to build out the country's fiber-optic backbone and expand broadband access for consumers. Internet administration was mentioned in a keynote report on the work of the government to China's parliamentary session. It underlined the importance of culture and noted the need to 'strengthen the development of civic morality' and 'speed up the establishment of moral and behavioral norms that carry forward traditional Chinese virtues.' The pledge comes amid revelations that DDoS attacks against WordPress last week allegedly originated from China."
Or in other words: suppress the flow of information that might threaten CCP rule, and push more magical-thinking hogwash created by the CCP down the people's throat. Just like every other "morality" or "virtue" rule the CCP has pushed in the past 30+ years.
Chinese virtues as in blocking and tracking what people post?
Why is it that when a attack originates in China, people immediately think it was ordered by the chinese government, but if it originates from Turkey -- not so much?
Perhaps because we don't understand the Chinese too well?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
>regulation
>Internet
The Internet is nothing but a collection of autonomous systems (AS), with China representing but a few such AS, with the Internet composed of all the AS of the world which all choose to exchange data in a mutually acceptable format, called the Internet Protocol. It works because the partners agree to work together towards these goals.
When they don't, de-peering occurs, and people loose access to parts of the Internet. (Keep in mind most servers that most the world uses are in North America, Europe, and Japan...)
So, China is limited in it's abilities, such as forking the DNS. Which would be AWESOME because hopefully DNS would die and be replaced with something better. Anything but this horribly centralized system we have now (ICANN), which is the most common reason people's Internet "goes down".
Yeah, right....
If politically, the US is a nation of lawyers, then, as a single-party state, the PROC is effectively a nation of administrators. The US Congress might debate about network neutrality, but in China all issues pertaining to the Internet are viewed as problems of administration (management). China, Inc. makes more sense than the old Japan, Inc.
The PC World article references a downloadable PDF translation of Premier Wen's report to the National People's Congress from the Wall Street Journal. The part about administering the Internet comes from a section titled "Vigorously enhancing cultural development".
The word "administration" occurs at least 15 times throughout the document, chiefly in the construct "social administration" and goes well with an image of Wen as some sort of company president or CEO delivering his annual stockholders' (party) report.
Geek note: The ~3 MB PDF appears to be a series of scanned pages overlaid upon the OCR'ed text version of the document. So you can actually cut and paste the text.
Isn't it funny that China's government recognizes the role the internet plays in culture? And wants to direct it in a positive way that benefits everyone in society? The entire idea is anathema to Westerners, isn't it? China does face some very real language problems and separatist tendencies, Mandarin is the common language that glues all of society together. Without a common language, the country would fragment along ethnic and regional lines and it would be back to the warlord civil war era from the 1920s. The government doesn't want this to happen and is enlightened enough to try to keep the country together in order to save millions of lives. Altruistic, eh? In China, the government really is made up of The Smart People. Not just anyone can join the CCP. It's rather like the US State Department or maybe Harvard, where you have to be really smart or have family connections to get in. If you're a redneck (laobaixing) who loves your country and wants to serve they'll just sneer at you, ridicule your hillbilly Mandarin accent that doesn't sound like a newscaster, slam the door in your face, and tell you to join the Army like all good peasants and hicks are supposed to do. Because if there is one cross-cultural idea that all The Smart People agree on worldwide, it's that lesser intellects (or those not from good families) should be ridiculed and rejected from having their ideas seriously considered in government.
As opposed to, say, America, where the government's idea of benefiting everyone is running up a $223 billion deficit in March 2011 alone, more than all of 2007. The role the internet plays? The internet allows Americans to utterly and completely convince themselves that they live in a real-live functioning fascist police state. And then use that same internet to organize protests against their own government. Inconvenient truths are a bitch, ain't they?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Wait for the Chinese population to be as economically dependent on e-commerce as we are (which will happen very soon with widespread broadband availability). That will make it seem very unreasonable for the government to outlaw SSL without a major outcry from its populace. After that, the world should gradually move to make http over SSL the norm rather than the exception. Webmasters of the world, I'm looking at you. Let's see if the "great firewall" can handle that proficiently.
What gets me, is how easily American international corporations and businesses - (think "big box" and "dollar stores" among other Importers) bed down with these totalitarian statist "one party rule" Chinese thugs. I cannot think of a single instance, whereby the Chinese Mandarin Rulers in Beijing have "lightened up" a little; not on Tibet; not on Hong Kong; not on Japan; not on Southeast Asia; not on the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Far East; and not on Taiwan, to name just a few concerns. Why we Americans do not treat Mainland China, like Fidel Castro's Cuba, or the Ayatollah's Iran, is beyond my ability to comprehend the "realpolitik" of our foreign policy and MBA business smarts. They have brand new Buick factories; we have Flint Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, and now, Madison, Wisconsin. When will the U.S. Dollar, and American political, financial, and business leaders "smarten up"? I hope it's not too late, when they do.
MDelCamp1 on YouTube - check out my PlayLists there.
From the excerpt:
"China says [...] and expand broadband access for consumers."
Am I the only idiot alarmed by the gradual replacement of "user" by "consumer" in current language about the Internet? Even on tech sites like Slashdot?
...Falungong and a new revolution in China, shooting down the China Communist Party. Let's start a new protest in May, and let's call it Peony Revolution.
* sit and watch how long /. is blocked *
What's next, they will print out revolutionary booklets and hand them out to the masses? The day the party falls I'm goign to have a party myself... a different kind of party of course.
There's absolutely no hard evidence that these attacks have been orchestrated by the Chinese government. As noted in the article, the actual source of DDOS attacks is very hard to pin down. The various hosts carrying out the attack may be based in one country, whilst the people directing it are in another country altogether. The article points out that those computers who get infected and become involuntary members of a bot-net are those which, among other things, might be running counterfeit software such as an operating system.Counterfeit software is very popular in China, and it is the most populous country on the planet, so it is fertile ground for recruiting members of a bot-net.
I read that as "stop up internet administration". I think my version is more likely to come to pass.
Soon they'll have Gb/s+ internet access to all those people, now if they could only figure out how to FEED THEM. But no, great job guys. Maybe if they're spending so much time online playing MMMMMORPG's, they won't notice they're starving to death. If only you could stream a bowl of rice...
After all, once they shut down NPR and PBS the only open and uncontrolled source of information that is readily accessible to all of the American people will be the 'net...and since the right doesn't like facts and the truth obscuring their message...their manipulation, that is...
Well, if you're a gambling man I think you could call an eventual attempt by the Republicans to speed up the establishment of moral and behavioral norms that carry forward traditional American virtues ("virtues" which will be defined and redefined as required by that little cadre of wealthy conservatives who own the Republicans) a "sure thing".
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"