Slashdot Mirror
Creator of China's Great Firewall Pelted With Shoes
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Chinese police are seeking a man who said he threw eggs and shoes at the architect of China's 'great firewall', the world's most sophisticated and extensive online censorship system as his claims were cheered by many internet users, in a reflection of growing anger among them about increasingly stringent controls. The office of Fang Binxing, known as the father of the great firewall, denied the attack had happened, but Associated Press said police were sent to the university to investigate a shoe-throwing incident targeting Fang, citing an officer at the Luojiashan public security bureau. The Twitter user who claimed to have pelted him, who posts under the pseudonym @hanunyi, wrote: 'The egg missed the target. The first shoe hit the target. The second shoe was blocked by a man and a woman.' Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him as 'a running dog for the government' and 'the enemy of netizens'. Meanwhile admirers of the shoe attacker showered the anonymous young man with promises of everything from Nike trainers to replace his lost footwear, to iPads, sex and jobs."
The torrentfreak crowd have often noted that measures designed to crack down on filesharing also have serious ramifications for privacy and free speech. While their goals may be somewhat selfish, they are also looking out for all internet users, even those who don't pirate.
And yet I'm sure you still want to watch our TV programs, movies, listen to our music and install our software.
Look, I'm all against egregious uses of government against innocent people. But Torrent Freaks is 99.9% designed to facilitate piracy. And unless you have a plan for a business model where you can still get $80m projects developed and executed for you then I'm not going to bemoan on principle someone wanting to profit from their efforts. IP while being free to copy isn't free to produce. There are real tangible costs to producing art--often very high costs when you're talking about media. A kickstarter page and $50k isn't going to create an episode of Game of Thrones.
Whether these websites actually hosted material might make a legal distinction but let's be real fucking honest for a moment, when I got KickassTorrents or PirateBay, I'm doing so with the intent to break the law. Now I think the law should punish you like a parking ticket or speeding--both of which I also do--but I don't take some high and mighty bullshit immature whining fest because The Man impeded my freedom to speed. If I was speeding... I was speeding. I'm going to try and avoid cops and do everything my power to avoid getting a ticket but I'm not going to say the US Government Pol Pot for enforcing a principle which I do actually agree with. I agree in principle that the city needs to charge for parking. And I've crossed my fingers before and ran into a store because I didn't want to bother walking back to the meter to feed it.
We'll happily stop censoring the world when the world pays for all of our products that they use.
Aside from just a question of taste, I also think you make those of us opposed to the MPAA's actions look like loons by equating the two
Fraudulent DMCA notices are being used to suppress unpopular speech, so no, you are a loon if you don't see the parallel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I live in China and access Slashdot frequently. I've never seen it blocked. Most foreign news sites are rarely blocked in China, and even negative articles about China's government are usually accessible. The exception is news sites with a lot of articles in Chinese, those are often blocked. And around certain important dates some news sites like the BBC may be inaccessible for several days.
Manufacture in China