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."
At least the Chinese do something about it. Unlike Americans who sit down watching tv and drinking beer and bitching on slashdot (and never doing anything about it) while their government not only censors their internet connections, but the whole worlds.
This is why Americans are so fucking hypocrites. Do whatever you want on your own land, but leave rest of the world alone. We don't want your bullshit around here in Europe, and the rest of the world.
...why not do the same to the people who have been restricting all their other freedoms, too?
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
The administrator's defense: The university could not access twitter from behind the firewall!
Hey mate, spare a sig?
The Guardian and others are in a tough spot, as print journals have less and less income and are trying to cover bigger and bigger stories (like... China). While the event posted here may or may not have happened, a blogger I read regularly, Adam Minter (www.shanghaiscrap.com) has made mincemeat of almost every such story I've read in the western media during the past two years (latest case, that China censored Bob Dylan's concert there - apparently not, but the story was reprinted extensively). I've travelled a lot in China, often with officials, and would say that most Chinese government officials are as far from the source of censorship itch as we are here on /. I don't know if the answer is for the West to stop reporting on "twitter posts" by people who claim to have "thrown shoes" at "firewalls", and I personally know the Chinese government "command and control" is awful and stupid and a painful thing to watch... Still, having read dozens of these stories, I think we need to expose that (a) the Western Press often does not know what it is talking about and (b) is just as often making it up as it goes along.
Gently reply
I'm an American who has lived in China for 7 years.
Most ordinary people in China believe the firewall is only for blocking pornography and dangerous information from terrorists. They don't believe political discussion is being blocked. In fact, there are many blogs and social networking sites in China full of political discussion, which are of course censored, but it is only a few sensitive topics that will be removed, so most users will never notice the censorship.
From the comments in this thread, it seems like most US internet users (even the savvy users on Slashdot) likewise believe that US web censorship is only for blocking IP infringement, and never for censoring political discussion.
So it would seem that Chinese and US internet users are equally misinformed and complacent about their own governments' internet censorship.
Manufacture in China
The so-called "filesharers" are not members of the copyleft movement, which seek to use copyright laws to push their idea of copyright equality. Pretty much like socialists, hopefully of the democratic stripe. The "filesharers" are more like copy libertarians, who don't want any copyright laws or at least want to restrict the copyright regime to industrial grade infringement. They are like the pro-gun lobby who at most want laws restricting the ownership of battle grade weapons like machine guns or rocket-propelled grenades, or the pro-drugs lobby who want the freedom to get stoned or high on low-grade narcotics and stimulants.