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China Blocks Web Searches About Protests
itwbennett writes "China is blocking searches on Google and microblogs for Zengcheng, a city in the country's Guangdong province, where protests have erupted against local authorities. The move is part of an effort to suppress information on the rioting."
Web searches about blocking web searches about protests, as well as protests about blocking web searches about protests. Web searches about protests about blocking web searches about protests are allowed, though.
Historically, peasant revolts have been the largest threat to whichever incarnation the Chinese government is in. It looks like the Chinese Communist Party has learned its lesson well.
Beautiful Zengcheng. Nothing bad has ever happened here. Much happiness to you.
Man, if I had fifty cents for every time I heard that...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So this is what businesses want our country to be like - where businesses can roam freely, and ask the government to cut coverage to (and search of) protests?
This is what we encourage when we send work offshore to these kind of countries. No thanks.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
P2P has no central server, so there is no way to shut it down, past coming to your house and imprisoning you for using it.
Instead of a central server, you'd hold a list of potential servers which is everyone you connected to last time you were online. Only one out of your list needs to be online, and they'll propogate you a new list of IP addresses and ports(don't use just one port or that can be blocked too, randomize it).
Once on, you could file trade, browse the web through proxies, or chat.
I'd do this, but I don't know the Chinese language. What other goodies would you want to load into this piece of software?
God spoke to me
Or the USians.
Evil.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Nothing better to kill a peasant revolt than a company town.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I haven't heard anything about these protests on the news here in the US
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
To attract the least suspicion, I think you'd make this software look like a browser itself. Another funny side effect of this is that your ISP would have no clue which sites you visit because you'd be loading up sites for other people all the time too. Someone should just make this software in order to make it harder for governments to control their people and censor the web. I'm good at P2P, and I already wrote a Gnutella client back in the day. I knew Gnutella was the future when Napster got shutdown even never hearing about the protocol before on my own. I thought I invented it. Anyway, if any of you guys want to form an organization to write a P2P software that combats censorship, is a webbrower, is a filesharer, and proxies at a whim, I'd like to write this software with you. I can't write this on my own because I'm sort of sheltered in the knowledge of open source. I would think we'd start with an opensource webbrowser. Then we'd code a P2P filesharer to interface with it. Next we'd add proxy ability through using the P2P nodes. I can do all the P2P stuff easy myself. My problem is that I'm not good at web browsers. Is there a good C/C++ open source webbrowser we'd use. I was thinking of using the ASIO C/C++ socket library because I've written different P2P aps there. I'm kinda serious about writing this software, but only if we get a group together to do it. I mean how would we even organize?
God spoke to me
There already exist several such projects. Tor and Freenet being only two of them.
There are not the usual kinds of riots and protests in China. It's no longer peasants in the villages protesting against stolen land, pollution or corruption - these are formally relatively quiet urban workers going on multi-day riots that the government is struggling to contain and that threaten to spread everywhere the same bad conditions exist. Things like stagnant wage rates with high inflation, abusive authorities and employers, political repression, etc: article from the Guardian
It's here because, as implied by Slashdot's tagline, it's "Stuff that Matters".
Really. I mean if you're a citizen of any country where you still have some freedom, any freedom, then FUCK CHINA.
The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
John Gilmore, quoted in Time Magazine
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
...you would have 50 cents.
But would I have 50 cent or fifty cents? HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do we really encourage this behavior by outsourcing work to China? It could be argued that this helps their situation.
Sure, "our" factories over there contribute to the Chinese government's budget, but it also contributes to the overall well being of the average Chinese person. More well fed, more education, and more opportunity. I can't help but think that this encourages liberalization in the long term more than anything.
Freenet seems to be pretty on with what I was expecting I'd make so I guess I don't have to worry about it. Hey at least when I come up with ideas, they're good ideas because other people implement them. I remember before windows Instant messaging, that IM would be a good idea. I remember before MMORPGS that they'd dominate the video game market. I remember hearing about the start of ebay on Usenet and said,"If they made a website for that, it would turn into a monopoly monster"
God spoke to me
I'm going to take a controversial stand here and probably be modded into oblivion but here it goes. This is a good move by China. Why? It increases social stability at the cost of individual rights. How many groups of self-described smart people in America are trying to roll back individual freedoms in the name of "it's better our way"? After all, freedom includes the freedom to make the "wrong" choice, and this this really pisses the smart people off. After all, they're the intelligent ones and know what the correct choices are politically, and anyone who opposes them isn't a noble dissenter but (a) mistaken (b) an idiot (c) probably medically insane.
You have to understand where China is coming from with this. The first and foremost priority of the government is to hold the country together. Everyone thinks of China as a monolithic entity, but this is just plain ignorant. China is a multicultural society, and like all multicultural societies it is fundamentally unstable. Action must be taken when unrest occurs, lest it spread throughout the country and result in the horror of all Chinese: a fragmented, divided China. China experienced the warlord era in the 20th century and never wants to go back. Before that, China lost sovereignty over its own territory (foreign concessions) and that wasn't much fun either. If a few peasants need to be crushed to ensure the bad old days will never return, then so be it. These protesters are making the "wrong" choice. All the smart people agree, and it is stupidity or insanity to oppose the choices they make. In China, the smart people really do control the government without that pesky democracy interference. Wasn't there an article here recently about the high government officials all being scientists and engineers? So, the government WILL do what it thinks is necessary to ensure social stability. And to Chinese, stability is more important than progress.
Why are the people protesting? China has a long tradition of the central government having limited control over the provinces and even less control over cities, counties, and lower branches of government. Corruption is endemic. Beijing promotes reform, but local officials are powerful in their own princedoms. It's kind of like trying to reform the State Department or the CIA from the presidency. However, Beijing CAN enforce its will when it comes to clearly overriding concerns like keeping the country from splintering apart. When a few thousand laobaixing get screwed over, there's really nothing to be done. Moreover, the mandarins cheating the peasants is not a pressing national integrity concern, it's been happening in China for thousands of years. So some people in flyover territory get screwed...again, the smart people agree that this is not a problem at all and in fact is sometimes a good thing. After all, who doesn't enjoy a good redneck-bashing?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So now you think you invented Tor too?
However, it's not news. It would be news if China suddenly grew a pair and _didn't_ censor it.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
China uses a giant national proxy infrastructure to censor information about the 1989 protests! News at 11.
The only thing it really does is gives maximum freedoms to business, while giving a few trinkets to distract from the non-freedom to regular people.
Still doesn't excuse sending work there, but to do everything to undermine that government.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There is no unrest in Zengcheng, and it's all instigated by subversive foreign elements.
...is what these people are protesting against. Bad jobs are still bad even if it is the only practical option.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What are you talking about? The government, for all intents and purposes, owns these business (state sponsored). Not the other way around as found in America. You don't become head honcho of a large Chinese company without at least having some political ties back to the CCP. Either you're paying your mafia-esque dues to the CCP, or you're a bonified member of the party.
Life is not for the lazy.
To be fair, I'm sure plenty of people came up with this idea. This is why I'm against patents so much. What makes someone a special snowflake that they patent an idea that multitudes of other people probably already came up with? Yes, I never heard of Tor before. No I do not feel special for coming up with it. I just like knowing the ideas I come up with are good ones, and not just "Hamburger Earmuffs"
God spoke to me
Publishing and searching for that information is not a crime against the US, unlike China.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There's no excuse for what China does. You're using their excuses, their terminology, and their justifications. It reads like it was a scripted excuse instead of a sound justification.
All China did in 1980 was to find a way to cleanse their despotism. Seeing people like you, makes me think that it worked. Yes, that's a problem.
Unlike China, we like to still give the regular individual the chance instead of disappearing them, harvesting their organs for some Party member, and putting the family under house arrest for objecting to working conditions at the company town.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
that works against a mostly cowed authoritarian government like the US gov, the chinese government would have no problem tracking down everyone running it and shooting them, the billing their families for the investigations AND the bullet
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
More well fed, more education, and more opportunity.
More rioting too...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You can't split the two without splitting society.
Without social stability, you don't get bearable living conditions for more than the governmental apparatus. See China, North Korea, India, Vietnam, Brazil, and Russia for examples of that. These countries are split - businesses get all the freedoms to run over regular people, while regular people are silenced or disappeared for doing the same things as business.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why not use https://encrypted.google.com/ ?
I just did this search http://www.google.com/search?q=China+Riot&hl=en&newwindow=1&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images&tbs=,qdr:w and came up with plenty of hits about the supposedly blocked subject. I am in central P.R. China.
This particular claim of censorship is nothing but lies by people who aim to discredit China. Again, the story is false, as a simple test will show.
War with China is inevitable. The sooner we glass the mainland back to the stone age the better.
an ill wind that blows no good
I am a Chinese, and let me tell you what might happen to such software, just like the fate of many similar-purpose software before it:
1. Restriction of distribution: people can't easily search for it due to keyword filtering, any local or foreign links for downloading the software could be promptly made inaccessible.
2. Technical disruption: for example, set up "watchman" peer-to-peer nodes that use the same service, which may collect the IP addresses of people using the service, monitor their online activities, then maybe perform sudden mass-banning from time to time that makes a wide range of ports on your IP address inaccessible from the Internet. I have little knowledge about networking, but I felt it might be naive to imagine there can never be any technical way to affect the service so it either becomes too slow to use, does not work all the time, or invoke fear of being monitored and caught. Especially when the attacker have firm control over the whole underlying infrastructure. It might even be harder to avoid technical disruptions if you try to make a service that is accessible to 'dummies'.
3. Bad publicity: propaganda and education could in fact make people believe they don't ever need to break censorship, that censorship or self-censorship is necessary for reasons such as protecting national security, fighting child pornography etc. Through propaganda you may give people the mentality like those in some religious conservatives who never want to read about atheist viewpoints because they have ingrained biases and negative predispositions. So people may not have enough motivation to use your software to begin with.
It is certainly worth mentioning that most useful information services that are blocked in China, such as Youtube, Twitter, etc. all have local-brand alternatives that cooperates with the government. It may also not be too surprising that the vast majority of Chinese-language information inaccessible in China are either propaganda against the Chinese government, or could be easily branded as such. This creates a situation that lead many Chinese people into thinking that the only reason to use anti-censorship is when they want to become a political activist. Then, without access to much of the information that could cause people significant discomfort, where is the motivation to become a political activist in the first place? This lack of motivation is strengthened even further with the propaganda that "political activists are trouble-makers who generates chaos and damages society". So in simple words, an uninformed Chinese may easily believe that "only bad guys who want to do secret underground anti-government business need to use circumvent censorship software."
Combining all the above, the end result is a great majority of Chinese people without much technical prowess either never gets to hear about such software, or have too much trouble making it useful, or were discouraged due to fear or simple lack of motivation. Those are some of the important reasons why anti-censorship softwares, despite having many of them been created already, never achieved truly great popularity in China except for a limited group of tech-savvy individuals, and the situation may provoke some thoughts that the problem may not totally be on the technical side.
Perhaps one of the ways for a truly meaningful opposition to Chinese censorship to happen is when someone first delivers a significant piece of censored information through hijacking of mainstream media (or when some mainstream media slips its control), THEN tell people where to find out more about it. Without first being convinced that there are some significant censored information they should be concerned about or interested in, many Chinese simply wouldn't want go through all the trouble of getting out of censorship just because you are waving a sign saying "Free Web" in front of them, and they few curious people who did peek out have never made much difference.
So maybe we should drop a few internets in a suitcase and some of those mobile phone workarounds from yesterdays $50M freedom non censorship project around China then.. surely they wont mind..
How much more obvious does China have to make it that they can't be trusted.
Free people everywhere should be preparing to confront the fascist Chinese government instead of joining them in a race to the bottom.
Although I agree the Government of China sucks, please don't lump all "the Chinese" people in with them.
People don't get to pick where they are born.
There's been much made the past couple of years about China the Rising Superpower. On balance that's a good thing, because what happens with China this century has existential repercussions the way that Al Qaeda and terrorism has never had and never will have. If things go badly between China and the rest of the world a great many people will die and nations will fall on a scale that would put the previous two world wars to shame.
But the thing that makes China watching such a nail-biter is that it is an exceptionally fractious and brittle society with very little in the way of pressure valves. As Mao and the Communists used to say back in the day, China has 'feet of clay.' Don't like the government? Tough! Big company paid off a local official and the police threw you off your land so they can build a big factory on it, without so much as a by-your-leave? It's for the glory of socialism, comrade, so be a good peasant and go 'eat bitter' (READ: suck it up). And with so many, many officials on all levels running hard to get the bribes they need to buy a black Audi, big house, and keep mistresses, those incidents are piling up by the thousands.
It's only a matter of time before everything reaches the breaking point, and when that happens either China dissolves into bloody civil war with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world, or the Communist Party decides it's time to start a war against foreign oppressors who are trying to humiliate the motherland, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
It's not a question of if this will happen, but how. And the how keeps the China watchers up at night. If the latter option comes about, hundreds of millions of people will die and the viability of the Earth for human habitation may become seriously compromised.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Yet when the US pursues policies aimed at maintaining social stability they get criticized for supporting tyrants and dictators like those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, and a whole host of similar countries. How much social stability has the "Arab Spring" generated lately?
Is there really any difference between the government owning industry and industry owning the government? Either way, they are in league, and to hell with the people. It seems to me, in both cases, it's more a case of them lying in the same bed than one owning the other.
I agree with Dutch Gun! I think, chinese polulation is like a chessman that is pushed forward and backward.
//itabspst
Magento Agentur
Magento
Magento Schulung
Magento Hosting
Get it through your thick American skulls -- plenty of people will happily sacrifice some of their freedom if it means that people much worse than them won't get those freedoms, either. For example, I don't need full and absolute freedom of speech but I would like it very much if spammers and crooks were told to shut up or go to prison.
For some odd reason that doesn't seem to be how China works, though - the spammers and crooks (and worse) are in charge in many areas, and the riots the Chinese government keeps stamping out are generally a result of the rest of the population getting severly pissed off about this. In fact, that's pretty much inevitable - one of the reasons political freedom is so important is that it's the best way of stopping evil people getting into positions of power.
China will not have any trouble dealing with Islam. They don't have to worry about being politically correct or have to deal with organizations like the ACLU, UN Human Rights Council, or CAIR. The Chinese government does not let outsiders dictate their internal policies. They routinely give the world community the finger and do anything they damn well please.
Think of what kind of crooks would be in power if they had more opportunities to instigate riots and hijack protests.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Jeremia Cornelius, the USA, and China - possibly equally evil and clueless, but given that only two of the three have control of nuclear weapons, I think you should learn to prioritise...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, we've seen how they deal with Islam. Just look at how they treat the Uighurs as compared to Han Chinese.
The kind that can't quite so easily get away with screwing over 99% of the population at a whim?
I'm visiting Shenzhen, a large city in the same province as ZengCheng. I hadn't heard anything about the protests (no surprise, since we're not keeping up with the news), so I thought I'd see what a search brought up.
I found a Wall Street Journal article as one of the first Google hits, no problems at all.
I'm often uncertain about the scope of the Great Firewall. I could read any online U.S. newspaper I tried thus far (this trip -- a previous year, the Washington Post was blocked while others were not). I could get to Usenet via Google Groups, Wikipedia, and pretty much every site I tried, except for Youtube (which seems to be redirected to a broken alternative) and Facebook (though Myspace is accessible). I can see why the great bulk of people are not terribly bothered by the firewall. I don't think they hit it all too often, unless they're exceptionally interested in politics.
In any case, I'm not saying the article is wrong, but I haven't seen the mentioned effects.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Anyone care to explain to me why this unsubstantiated, bigoted horseshit got modded up at all on /.?
Don't get me wrong, both the Chinese and United States societies have their woes, some in more places than others, but I am pretty sure that the majority of folk in both societies are trustworthy people just trying to get by. Many of our leaders, on both sides, might be dipshits, but labeling Americans (our proper title) and Chinese citizens in general as evil is nothing but pissy, whiney drivel.
We're better than this Slashdot. Stop encouraging the bitter, overly-hormonal 12 year old mentality.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
why we even continue to cover stories like this on slashdot. If not for some element of moral superiority knowing
our nation "does not engage" in this kind of behaviour then why? every slashdotter who bought the latest
nook, kindle, iphone, ipad or droid just tacitly and communally signed off on this censorship practice being okay.
as in the communist state all labour is a component of the states interest and unionized as such under its watchful eye
.
its like saying walmart has suddenly decided it will fire anyone who says the word "groundhog" in the meat department
when you buy 5 pounds of sliced turkey there every week. you dont exactly have the unfettered right to complain.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Eat Satire, you fool!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I might be okay with that had it been modded funny instead of insightful.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I don't mod my own posts. ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Each and every popular uprising, if successful, establishes yet another kind of aristocracy. In rare situations when new aristocracy is relatively benign compared to old one, the uprising or movement lasted long enough that simply blocking information on it in media wouldn't have any effect on it in the first place. It's a selection mechanism, and a pretty good one. When it doesn't work, you have "successful movements" like your stupid Tea Party.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How long were you in the coma? We had rules about that sort of thing at one time, back before software and business model patents.
There is a saying that you can't trade freedom for security. Can you trade justice for wealth ? They are not rioting over money, they are rioting over corrupt policemen doing crimes with impunity.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.