41% of Chinese Websites Shut Down In 2010

To answer your question by RobertinXinyang · 2011-07-14 00:50 · Score: 5, Informative

I am in P.R. China and I have never had trouble accessing Slashdot. In fact, it is so reliable that it is the site I typically check if I want to see if the internet connection is working.

Re:To answer your question by operagost · 2011-07-14 01:32 · Score: 4, Funny

I guess if the opposite was true, we wouldn't have heard from you!

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Re:To answer your question by jacksonyee · 2011-07-14 01:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

I've been a daily Slashdot reader since 1997, and I've been exploring China since March of this year. The only time that I've ever had Slashdot blocked was with the Falen Gong article a couple of months back. Apparently, there was a url keyword detection routine which filtered the page out. Every other page has loaded just fine. Fortunately, since I have a shell account on a U.S. server, ssh -D [port] got around it quite nicely.
I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the country, but here in Kunming, if you run a website, you have to have it registered with the police, which means that someone is probably periodically checking on your site to make sure that the content is considered appropriate and "harmonious." It is definitely a big brother approach, but considering the situation with the cameras in London, Homeland Security in the U.S., and the filtering in Australia, I really can't see an open web besides perhaps a couple of the European countries. To be honest, it reminds me an awful lot of the early gated communities like AOL, only this time, we're dealing with government rather than corporate interests.
Youtube, Dailymotion, Twitter, Facebook, and other such sites are blocked on a constant basis requiring a VPN or SOCKS proxy to get around. It's a bit of an annoyance, but most people around here simply use the native Chinese versions and don't notice anything of the outside world. It's only us foreigners that really know what's going on.
On the one plus side, China Telecom has a 3G mobile data plan with a 100 hour per month limit. I haven't found a data cap on it yet, and I used 17GiB last month watching Stargate: Universe. It's 500 yuan for the adapter and 400 yuan for six months, which works to ~67 yuan, or slightly over $10 per month use. Take that, AT&T!
Whenever I finish exploring here and get to Europe, I'll get a chance to see how all of you fancy Europeans have been haggling us Americans about our data plans and cell phones for years. ;-)
Re:To answer your question by gad_zuki! · 2011-07-14 02:04 · Score: 5, Insightful

>It is definitely a big brother approach, but considering the situation with the cameras in London, Homeland Security in the U.S., and the filtering in Australia,
Cameras in public spaces or being searched before getting on a plane have nothing to do with state enforced censorship. I'm not sure why so many Chinese find it believable that their limits of expression are normal and fit in with the West. They don't. Its just propaganda to make you feel better and not to try any pesky revolution or uprising.
Re:To answer your question by digitig · 2011-07-14 02:21 · Score: 3, Informative

It doesn't matter whether the name is true or not, it's still the name, and distinguishes the People's Republic of China from the Republic of China.

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Re:To answer your question by JonStewartMill · 2011-07-14 02:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

"It's a bit of an annoyance, but most people around here simply use the native Chinese versions and don't notice anything of the outside world."
In other words, it's working exactly as intended. :-(

The Chinese are more like Americans than you expected?
Re:To answer your question by jacksonyee · 2011-07-14 03:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's interesting that you should use the word "normal" in your post, because here in China, Internet filtering is indeed normal, the same way that you would considering post-9/11 groping to be normal and being constantly watched in the streets of London normal. Do I agree with it? Certainly not, but every place has its own culture and laws, and for the most part, the modern Chinese people are getting along just fine without trying to fit in with Western ideals.
It's actually quite amazing to me how much China has progressed from the days of the Cultural Revolution though. Between all of the new high-tech buildings, the girls in miniskirts out on the streets, the new high speed train which rivals the Japanese, and the huge influx of luxury items, it's hard to believe that this was a nation torn apart and hungry just half a century ago. Now, I believe that the Bill of Rights (not the Constitution itself, due to that nasty 3/5th compromise) is one of the greatest ideas in history, but China has placed economic freedom above political freedom in its efforts to pacify its people, and having a chance to be here and talk to various people, I've actually found that it's working decently well.
Not every place is like the U.S., but not every place is like the Middle East either. I really don't know how the "China model," as it's often called, is going to end up, but to be honest, propaganda is everywhere. How many times have you watched a commercial where everything was true? How many people do you know who watch Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh? Even NPR and the BBC have their own biases. How many actual, purely objective articles can you find in the mainstream media? Certainly, we don't have the state mandated media in the U.S. like China does, but the important thing to accept is that everyone has their own propaganda, no matter where they are. It's just a matter of which ones you agree with and which ones you don't.
Do the things that work for the U.S. automatically work in China? It's going to be very interesting to find out in the next ten to twenty years as China continues developing and opening up to the world. I'm curious to see how this huge housing bubble and the enormous debts of the local governments are going to turn out, but there's no denying China's growth and advancement in the last 30 years. With Russia's fade from glory, I'm hoping that some competition can get the U.S. out of its current funk and start being the country that we're capable of being. If not, China will be glad to sell us everything that we need, and once they get past the copying stage and start innovating for themselves, it's going to be scary.
Re:To answer your question by jmac_the_man · 2011-07-14 03:52 · Score: 3, Interesting

Now, I believe that the Bill of Rights (not the Constitution itself, due to that nasty 3/5th compromise) is one of the greatest ideas in history
Interestingly, the point of the 3/5 compromise was to kill slavery. If a slave counted for one person for purposes of representation, the slave states would have 2/5ths more representation than they got under the actual Constitution. They would have used that extra representation to hang on to slavery for as long as possible.
This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in American history.
Re:To answer your question by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-14 04:14 · Score: 2, Informative

but to be honest, propaganda is everywhere. How many times have you watched a commercial where everything was true? How many people do you know who watch Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh? Even NPR and the BBC have their own biases. How many actual, purely objective articles can you find in the mainstream media? Certainly, we don't have the state mandated media in the U.S. like China does, but the important thing to accept is that everyone has their own propaganda, no matter where they are. It's just a matter of which ones you agree with and which ones you don't.
Yes, it's human nature that organized groups enjoy pushing their own agenda, and are willing to hide certain facts or bend the truth in order to do it. When governments do it, we call it propaganda. When companies do it, we call it advertising. It's everywhere.
The critical difference here is what a government does when you publicly disagree with its propaganda. You mentioned the Bill of Rights; consider Freedom of Speech. Yeah, it's not carte blanche to say whatever you want (you can't scream "Fire!" in a crowded theater, and recent hate crimes legislation comes to mind). But it *does* mean that the US *cannot* imprison political dissidents like the PRC. And if we tried, that shot would be heard around the world.
(Indeed, the US has other ways of silencing a political dissident, such as labeling them a terrorist, or using the media to marginalize them and/or paint them using loaded terms. That's true and worrisome, but it's not the fundamental issue here, so don't let it become a red herring)
Astounding economic growth doesn't excuse human rights abuses. Just because a system of government "works decently well" doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed.
P.S. Last Sunday I was in Beijing, and visited a certain heavenly-peace-gate square. The surveillance there puts anything else I've seen to shame. Security checks, camera installations every thirty meters, and at least 50 uniformed officers inside -- not to mention a number of under-cover ones. And for what? Not to protect property, even government property... but to ensure nobody can speak out. Tell me it isn't a sickening irony that the current period in history is called the "liberated era".
Re:To answer your question by russotto · 2011-07-14 05:31 · Score: 3, Informative

the modern Chinese people are getting along just fine without trying to fit in with Western ideals.
Ooh, the culture card. To oppose Internet censorship is to be provincial, parochial, imperialist, colonialist, or whatever the bad word is today. Imagine how silly it would be if someone from some other culture objecting to TSA groping were to be told that the US was getting along just fine without trying to fit into that other culture's ideals.

(not the Constitution itself, due to that nasty 3/5th compromise)

You do understand that it was the free states which wanted a slave counted as zero, and the slave states who wanted a slave counted as a full person, for the purposes of representation?

I really don't know how the "China model," as it's often called, is going to end up, but to be honest, propaganda is everywhere.
Indeed it is. Enjoy your job at the (Chinese) Ministry of Propaganda.
Re:To answer your question by tqk · 2011-07-14 06:36 · Score: 2

You know what site my U.S. govt censors? None. Not a single one.
Does Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) not ring any bells for you? At the behest of Disney, et al, they're stealing domain names, often on the flimsiest of evidence.

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"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.

Not blocked by water-and-sewer · 2011-07-14 00:50 · Score: 4, Informative

Slashdot is not blocked in China, but citizens are forced to use older browsers that choke on Slashdot's excessive CSS and Javascript goodness. The result is an experience - not unlike my own - that makes Slashdot increasingly too annoying a site to visit.

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If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.

Re:Not blocked by killkillkill · 2011-07-14 01:01 · Score: 4, Informative

It's the same experience on new browsers as well.
Re:Not blocked by Lord+Lode · 2011-07-14 01:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

./ is annoying in new browsers too. I can't click a link anymore without the page doing a random scroll-jump instead. Same for middleclicking, or trying to moderate something, or anything else that requires clicking any of the 3 mouse buttons on ./.
Furthermore it often shows an eternal "loading" spinning thing at the bottom.
Re:Not blocked by Samantha+Wright · 2011-07-14 01:31 · Score: 5, Informative

It's not actually link-clicking that's causing what you describe. A post with collapsed parents will expand the parents one by one (and jump uselessly) when anything within it is clicked. You'd think that would be obvious enough a UI design disaster to avoid, but apparently they really are brain-damaged here.

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Re:Not blocked by cyfer2000 · 2011-07-14 01:40 · Score: 3, Informative

Banks forced people to use not so great browsers (technically not older). Banks in China usually use ActiveX for encryption things, so IE is your only choice if you want to use online banking.

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There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Re:Not blocked by maxwell+demon · 2011-07-14 04:12 · Score: 2

Was there something wrong with good old HTTPS?
Maybe it lacked government backdoors?

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The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

Facebook and Youtube varies by Anonymous Coward · 2011-07-14 00:52 · Score: 2, Informative

Just spent 36 days in china.
Youtube would work maybe 1 or 2 clips, before you had to change connection.
Facebook, would work for an hour or so and then be offline for an hour. Keep bouncing up and down.

if Slashdot is currently blocked? by renzhi · 2011-07-14 00:54 · Score: 2

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Usually no. It has been blocked a couple of times in the last few years, but that usually only lasted one day, or half a day. The fact that /. was blocked was probably a mistake in filter manipulation. It's not blocked, because probably the firewall admins waste their days away, lounging here too?

Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in China by poity · 2011-07-14 01:09 · Score: 4, Interesting

Anything happen when you search Tiananmen in the Slashdot searchbox? It used to time out the entire domain for me.

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your thin skin doesn't make me a troll

Re:Chine by Chrisq · 2011-07-14 01:17 · Score: 4, Funny

Wikipedia says it's the French name for China. The Grammar Nazi in me was saddened to hear that.

Not really, the French have a history of accomodating Nazis.

Re:Pr0nography?? by royallthefourth · 2011-07-14 01:31 · Score: 5, Funny

In a more enlightened atheist society this would never happen!

Only according to a typically immoral, decadent liberal.
In a socialist society, both men and women will have respectable employment and not turn to work in pornography to make a living. The reification of private intimacy to marketed commodity is the very height of alienation; on the other hand, it still exists outside the market as a homemade expression of individualist nihilism, the consistent self-indulgent stamp of the culture industry that has appropriated and homogenized everything in its contact. Sex is replaced with watching sex. Social bonds break down as partners become as interchangeable as the URL in the browser. It is the another illegitimacy in the wake of Enlightenment subjective rationality: that only the method by which free speech is achieved may be debated, while the objective remains as a dictator.

Not to suggest that China has much communist credibility remaining these days...

False summary by wvmarle · 2011-07-14 01:34 · Score: 2

I haven't read the BBC article but have read this in the local Hong Kong paper today.

Lots of sites closed, but the opinions vary on why. The state-sponsored bodies in China claim it is because most of those sites went bankrupt, while others (mainly foreign human-rights activists) claim it's the government forcing them to close. Fact is lots of sites closed, yet the total number of pages available is a whopping 90 billion. Yes that's like 70 pages for every Chinese citizen. And many more if you only count Chinese Internet users.

Some web sites are for sure closed by the government, mainly for pornography, but also sometimes for political speech. Though it seems the Chinese actually enjoy quite some freedom on-line.

And Twitter not available from within China, who cares when you have Weibo? Most Chinese can't read English anyway. And no Google? Well they have Baidu.

Yes it's censored, but no they don't miss out on too much functionality either. It's not that the Chinese can not do those things by themselves, and they do it in Chinese catering to Chinese users. It may be an American viewpoint but all the time I hear "no YouTube, no Google, no Twitter" as if that's the complete Internet?! I'm happy there is more than those few sites. Much more.

And on the importance of Twitter in China... how many non-Chinese will ever look at what's going on on Weibo?

Re:False summary by Rincewind42 · 2011-07-14 03:35 · Score: 2

I signed up for a Weibo account last week. I've had a Renren account (Chinese Facebook clone) for over a year now. I can't effectively use either of them due to language difficulties. Really need to practice my Chinese reading. So this gives some insight into how Chinese people view western sites. They just can use them - so they don't care that they are blocked. Why would you worry that Youtube is blocked when you have all the videos you need on Youkou or Tudou.

Re:Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in Chi by jacksonyee · 2011-07-14 01:39 · Score: 2

Just tried it here from Kunming with the results:

Wikileaks Cables Say No Bloodshed Inside Tiananmen Square 235 2011 2009 Bing Censoring All Simplified Chinese Language Queries 214 Chinese Social Websites Go Under "Maintenance" 84 Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Others Blocked In China 151 20 Years After Tiananmen, China Stifles Online Dissent 235 China Blocks YouTube, Again 127 China Makes Arrests To Stop Internet Porn 204 2009 2008 China Does U-Turn, Lifts Ban On Websites 133 China Allows Access to English Wikipedia 219 2008 2007 Users Rage Against China's 'Great Firewall' 277 Yahoo Confirms Beijing Blocking Flickr 163 2007 2006 Helping Other Big Brothers Go High Tech 97 Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy 184 Poor Spelling Beats Google's China Filter 248 2006 2005 Business At The Price Of Freedom 254 2005 2001 China Prosecuting Webmaster Over Site 27 Today Follow us: Twitter Facebook RSS Feed

Stupid Slashdot not respecting my pre element...

Re:OK, I'm a grammar nazi, so sue me by JonySuede · 2011-07-14 01:44 · Score: 2

Chine is french for China, maybe he wanted to be smug!

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Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected

Re:Did News Corp buy slashdot? by rbrausse · 2011-07-14 01:55 · Score: 2

this document of the .cn-registry is interesting.

sure, the thing is biased but take a look at page 23:

In the first half year of 2010, the number of internet sites in the globe has fallen and that in China has declined synchronously. According to the statistics of Netcraft, in the first half year of 2010, the number of internet sites in the world has been decreased by 27 million7, with a drop of 11.5%. An important reason for the drop of total sites is the expiration of web hosting services.

TFA compares end of 2009 with end of 2010, the survey is unfortunately older (June 2010) so it is not possible to see the same data from the 2 different POVs...

Porn by Cockatrice_hunter · 2011-07-14 02:17 · Score: 3, Funny

Almost think that the takeaway from this article is that 41% of websites in china are porn,

Re:Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in Chi by donscarletti · 2011-07-14 02:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

Tiananmen is a symbol of China and features on the Chinese national crest and is certainly not blocked. Tiananmen Square is where Chairman Mao's body rests and the site of a monument to the people's fallen heroes, it is not blocked either. There is however a particular date 22 years ago that if you mention in any way, the domain will be inaccessible for the next 10 minutes.

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When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem

Re:Zhao Lianhai begs to differ by Dunbal · 2011-07-14 03:03 · Score: 2

And you would be sentenced to prison for not submitting to a TSA pat-down. Moral of the story - breaking the laws of your country result in jail.

By the way, this has nothing to do with the other 1,299,999 websites that disappeared from the internet. But I guess this is the kind of rationalization you need to construct when you live in a country that tells you every day how free you are, when really you're no better off than anyone else and much worse off than quite a few. Yeah, keep focusing on those exceptions and believe them to be the "norm" elsewhere... hone your "China is evil" training so that you can be ready to throw your life away when your government decides it has to kill you before it loses control of you.

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Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.

Re:Chine by Chrisq · 2011-07-14 03:23 · Score: 2

Not really, the French have a history of accommodating Nazis.

[citation needed]

[history lesson needed]

Try starting with Vichy France

Slashdot Mirror

41% of Chinese Websites Shut Down In 2010

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