41% of Chinese Websites Shut Down In 2010

BinaryMage found a pretty shocking bit- apparently the Chinese government has shut down 1.3 million websites in 2010, an incredible 41% of all sites behind the great firewall. The usual reasons (pornography) are cited, as well as the reminder that China blocks Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from its citizens. Anyone behind the firewall know if Slashdot is currently blocked? I've heard it varies.

Comments

To answer your question

[RobertinXinyang]

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

[operagost]

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

Re:To answer your question

[jacksonyee]

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

[gad_zuki!]

>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

[digitig]

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.

Re:To answer your question

[jacksonyee]

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

[jmac_the_man]

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

[russotto]

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.

Not blocked

[water-and-sewer]

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.

Re:Not blocked

[killkillkill]

It's the same experience on new browsers as well.

Re:Not blocked

[Lord Lode]

./ 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

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Re:Not blocked

[cyfer2000]

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.

Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in China

[poity]

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

Re:Chine

[Chrisq]

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??

[royallthefourth]

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...

Porn

[Cockatrice_hunter]

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

[donscarletti]

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.