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Browsing the Broken Web: a Software Developer Behind the Great Firewall of China
troyhunt writes "While we've long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It's an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can't work in the country with the world's largest internet population."
Seems to work just like DRM. Gives the company a sense of power and usually just inconveniences the average user. The power user probably has very few issues.
I spent 4 months in Shanghai and was considering moving there. Shanghai is an amazing city. However, by the end of the 4 months I could not get out of there fast enough. Their Internet censoring/monitoring slows down your Internet connection so much it is sometimes not useable. Skype and many other programs/websites we use regularly in the west are not legal in China. Some are blocked for political reasons and other are blocked so people are forced to use local versions of the products. The local versions all have built in monitoring for the government. Almost all expats in China use VPN connections for their daily work. Hong Kong is the complete opposite. Nothing is censored there and their Internet connections are extremely fast! I can live in HK.
VPN. VPNMakers.com - $5/month, works great from all over China (including Shanghai, where I live half-time). No problem getting into corporate networks, secured websites, or even streaming Hulu/Pandora/MOG/Netflix.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Heh. It's fun to watch an ignorant bit of "peevery" shot down by an entry in a well-known dictionary. Not that dictionary makers consider themselves arbiters of correctness, of course, but lots of people insist on believing them to fill that role.
In this case, it's actually a bit unusual to find such an entry, since "impactful" is a simple combination of a common English substantial (a common term for words that are both noun and adjective, and in this case also verb) plus a common suffix. Dictionaries tend to omit such normal combinations unless they have some idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from the parts, and that doesn't apply to this case. OTOH, if it's an unabridged dictionary, such routine combinations are likely to be included, and disk space is getting so cheap that all online dictionaries are becoming unabridged.
But the real fun is watching people look silly by objecting to a perfectly cromulent bit of affixation like this. We here at /. tend to pride ourselves in our education and literacy, but there are constant reminders that the linguistically ignorant are about as common here as in the rest of the English-speaking world.
(And when I decided to ask google to "define:peevery", I was entertained by the fact that most of matches are for the phrase "pee very", typically followed by words like "often" or "badly". I also discovered the peevery.com web site, which is a lot of fun. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Been to Shanghai more than I can count. Basically, the network is poorly maintained. Everything from double-NATing, poor routing, to offline DNS servers. The problem at least residential side are systemic.
Life is not for the lazy.
We (people in my country) don't use Webster's (we use the Oxford Dictionary instead as our standard - mostly). Just because a word is in Websters doesn't mean the word is accepted by the international English community. While we my countrymen will usually tolerate abominations like 'impactful', they come across as quite dissonant and are avoided by better writers and speakers. For example, the the writer could have substituted the word 'significant' for 'impactful'.
My other favourite poor-word-choice peeve is 'architected' when 'designed' is the better word to use. All these faux-formal words being made up by corporate drones when there are perfectly suitable and well accepted alternatives instead. If you have a good vocabulary you choose the simplest word to fit, not make up words to try sound enlightened or technically adept. Use of such words are jarring for those of us who have moved past the stage of complicating our prose (as you learn to do as an undergraduate in university) to the stage of ruthlessly simplifying it where we can.
What you are missing is that China also jails people who point out corruption, mis-governance, unsafe practices such as the addition of mildly poisonous food additives to food products that result in baby deaths (eg the melamine added to milk by a Chinese dairy producer - and then blame it on the New Zealand company that acquired them), illegal and unreasonable acquisition of citizen land, etc. Yes, this happens elsewhere too, but not on the same scale nor without the same redresses available elsewhere.
With regards to economics. America is slowly getting back to growth. The difference between China and America's economies is not really to do with their political systems, it is to do with whether the government believes in a lassez faire system with weak regulation (America) or strong central control of the economy (China) including product dumping and currency manipulation and other unfair trade practices (at least according to the WTO 'standards'). America also bends the rules in its favour (obvious to outsiders, most US citizens don't know or care), but not to the same extent as China. If America decided to bend the rules too far in its favour it would reap the same short-term (several decades) benefits that China does now, at the expense of getting the same bad reputation China is rapidly acquiring (and will take a much longer time to shake off).
You feel bad about being an American because of stand-up comedians? This is tragic, perhaps you are a bit too sensitive (but at least that is much better than being insensitive/oblivious - as many of your countrymen are). As cultures mature they gain the ability to laugh at themselves. As they mature further they then gain the ability to allow others to laugh at them. This is why the 'English' (what you might call 'British') culture around the World appreciates black humour and sarcasm to a degree not seen in the US. Unfortunately these delights seem lost on many Americans who in their earnestness are mostly quite poor in distinguishing a pleasantly sounding mortal insult from invective wrapped comradely banter.
Your desire for your countrymen to do better is laudable. However, I think that America would often look better to outsiders if it learned to kick back, have a beer, and not take things so seriously. Trying to look good usually makes you look worse. This trying hard to look good is something the Russian and Chinese governments miss completely - trying to look strong makes them look 'try-hard' and feeble; showing how much power they have over various things (eg. Russian supply of gas) does not make their neighbours respect them out of fear, it makes them distrust them. Doing these things is counter-productive and most Chinese and Russians just don't grok this yet. My point here is that the ability of America to grow stand-up comedians with their cutting insight shows strength of their culture and is something to be proud of, not ashamed of. The ability to recognise and laugh at your own foibles shows good judgment and character. *All* cultures have flaws, acknowledging them is good (because ignoring them is ridiculous - outsiders can see the flaws even better than you can). America is a great country to be proud of, please also realise that almost everyone else is also proud of their countries too - and it isn't a competition as to who is best at what, it is all a joke.
China has some great aspects. The ones you pointed out are not some of them. I hope the US doesn't slavishly emulate China, because as the US edges towards the concentration of power to centralized elites and draconian laws (both of which China has) against the citizenry it is making it a worse country, not better. That trend is not something to tolerate or aspire to.
I'm a developer currently living in China and working for an Australian company. It is immensely difficult to work here without a VPN and I notice it in every part of the work. Searching the internet for information about a problem is nigh on impossible, Google searches are intermittent, I can't access a large amount of developer blogs, and stackoverflow is intermittent too.
One funny one I came across last night was after installing Mint. The Ubuntu repos aren't blocked, but the main Mint repo is. Luckily there is a Chinese mirror that is actually really fast.
I'm lucky in that I live very close to Hong Kong (I'm in Guangzhou), and VPN access to Hong Kong is blisteringly fast. I keep VPN accounts with both SuperVPN and StrongVPN (when one is performing poorly, I switch to the other). From my experience, SuperVPN has the better performance in HK.
I love living in China, it's an amazing country with some great people, but you really need to be prepared if you want to live here and work in IT internationally. Make sure you organise a VPN before you get here, and always have a backup plan.
Disclaimer: I'm a native Chinese living in Shanghai. Somehow access to /. isn't disrupted, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is in the future. Simple complaints about the GFW, online or otherwise, is too common to be considered sensitive here AFAIK. Buying a VPN is probably so as well; I have been too lazy to get one myself, but considering the amount of lost productivity, maybe I should.
That said, Google is borderline unusable here. When I search for anything technical, 30% of the time the connection gets reset and google becomes inaccessible for several minutes, and if the search results are shown, about half of the sites are inaccessible, including most foreign blog sites and many of the mailing list archives. It is so frustrating that I'd wish for the evil bit to be implemented, or bang the keyboard refreshing the page in a vain attempt to DoS the machine sending out these bogus TCP reset packets.
I consider the GFW a kind of malicious DoS attack on our network infrastructure. We do have laws against such attacks, and I think those responsible for it may well deserve a few years in prison.