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Chinese Censors Accidentally Block Shanghai Index
New submitter Vulcan195 writes "Now this is amusing in so many ways ... Today (June 4, 1989 ... i.e. 6/4/89) is the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Naturally, the Chinese Censors were working overtime to block anything that made remote or oblique references to that event. Well, sometime during the day the Shanghai Composite Index dropped by 64.89 points; You can guess what happened next."
Much like the fate that befell Olympic runner Tyson Homosexual, the Shanghai Stock Exchange could've found itself falling Harmonious Society points today.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Every discussion of Chinese censorship inevitably leads to posts about how the USA should get off it's high horse because it is just as bad. It is true that the USA has committed atrocities. Kent State, Jim Crow killings, Dresden, etc. The difference however, is that the USA reflects on its past in a much more transparent way than China does today. Come on China, it has been 23 years. Let's discuss this in an open way. You won't be able to hide it forever, especially because most Americans saw a lot of Tiananmen on TV.
I thought today was June 4, 2012. If it's 1989 still, I should probably get out of this office and head to high school.
China doesn't need to use it for it to be blocked by their filters, they would be designed to block foreign sites as well.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
The reverse engineers copied the errors. ;)
It was no accident, the Shanghai index fell 64.89 points and people starting blogging that since 6/4/89 was the date of Tiananmen massacre, the stock index coincided with the date, which is a particularly infamous one. The censors then blocked those people for discussing the massacre, which is verboten. The NYT has a more in depth article. Now, the fact that the stock market fell by that exact amount by closing (see here) might be an accident, but the censors were doing exactly their job, censoring people discussing the massacre. As the NYT points out, other stock markets have been hacked and this may have be the case here as well, or some other intentional act. The Chinese government is investigating and you may rest assured that we will likely never know what they find since that would draw attention to why they were investigating in the first place.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
They probably blocked all iterations of the date. I mean, it'd be rather pointless to block one way and not the other.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
China uses YY//MM/DD, and in Chinese they usually explicitly write the character for year, month, and day after each part respectively.
Something like 2012Y, 06M, 05D
Does 6489 this 6489 mean 6489 I have 6489 discovered 6489 a way to 6489 keep my 6489 industrial 6489 data 6489 from being 6489 stolen 6489 by Chinese 6489 spies?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
the YY[YY]MMDD form is actually much more sensible. It numerically sorts in chronological order. MMDDYY[YY] is just dumb.
You know, kind of like how metric is superior to any other system.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Because the 4th June 2012 is better expressed as 20120604.
Middle-endian date formats are fucking obtuse.
... the CPP gonna accidentally China !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
45:11 would be just as logical as 11:45, it just seems strange because it is unfamiliar. A better approximation of the US date format applied to time would be to include the seconds as 45:00:11.
There's something to be said for both big-endian dates (YYYY-MM-DD) and little-endian dates (DD-MM-YYYY). Big-endian dates sort automatically into chronological order. Little-endian dates deliver the most pertinent information (least likely to be obvious from context) first, so you don't have to read the whole date if you already know the year. The same applies to big-endian times (HH:MM) and little-endian times (MM:HH).
Middle-endian dates like MM-DD-YYYY are still meritless and perverse, though.
IF the firewall kicked in and "walled off" the stock exchange the instant that the magic number showed up, then the exhange may have been "stopped" at the magi number -because- of the censorship.
Indeed, anything with a "rolling number" that was influenced by user action could have been "memorialized" by the censorship itself.
Imagine if every web site in China had a "daily visitor counter" then they all would have been shut off at 6489 visitors. Several might have incremented one-to-X times more than that as the filter took hold, sure. But there is the effect is lagged.
Now if every page sent from the stock exchange included the index value, the number of discrete actions necessary to get the composite 64.89 to 64.90 was likely dwarfed by the average size of each transaction.
The problem with all net filters is unintended consequence.
This reeks of unintended consequence of that sort if you really think about it as a wide-area phenomonia.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
In Chinese it is more like 2012Y 6M 4D in both speaking and formal writing (no comma!). For speaking, the day 4th when by itself is usually called the "4 no." to distinguish from "4 days" and "the 4th day (of other thing else)". If month and day are mentioned together, it is also not uncommon to further shorten it to 6M4, especially when it's in (Chinese) lunar calendar. Meanwhile, for modern memorial date, like the event this time, it is often shortened (again!) and codified to 6 4, or 8 9 6 4.
Now you know why 64.89 triggered the censor alarm.
"War is the continuation of Politics by other means" -- Carl von Clausewitz
Speaking of numeral systems, at the time when fish came out of the water there were several competing species of amphibians, some with 5 fingers, some with 4 fingers, even some with 8 fingers. Eventually, the 5-fingered species 'won' the competition and it became the ancestor of all terrestrial vertebrates. That's why all of them, from frogs to lizards to humans have 5 digits. Makes you wonder what would have happened if the 4 fingered species had won. With 4 fingers we would have developed the octal numeral system. It would have been pretty convenient, a computer byte would then be the natural base of our numeral system.
NOTHING HAPPENED.
I happened to be within walking distance yesterday, was out getting dinner, and decided to stop by The Spot. It was totally blocked off by security. Completely empty except for some security guys at the exits from pedestrian underpasses. Got some nice pictures from across the street.
Fun fact- in countries like the UK where "DD/MM/YY" is the normal format, we say "4th of June", not "June 4th".
The bombings happened on different days. The Japanese had several days to surrender, which they didn't.
From wikipedia:
Together with the United Kingdom and the Republic of China, the United States called for a surrender of Japan in the Potsdam Declaration on 26 July 1945, threatening Japan with "prompt and utter destruction". The Japanese government ignored this ultimatum, and two nuclear weapons developed by the Manhattan Project were deployed. Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, followed by the Fat Man over Nagasaki on 9 August
The Japanese government still did not react to the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito, the government, and the war council were considering four conditions for surrender --snip--
The Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 5 April. The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Korechika Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace . --snip--
This doesn't read like they were ready to surrender.
An important lesson in warfare was learned in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles was that you do not crush your defeated enemy completely - unless you are prepared to make them extinct. Sure, win at all costs but then make sure there is an operating country left.
10 years after WW I Germany was a wreck and this led directly to the rise of Hitler and WW II.
10 years after WW II both Germany and Japan had strong economies and a great deal of rebuilding had been done. Neither Germany nor Japan was "crushed" from their defeat and in many ways Japan's society improved a great deal. The average man on the street probably came out better because of how Japan was managed post-war than if the war had never happened. All traces of feudalism were wiped out of the country whereas before many had persisted.
I'd say the other approach that works was Carthage which we have not seen the likes of since - burn everything to the ground, salt the fields so nothing grows there and kill everyone - men, women, children, dogs, everyone. If you aren't prepared to go that far, it is necessary to leave a functioning country after defeat.
This is one problem with Iraq and Afganistan. Iraq was a functioning country but it was crushed almost completely. Afganistan post-Taliban could probably be said not to have been a functioning country even before being invaded. In both cases failure to leave a functioning country will almost certainly result in more wars.