Slashdot Mirror
China Cracks Down On Mobile Messaging
itwbennett writes China is tightening control over mobile messaging services with new rules that limit their role in spreading news. Under the new regulations, only news agencies and other groups with official approval can publish whatever the government considers political news via public accounts. "All other public accounts that have not been approved cannot release or reprint political news," the regulations said. Users of the instant messaging services will also have to register with their official IDs, and agree to follow relevant laws.
...why they have not banned text service altogether by now. Or phones because people can do conference calls. C'mon, If they really monitor everything, it's easy to root those guys out instead of having the need to restrict it. Slap the "conspiracy to topple the government" and voila! People will stop doing it very soon.
We've always been at war with Eastasia"
... because everyone on Facebook has to use their real name and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's astounding to me that people tolerate this. As the Chinese people become wealthier and more educated, at some point there will be a forced regime change.
It's OK they have Chinese Whispers :)
Peiople tolerate this when they are not otherwise suffering Materially. Arab Spring didn't get triggered when the general population is well fed, they triggered when people have problems living on at the conditions at the time (because they are broke?)
The supreme court is bound to overturn it as a flagrant violation of the 1st amendment.
No. Not all people can tolerate this. It's just that those who can't tolerate are jailed...
It has been clear for a long time that governments want to use the internet for mass scale surveillance(usa, lesser extent many others), control(china, russia, middle east), and generally Orwellian things.
It is LONG past time to invent dead-simple to use programs and protocols that are end to end encrypted and take control out of the hands of governments and put it back where it belongs: with the people.
It should not be possible for the NSA to tap all communications, because it should all be strongly encrypted with only the endpoints having the keys. It should not be possible for China to control IMs, because they should look like any other random encrypted data passing over the wires.
The longer we go without making those things reality, the more Orwellian it is going to get. Power hungry people are hungry for power: news at 11.
Sure, it would be easy to root out the dissenters... but that costs you a productive citizen each time you do it. If you can prevent them from becoming dissenters in the first place, you come up way ahead.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Does iMessage run afoul of this?
If the encryption is good (and China doesn't have the pull to get access as the NSA does) then maybe Apple products DO pose a security threat .... to the government.
They need to defeat their own extremists in Xinjiang before going around helping others. They had an attack a couple weeks ago were 100 people were killed. The fact the government is willing to acknowledge 100 deaths only means the total was most likely closer to 1000.
China could probably imprison everyone who *might* dissent and still have fewer people incarcerated than we do in the US.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
As an Argentinian (if you know our recent history): No, people tolerate everything. People don't "uprise" spontaneously. People don't go out and protest.
They don't.
I've learned that ALL protests are organized by someone with a political motivation. Nothing more.
We're in a situation worse than what we were in 2001. And people just carry on with their lives every day. Humans are tame criatures, they will take absolutely everything and accept it. Look at the life in the Middle East for example. Iran, once a westernized, modern country, taken back to the middle ages by the muslims. And people didn't protest.
The Khmer Rouge killing everything and everyone. People didn't protest.
You'll see people oppressed all over the world. In third world nations, and in the US too. And guess what? People don't do anything. The ones in power take it all.
This would help cut down on the stupidity that "news" outlets in the US spread to the uneducated and or uninformed population
Yes. Freedom of Speech, as conceived in many nations, includes the freedom to speak irresponsibly. These nations may be destroyed by that freedom, which creates an ecosystem of mostly-stupid ideas that it is very, very hard for wiser minds to change. Or they may be saved by it, if nations such as China tighten their grip on information far enough that they overly limit the free flow of innovative ideas and legitimate idea-generating-and-analyzing debate.
There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who should never be allowed to publicly speak to the American public about politics again. Not because we may disagree with them, but because they are obviously wrong, and alarmist, and they are hurting America by their false contributions to the debate. So it is in many free nations.
Before the Internet, Chinese in their villages wondered what was happening in the world. After the Internet, Chinese in their villages looked at their mobile phones and wondered what is happening in the world.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Take a look at what real oppression is. The NSA is still evil, wrong and violating the rights of others, but you are allowed to complain about it publicly and privately all you want. You can even openly advocate seceding from your own nation, spread groundless conspiracy theories, and call your politicians a manifestation of the anti-christ, and the government will virtually ignore you and let your kooky little 90's looking website stating all of the above remain on the web. Doing this on talk radio or on cable news can make you millions of dollars per year.
Do this in China against the Chinese government and you'll be tracked down and be executed or imprisoned.
Governments have become very good at making sure people don't rise up, and if they do protest that the protests are ignored and ineffective. It's very dangerous because now the only way to effect any kind of political change is via the mass media or via violence. In countries where the mass media is heavily controlled, that just leaves violence.
It's the same everywhere. In the UK 2 million people protested against the invasion of Iraq, and they went ahead anyway. Literally the only thing that would have stopped them was a violence overthrowing of the government. Fortunately for them the lives of some brown people in a far away land where not valuable enough to trigger that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I am glad Google failed and I hope any future attempts will also fail. "Users of the instant messaging services will also have to register with their official IDs, and agree to follow relevant laws." Corporations and governments want the same thing. Now why could this be?
Not really. It was triggered by young people being able to look abroad via the interwebs and see how people in other countries lived. So they too wanted to live in a place where their political voices could be heard. The problem was that they ignored the snake in grass ready to pounce if the central governments were weakened. Political Islam hijacked the soft revolutions; they saw it as their chance to finally exert a Nazi like control over the rest of the pop. and make them enjoy the pure hell on earth that an unchecked religion can deliver.
The factors behind political Islam were originally religious in nature, however politicized Islam is mainly run by young men. The main reason for them to support political Islam is that if women in Islamic countries are freed from their slavery, they will be free to make their own marriage decisions. This scares the hell out of the young men because they figure they'll be on the losing end of that deal...and probably rightly so. The women won't be interested in subjugating themselves or their (new) careers to their husbands, they won't be interested in being part of the husband's brothel of kept women, and they'll be wanting a say in all decisions.
The headgear worn by Islamic women has nothing to do with religion; it 'tis but a mark of their enslavement and yet one more method to keep them in line.
The best argument against Democracy is to have a 5 minute conversation with the average citizen.
As long as China continues to maintain an exponential growth in the standard of living.
People accept that tradeoff: freedom for increased prosperity.
Where it breaks down is in the eventual slowdown of exponential growth, which WILL occur.
At that point, the agreement weakens. Why maintain the line if the old promises no longer apply?
That's when things get dicey, and why the Chinese leadership is so paranoid.
Unfortunately, cracking down will, long run, just fuel the fire.