Slashdot Mirror
Clever Workaround: Visual Cryptography On Austrian Postage Stamps
An anonymous reader writes Have you heard of personalized postage stamps? You pay the value of the stamps plus a fee and the post office prints official stamps usable for postage which show (almost) anything you can put into a jpeg file. An Austrian Tibet supporter found out what 'almost' means. He submitted a picture of the Dalai Lama with the text 'His Holiness the Dalai Lama,' but the Austrian post office refused to produce these stamps. Stampnews and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (autotranslation) reported that this had been due to pressure from the Chinese embassy in Vienna. Now there is a video showing how visual cryptography has been used to get around this attempt at censorship [caution: organ music] .
How did you decide that the People's Republic of China is a dictatorship? Most consider it a representative democracy. It certainly considers itself such. Nominees for Local People's Congresses can be selected not only by the Communist Party, but also other parties, and even by individual voters, properly seconded. The popular election of same is then made by secret ballot. Recall elections are provided for. The Local People's Congresses in turn elect the National People's Congress, and the NPC in turn elects national leaders.
OK, it's not a pure democracy, but there are damn few of those.
If you want to match oppression for oppression, there are a lot worse than PRC, and a fair number arguably better. I submit it's around average.