1) China isnt communist, theyre authoritarian (possibly fascist). They stopped being communist after Mao died. 2) 66 million are. Many many more practice falun gong. Im also 3) Just to be clear that stance is incompatible with a belief in freedom of speech. Why are you so afraid of people making up their own minds? You have no problem peddling Mao Zedong worship in school.
Its very interesting that english appears to be a second language, you posted as an AC, and you seem to have an intimate knowledge of the official names of the sanctioned Chinese churches which very few people I have talked to know.
Any chance you're posting this from China? Perhaps part of the wangluò pínglùn yuán (50 Cent Army)?
What if I give you a stack of flyers (of my choosing) and you stand in front of your nations capital and hand them out? Since you clearly have "free speech" laws and can say whatever you want, you have nothing to fear right?
People do this all the time. If you caused a disruption, it is possible you would be asked to leave.
I witnessed this on a random street in China, where a man was handing out flyers in a public square. Police appeared, the man ran, all flyers were confiscated-- including the ones people were holding. That sort of thing simply does not happen in the US.
Just because i handed you a stack of "hate propaganda"
Good thing the US has "separation of state and religion" rules for those of us who do not believe in "god".
This is off topic and out of context. He was specifically asking why someone would go to a country like china and preach an illegal message. I provided the answer. The US's separation of church and state is not relevant because its not illegal in the US to preach such a message.
Here is another one for you, go break some law and then tell them you report to a "higher authority" and see if they buy that one.
Obviously they do not, and missionaries certainly go to prison for it. Are you arguing that it SHOULD be illegal?
They design it to appear sporadic. Generally you have to hit a certain number of "deviations" to trigger a problem, and often things like VPN will work for some short period of time before breaking and bringing your connection to a throttled state.
I was simply demonstrating in stark contrast the difference in "freedom" in China and the US.
As to WHY someone would break the law to evangelize? Peter puts it well: And the high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.” 29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men."
They're completely free, that is until they have a high-enough profile to attract attention
Im not sure what your definition of high-profile is. If you form a house church over there and they find you, you WILL be detained, or deported (if you are an ex-pat), or at the very least monitored. I believe the unofficial threshold for being a concern is a gathering of 15 or more, hardly "high profile".
Not only that, but a vow of atheism is required to have a government career.
No one is ever disappeared for talking to a minor about religion or talking about religion outside of a church.
Many have been detained and deported for it, however, and had congregations threatened if details about other contacts were not revealed.
But if you're just an everyday college student (or an engineer at a multinational), for practical purposes, you have the freedom to say and do anything you want as long as you don't attract a large following.
For all intents and purposes, no religious thought unsanctioned by the government can be discussed. I have not been to a Three-self church, but the reports I have heard indicate that they are not what one would call "orthodox Christianity". Actual protestant churches, like those for Ex-pats, require a foreign visa to enter and tend to have barbed wire or electrical fencing.
Ask the KKK about their thoughts on American free speech.
Its perfectly legal to espouse KKK doctrine; ask the Westboro Baptist Church, or the residents of Skokie, Il during the Nazi demonstration.
for quite some time the NSA was analyzing google searches for forbidden content...
There is no official policy for this, nor has the NSA been found to compel anyone to allow SSL MITM without a court order. In fact there is no evidence currently that any widescale SSL MITMs are going on.
I can also tell you that it is apparently not common knowledge there that if you text something "forbidden" in America, the government gets a copy.
Need some evidence.
Don't you have any gripes with your own government?
Of course I do. But you would have to be absolutely ignorant of life in each country and the repercussions of open political speech in each to even begin making the comparison. The US has nothing even remotely comparable to the GFW.
The US government as official policy does not do DPI. While I am quite sure various agencies DO do it, whether it is legal is Big Question #1, and whether its universal is Big Question #2 (and Im sure it isnt). The most you could say for the NSA is they secretly try to subvert comms between you and Google.
China openly (in the sense that its official policy-- they dont generally advertise it) uses filter lists, works with companies to create "custom" chinese software (ie, TOM Skype), hotwords ALL text and voice communication, intercepts and interrupts VPN connections, and simply blocks websites they dont like (like Google). They also directly engage companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to assist in the spying.
Yes, and you could also inform someone on their birthday that theres actually nothing special about the day astronomically and that they're quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Its just that you probably arent going to get invited to his birthday party ever again, and while you could make the same remark about objective fact that Tyson did, you'd still be a jerk.
The GP said the church and traditionalism is the source of much of society's view on gender roles.
And that is not reinforced by any bit of history I am aware of. Christianity has tended to improve women's rights, not degrade them, and I posed evidence to support this. I have seen precious little to suggest that GP is correct-- but as I say I am no expert on this so perhaps one of you two could provide sources.
The flip side of that one denomination being so notable for believing in equal gender roles implies that many other denominations did NOT believe as such.
Not necessarily, just that perhaps they made less of a big deal about it. Nevertheless a large number of the women's colleges that sprang up were seminaries, if Wikipedia and some quick googling be believed. The entire reason I objected and did spot research is because it struck me how many venerable old women's colleges are religiously (protestant / catholic) affiliated; it seems disingenuous to claim that Christianity is holding the women back academically in spite of that.
You're right that this is a particularly sensitive area for me, because I see these sort of attacks all over the place, and its highly irritating that this sort of stuff becomes "generally known fact" despite being quite incorrect. It seems to me the only way to fight these pervasive myths is to be sensitive to them and respond with sourced facts whenever I see them.
GP was not being directly confrontational, but he was laying a huge portion of the blame directly on Christianity as being a traditionalist enforcer of the oppression of women; he simply phrased it much more tactfully than that.
And I would agree that not only are they not doing that, but that they probably wont do it. China's whole MO with the GFW is to subtly punish "deviant" internet users, and reward conformant ones. Blocking email from gmail users would punish both and make their filtering more generally known.
They tend to prefer things like making gMail or google really spotty, slow, or unreliable so it is obnoxious to use without it being obvious that its actually censorship.
China doesnt use a handful of pf rules, they use a comprehensive array of filtering, DPI, and firewalling techniques. They've been known to actively probe VPN services to determine whether they are allowable, implement real-time updated keyword content filtering, and forge RST packets for any "undesirable" content.
They are also incredibly proactive about nullifying workarounds; ask the Tor guys how their efforts with e.g. obfsproxy and obfs2 went. Really good at circumventing the GFW for a year or so until it ended up 100% blocked just like stock OpenVPN.
Either way its difficult to defend the idea that China intentionally did this
No, its not, it fits 100% in with their existing (bad) relationship with google.
when google gladly censors their search results and complies with all local regulations.
Your information is about 5 years out of date. Ever since the Aurora hacks in 2010, Google has ceased all cooperation with the Chinese government on that front, and has ceased filtering on their end. They have in fact on a number of occasions worked to alert users when third party tampering has occurred, which has led to a number of confrontations with the Chinese gov't. Notably, in June of this year, China completely blocked Google prior to the TIanenmen Square anniversary.
Google remains a sterling partner of the chinese leadership in their quiet, tacit business participation in what for all intents and purposes amounts to a capitalist dictatorship with a communist logo.
Except for the part where they are the one major internet company NOT cooperating with them, while Microsoft and Yahoo continue to do so. Hope you dont use Skype over there.
Yes, the people I know who were deported for "unlawful speech"-- totally imagining that. Imagining Liu Xiaobo too, and illegal flower ceremony. Tank man? Never happened. Suppression of free speech during the olympics? Definately not.
And all those deals with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (since reneged, which is why China is so irked with them) in 2006 to help spy on their users and expose dissidents? Internet myth.
Sounds like you have it all figured out.
1) Do you own a passport? 2) Is your passport stamped with a Chinese entry visa?
Yes, and yes.
In return Id challenge you to stand on a corner and preach the risen Christ, and see how long it is before thugs detain you and give you a 1-way ticket out of the country. Or you could try handing out pamplhets advocating democracy-- I actually saw one of those-- You'd get the same response.]
By the way-- if you are a chinese national, please do not do this as you will get a 1-way trip but it wont be out of the country.
They certainly don't hide their censorship, let alone have a problem with people complimenting them for it
You're naieve. Some of it is in the open, a lot of it is not.
For instance: Ask your average Chinese college student whether they have freedom of religion / speech, and they will say yes. What they often dont know is that you can be arrested for talking to a minor about religion, or talking about religion outside of a state-sanctioned church. Ask the Falun-Gong about their thoughts on Chinese free speech.
Another example, for quite some time the GFW was analyzing google searches for forbidden content, and massively throttling connections with hits. Google posted an alert on their search page when such throttling occurred, which made the government quite angry. Why do you suppose that is, if theyre quite open about it? Why throttle, rather than displaying a block page?
I can also tell you that it is apparently not common knowledge there that if you text something "forbidden" in China, the government gets a copy.
Its wonderful that you think China is such a free country and that all of the reports of their human rights issues are apparently overstated. Maybe you think Liu XIaobo received his Nobel Peace Prize and was released from detenention, or that his wife has been released-- Im sure they would be thrilled to learn this.
but this is beyond what they have been reported to have done so far.
No its not, they were tampering with connections to google in the past based on what search query you entered and forging RST packets if you searched for "illegal content".
DPI is the bread and butter of the GFW; Im sort of astonished at how naieve people are about what they actually do.
How, though, does the Great Firewall stop email from going between Google servers in the US, and Yahoo/Microsoft/etc servers in the US? Short answer: It doesn't.
If they wanted to? With DPI, which they already do.
Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism;
Im no expert on any of this, but I have read a little history on the period and I seemed to recall this being generally false. Lo and behold wikipedia agrees:
The formal education of girls and women began in the middle of the 19th century and was intimately tied to the conception that society had of the appropriate role for women to assume in life....Many early women's colleges began as female seminaries and were responsible for producing an important corps of educators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
In fact, apparently the first women's college in the US was Salem College, a protestant institution established in 1772 by a denomination that was notable for believing in equal gender roles at a time that society did not reflect this.
The revisionism as regards christianity and its relationships with education and women is astounding to me. You'll get things like this page, which allege that the loss of property rights in Rome was due to Christian policy in 306 AD-- despite the fact that Diocletian had just gotten done persecuting the church (as in seizing property and burning churches), and that Constantine would not become (supposedly) Christian for another decade or so. People will talk about the educational backwardism of Christianity, and ignore the role that religious orders played in the creation of universities in europe in the middle ages. Like you, people talk of how Christianity has tried to stifle women's education and utterly ignore its role in the creation of institutions dedicated to their education in a time when society had no desire to do so.
It doesn't matter if it's possible to make a targeted attack against an individual, you could do that with a key too
If the shape of every key you had was publicly visible every time you went outside and in every photo you were in, they would probably be a lot less useful as well.
. That's about as good as it gets. Nothing you could do that ADDS to this could improve this part of your security. Using two of one group is useless. It's useless to require two different PINs. For the obvious reason, someone who can force you to hand over your first pin will also force the second one out of you.
This seems strange to me. Why is the use of 2 categories an improvement, but 2 from one category is not? It seems to me that the attacker who would coerce you to give up 2 "somethings you know" would just as easily force you to give up a "something you know" and a "something you have". But you're differentiating as if a mugger could only demand one type of thing.
Security is layered. Having multiple forms of "something you know" could be useful, just as having multiple "something you haves" could-- and in fact thats not unusual. Many people with smart cards are also going to have hardware tokens; they accomplish different things, and are useful in mitigating different threats.
Slashdot Mirror
1) China isnt communist, theyre authoritarian (possibly fascist). They stopped being communist after Mao died.
2) 66 million are. Many many more practice falun gong. Im also
3) Just to be clear that stance is incompatible with a belief in freedom of speech. Why are you so afraid of people making up their own minds? You have no problem peddling Mao Zedong worship in school.
Its very interesting that english appears to be a second language, you posted as an AC, and you seem to have an intimate knowledge of the official names of the sanctioned Chinese churches which very few people I have talked to know.
Any chance you're posting this from China? Perhaps part of the wangluò pínglùn yuán (50 Cent Army)?
What if I give you a stack of flyers (of my choosing) and you stand in front of your nations capital and hand them out?
Since you clearly have "free speech" laws and can say whatever you want, you have nothing to fear right?
People do this all the time. If you caused a disruption, it is possible you would be asked to leave.
I witnessed this on a random street in China, where a man was handing out flyers in a public square. Police appeared, the man ran, all flyers were confiscated-- including the ones people were holding. That sort of thing simply does not happen in the US.
Just because i handed you a stack of "hate propaganda"
No such thing. See National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Village_of_Skokie
Good thing the US has "separation of state and religion" rules for those of us who do not believe in "god".
This is off topic and out of context. He was specifically asking why someone would go to a country like china and preach an illegal message. I provided the answer. The US's separation of church and state is not relevant because its not illegal in the US to preach such a message.
Here is another one for you, go break some law and then tell them you report to a "higher authority" and see if they buy that one.
Obviously they do not, and missionaries certainly go to prison for it. Are you arguing that it SHOULD be illegal?
They design it to appear sporadic. Generally you have to hit a certain number of "deviations" to trigger a problem, and often things like VPN will work for some short period of time before breaking and bringing your connection to a throttled state.
I was simply demonstrating in stark contrast the difference in "freedom" in China and the US.
As to WHY someone would break the law to evangelize? Peter puts it well:
And the high priest questioned them, 28 saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.” 29 But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men."
Jesus, however, did not, so his birth was not in the spring.
They're completely free, that is until they have a high-enough profile to attract attention
Im not sure what your definition of high-profile is. If you form a house church over there and they find you, you WILL be detained, or deported (if you are an ex-pat), or at the very least monitored. I believe the unofficial threshold for being a concern is a gathering of 15 or more, hardly "high profile".
Not only that, but a vow of atheism is required to have a government career.
No one is ever disappeared for talking to a minor about religion or talking about religion outside of a church.
Many have been detained and deported for it, however, and had congregations threatened if details about other contacts were not revealed.
But if you're just an everyday college student (or an engineer at a multinational), for practical purposes, you have the freedom to say and do anything you want as long as you don't attract a large following.
For all intents and purposes, no religious thought unsanctioned by the government can be discussed. I have not been to a Three-self church, but the reports I have heard indicate that they are not what one would call "orthodox Christianity". Actual protestant churches, like those for Ex-pats, require a foreign visa to enter and tend to have barbed wire or electrical fencing.
Ask the KKK about their thoughts on American free speech.
Its perfectly legal to espouse KKK doctrine; ask the Westboro Baptist Church, or the residents of Skokie, Il during the Nazi demonstration.
for quite some time the NSA was analyzing google searches for forbidden content...
There is no official policy for this, nor has the NSA been found to compel anyone to allow SSL MITM without a court order. In fact there is no evidence currently that any widescale SSL MITMs are going on.
I can also tell you that it is apparently not common knowledge there that if you text something "forbidden" in America, the government gets a copy.
Need some evidence.
Don't you have any gripes with your own government?
Of course I do. But you would have to be absolutely ignorant of life in each country and the repercussions of open political speech in each to even begin making the comparison. The US has nothing even remotely comparable to the GFW.
. Jesus does not seem to have been offended by that tweet. Just people who do not understand these points.
And you should totally lecture them on that point at Thanksgiving or Christmas, so you can be That Guy.
The US government as official policy does not do DPI. While I am quite sure various agencies DO do it, whether it is legal is Big Question #1, and whether its universal is Big Question #2 (and Im sure it isnt). The most you could say for the NSA is they secretly try to subvert comms between you and Google.
China openly (in the sense that its official policy-- they dont generally advertise it) uses filter lists, works with companies to create "custom" chinese software (ie, TOM Skype), hotwords ALL text and voice communication, intercepts and interrupts VPN connections, and simply blocks websites they dont like (like Google). They also directly engage companies like Microsoft and Yahoo to assist in the spying.
Yes, and you could also inform someone on their birthday that theres actually nothing special about the day astronomically and that they're quite insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Its just that you probably arent going to get invited to his birthday party ever again, and while you could make the same remark about objective fact that Tyson did, you'd still be a jerk.
The GP said the church and traditionalism is the source of much of society's view on gender roles.
And that is not reinforced by any bit of history I am aware of. Christianity has tended to improve women's rights, not degrade them, and I posed evidence to support this. I have seen precious little to suggest that GP is correct-- but as I say I am no expert on this so perhaps one of you two could provide sources.
The flip side of that one denomination being so notable for believing in equal gender roles implies that many other denominations did NOT believe as such.
Not necessarily, just that perhaps they made less of a big deal about it. Nevertheless a large number of the women's colleges that sprang up were seminaries, if Wikipedia and some quick googling be believed. The entire reason I objected and did spot research is because it struck me how many venerable old women's colleges are religiously (protestant / catholic) affiliated; it seems disingenuous to claim that Christianity is holding the women back academically in spite of that.
You're right that this is a particularly sensitive area for me, because I see these sort of attacks all over the place, and its highly irritating that this sort of stuff becomes "generally known fact" despite being quite incorrect. It seems to me the only way to fight these pervasive myths is to be sensitive to them and respond with sourced facts whenever I see them.
GP was not being directly confrontational, but he was laying a huge portion of the blame directly on Christianity as being a traditionalist enforcer of the oppression of women; he simply phrased it much more tactfully than that.
And I would agree that not only are they not doing that, but that they probably wont do it. China's whole MO with the GFW is to subtly punish "deviant" internet users, and reward conformant ones. Blocking email from gmail users would punish both and make their filtering more generally known.
They tend to prefer things like making gMail or google really spotty, slow, or unreliable so it is obnoxious to use without it being obvious that its actually censorship.
China doesnt use a handful of pf rules, they use a comprehensive array of filtering, DPI, and firewalling techniques. They've been known to actively probe VPN services to determine whether they are allowable, implement real-time updated keyword content filtering, and forge RST packets for any "undesirable" content.
They are also incredibly proactive about nullifying workarounds; ask the Tor guys how their efforts with e.g. obfsproxy and obfs2 went. Really good at circumventing the GFW for a year or so until it ended up 100% blocked just like stock OpenVPN.
Either way its difficult to defend the idea that China intentionally did this
No, its not, it fits 100% in with their existing (bad) relationship with google.
when google gladly censors their search results and complies with all local regulations.
Your information is about 5 years out of date. Ever since the Aurora hacks in 2010, Google has ceased all cooperation with the Chinese government on that front, and has ceased filtering on their end. They have in fact on a number of occasions worked to alert users when third party tampering has occurred, which has led to a number of confrontations with the Chinese gov't. Notably, in June of this year, China completely blocked Google prior to the TIanenmen Square anniversary.
Google remains a sterling partner of the chinese leadership in their quiet, tacit business participation in what for all intents and purposes amounts to a capitalist dictatorship with a communist logo.
Except for the part where they are the one major internet company NOT cooperating with them, while Microsoft and Yahoo continue to do so. Hope you dont use Skype over there.
Yes, the people I know who were deported for "unlawful speech"-- totally imagining that. Imagining Liu Xiaobo too, and illegal flower ceremony. Tank man? Never happened. Suppression of free speech during the olympics? Definately not.
And all those deals with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (since reneged, which is why China is so irked with them) in 2006 to help spy on their users and expose dissidents? Internet myth.
Sounds like you have it all figured out.
1) Do you own a passport?
2) Is your passport stamped with a Chinese entry visa?
Yes, and yes.
In return Id challenge you to stand on a corner and preach the risen Christ, and see how long it is before thugs detain you and give you a 1-way ticket out of the country. Or you could try handing out pamplhets advocating democracy-- I actually saw one of those-- You'd get the same response.]
By the way-- if you are a chinese national, please do not do this as you will get a 1-way trip but it wont be out of the country.
They certainly don't hide their censorship, let alone have a problem with people complimenting them for it
You're naieve. Some of it is in the open, a lot of it is not.
For instance: Ask your average Chinese college student whether they have freedom of religion / speech, and they will say yes. What they often dont know is that you can be arrested for talking to a minor about religion, or talking about religion outside of a state-sanctioned church. Ask the Falun-Gong about their thoughts on Chinese free speech.
Another example, for quite some time the GFW was analyzing google searches for forbidden content, and massively throttling connections with hits. Google posted an alert on their search page when such throttling occurred, which made the government quite angry. Why do you suppose that is, if theyre quite open about it? Why throttle, rather than displaying a block page?
I can also tell you that it is apparently not common knowledge there that if you text something "forbidden" in China, the government gets a copy.
Its wonderful that you think China is such a free country and that all of the reports of their human rights issues are apparently overstated. Maybe you think Liu XIaobo received his Nobel Peace Prize and was released from detenention, or that his wife has been released-- Im sure they would be thrilled to learn this.
but this is beyond what they have been reported to have done so far.
No its not, they were tampering with connections to google in the past based on what search query you entered and forging RST packets if you searched for "illegal content".
DPI is the bread and butter of the GFW; Im sort of astonished at how naieve people are about what they actually do.
How, though, does the Great Firewall stop email from going between Google servers in the US, and Yahoo/Microsoft/etc servers in the US? Short answer: It doesn't.
If they wanted to? With DPI, which they already do.
China does DPI on basically all connections inside the country.
Its called "trolling", you cant tell me that he didnt realize the reaction people would have.
Who exactly is this them? I know very few people who have an opinion either way regarding Tyson.
Actually it was likely September, not the spring. Apparently, John was born in the spring, Jesus was born 6 months later.
Ever heard the term flamebait?
Gender roles come from two places in modern America: One, Churches and other bastation of traditionalism;
Im no expert on any of this, but I have read a little history on the period and I seemed to recall this being generally false. Lo and behold wikipedia agrees:
The formal education of girls and women began in the middle of the 19th century and was intimately tied to the conception that society had of the appropriate role for women to assume in life....Many early women's colleges began as female seminaries and were responsible for producing an important corps of educators
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
In fact, apparently the first women's college in the US was Salem College, a protestant institution established in 1772 by a denomination that was notable for believing in equal gender roles at a time that society did not reflect this.
The revisionism as regards christianity and its relationships with education and women is astounding to me. You'll get things like this page, which allege that the loss of property rights in Rome was due to Christian policy in 306 AD-- despite the fact that Diocletian had just gotten done persecuting the church (as in seizing property and burning churches), and that Constantine would not become (supposedly) Christian for another decade or so. People will talk about the educational backwardism of Christianity, and ignore the role that religious orders played in the creation of universities in europe in the middle ages. Like you, people talk of how Christianity has tried to stifle women's education and utterly ignore its role in the creation of institutions dedicated to their education in a time when society had no desire to do so.
The mainstream is looking for someone to blame,
And so are you.
It doesn't matter if it's possible to make a targeted attack against an individual, you could do that with a key too
If the shape of every key you had was publicly visible every time you went outside and in every photo you were in, they would probably be a lot less useful as well.
. That's about as good as it gets. Nothing you could do that ADDS to this could improve this part of your security. Using two of one group is useless. It's useless to require two different PINs. For the obvious reason, someone who can force you to hand over your first pin will also force the second one out of you.
This seems strange to me. Why is the use of 2 categories an improvement, but 2 from one category is not? It seems to me that the attacker who would coerce you to give up 2 "somethings you know" would just as easily force you to give up a "something you know" and a "something you have". But you're differentiating as if a mugger could only demand one type of thing.
Security is layered. Having multiple forms of "something you know" could be useful, just as having multiple "something you haves" could-- and in fact thats not unusual. Many people with smart cards are also going to have hardware tokens; they accomplish different things, and are useful in mitigating different threats.