T-Mobile has unlimited GPRS data for very cheap (I think it was $29.95 month). I got it working with gprsec connected to my Sony/Ericsson via bluetooth.
A few gotchas....
1) I had to set the gprsec to use slot 2 for the GPRS number instead of default 1
2) There is a bug in the Sony/Ericsson stack which you have to work around if you use IRDA.
It's amazing how out of touch people are. You obviously have never been to a Chinese internet bar, or even to China.
I doubt reading the NYT is the reason why they shut down the cafes. First, NYT is not blocked in China. Second, I doubt you could read anything in an internet bar, since its so darn loud from people fragging each other playing Doom 3. People in internet bars are not reading news, they are generally playing a huge number of pirated video games.
My guess is that the Chinese government did something after complaints by parents that their kids were played adult video games.
The irony here is that an internet bar would have a ***much*** harder time in the US than in China. Any internet bar in the US would get shut down in about five minutes because of copyright laws, and any owner of an internet bar in the US would likely end up in jail for criminal copyright infringement, since there is a staggerring amount of IP law violation that has to take place in order to get an internet bar working.
The number seems about right. Pretty much every city in China has many dozens of internet bars.
What you are missing is that the exist in China and not in the United States because of intellectual property reasons. In China, you find a storefront, buy some cheap computers, and get cheap internet access, and (this is the important part) a pirated copy of every pirated video game under the sun. You attract a huge number of teenagers who can play Doom, Counterstrike, and every MMORG that has ever been written. You can't do this in the United States because the software police will come in and shut you down. In China, intellectual property is something that no one cares about.
A typical internet bar is a loud video arcade where a lot of teenagers are playing MMORG's and downloading mp3's. When you log into one of those machines, you get this huge menu of all of the games that you can play, and they are really cheap , (about 10 cents/hour).
There is no way one could operate in the United States. Almost all of the software used in the internet bars is pirated, and anyone in the US who tried to set an internet bar up in the United States would get instantly shut down for copyright violations. The Chinese government frankly does not care at all about this.
Curiously, my impression is that the internet bars help the government stay in power. In areas where there is high unemployment, a lot of unemployed people will spend huge amounts of time in those bars playing video games. I suspect that this gets out a lot of frustration and boredom that might otherwise be directed at the government.
1) I believe them because of the way that the firewall is structured. The Great Firewall of China works by IP blocks, which makes it trivial to get around. If it were the case that Western companies were helping the Chinese government develop data-mining techniques or anti-cryptography techniques, then you might have a point, and this would be objectionable (partly because those technologies would probably eventually be used by Western governments). But the evidence that this is not going on. You can reroute via a proxy server, and ssh/https connections aren't being blocked.
Getting back to the original point. Laying fiber is good because it makes it much *harder* to do content based filter. It's easy for North Korea to monitor all internet connections out. It's difficult to impossible for China to do so because there too much traffic which contains https, VoIP, video.
If you are the only one sending e-mail, it's easy to keep track of you. If everyone is connected to the internet, it makes it much easier in hide in the weeds.
2) Which defeats your purpose. The Chinese government will just slam the door in your face and keep everyone poor like the North Koreans. If you want to loosen the Chinese governments grip on power, you want to make people in China rich and well connected to information. Putting in internet connections *even with censorship* makes communications more open.
Not to be too harsh since your heart seems to be in the right place but.....
I think here GTE has helped free speech in China more than you have. A fiber system in and out of China which the government tries to censor is *far* better than no system at all. One reason that China is finding much harder to censor the internet than Cuba or North Korea is that there is so much traffic going back and forth that its impossible to monitor it all. Putting in fiber helps increase internet usage and makes it much harder for the government to censor it.
Something to keep in mind is that on the same weekend that Tiananmen happened, the Burmese government also shot a whole bunch of students. No one remembers or even knows about it, because there weren't a million television cameras in Burma that weekend.
Why don't people use freenet for swapping Mp3? Because there are easier alternatives available.
Generally nothing bad will happen to you if you read subversive content, and the firewall is ridiculously easy to get around. If you are really paranoid you can log in at a random internet bar.
Bad things will happen to you if you post subversive content (and by this I don't mean post a bulletin board message I mean hosting an anti-party web site). Here freenet doesn't help you much because by just using a non-standard protocol, you limit your audience, and if you host an anti-party website in China, then they will track you down just like the RIAA will track down websites with bootleg songs. What you want is "no hard targets" that the government can track, and just trying to get freenet installed and running is a hard target.
There are ways around the second type of censorship. It's actually not that difficult to express or post views that are critical of the Communist Party or government even on government sponsored bulletin boards like the People's Daily board (which is much more interesting to read than you might expect). You just have to use code words and think about how to phrase things. (The closest analogy is trying writing a corporate memo that says that the CEO is an idiot. If you directly write that the CEO is an idiot, you are the idiot, but its usually possible to get that meaning out without saying it directly.)
The trouble is that the censorship technologies are pretty much the same as the non-censorship technologies. It's not that Cisco sells the Chinese government special censorship routers, the technology that the Chinese government uses is basically the same comodity technology that everyone else uses. The router has no way of knowing if its the Chinese government trying to censor political sites or a company trying to keep its intranet isolated.
But I also don't understand the logic behind some of the posts. It seems to me that it is far, far better for Western companies help the Chinese government get a censored internet than to take the moral high ground, and not sell the Chinese the technology at all.
Think of the Trojan horse. If you don't sell the Chinese these sorts of technologies, they are going to be less likely to develop internet infrastructure. If you sell the Chinese these sorts of technologies, yes the Chinese government will try to censor the content, but they'll fail miserably at it.
Actually, I think you are "blaming the workers" when then fault is really in management.
Getting people to tell the truth is really hard. It's even harder if you are dealing with people who have been culturally conditioned to believe that very bad things will happen to them if they tell authority something that authority doesn't want to hear.
In managing groups of Chinese people, its very important to establish that nothing bad is going to happen to them if they point out a problem. It's also important to have channels by which people can privately and anonymously bring up issues without fear of retribution. Finally, its also important to have a sixth sense and realize that something is going wrong without having people tell you.
Getting back to the internet, one thing that is good about the internet in a Chinese context is that it makes it possible to post things more or less anonymously. (Yes you can trace the IP, but if it goes back to some internet bar which hundreds of people are using, then you are out of luck.)
Actually its very likely that they were questioning things, it was just that they weren't telling you that they were questioning things.
My experience in working with Chinese people, is that they do think for themselves. However, (for really obvious reasons), they generally are very reluctant to openly challenge authority. This can make really, really difficult to manage Chinese because they often know something is wrong, are talking about it among themselves, and scared out of their minds to tell the manager about it.
Yes, and then we should organize and condemn any Western efforts to help the Chinese build their internet infrastructure.
That way instead of having an internet infrastructure which the government tries and fails to censor, the Chinese will have no internet at all!!! It is after all much better to demonstrate our moral indignation than to actually do something useful to advance human rights and freedom in China.....
I've been on grant review boards, and being open source is big positive factor. Grant review boards are often concerned that 1) you aren't duplicating the wheel 2) that the software that you produce won't be orphaned once the grant runs out. There is also the "why aren't you funding this via venture capital" question.
And like all bureaucracies. its subject to ineffciencies.... So don't assume
1) that the regulations are going to be issued, and
2) that the regulations are going to be followed once they are issued. Particularly with respect to information technology, the Chinese government often issued regulations that everyone ignores.
I didn't mention this earlier because I didn't want Eolas to win, but I guess there is no harm in mentioning it now.
During the litigation, lawyers from Microsoft contacted me about a program that I wrote in 1992 called tkwww which was an early web browser. The important thing about tkwww was that it rendered images by calling an external application xli.
This was sufficiently close to what microsoft was looking for that a lawyer (who was named Vlad of all things) talked to me about what I did. I stupidly gave him a pointer to a URL through which they downloaded everything, and even more stupidly did not bill them anything at the time.
When I finally came around to sending them an invoice I got some stupid excuse about them might needing me as a witness so that they couldn't pay me anything. I never heard from them again.
The reason I didn't mention this earlier was because I thought that the Eolas patent was silly and I didn't want to say anything that would help them. Now that they won the case against Microsoft, I'd like to let everyone know about this prior art, in case Eolas decided to go against other people.
Since when is being oriental a requirement of being an agent of the Chinese government? I remember that during the Cold War, most of the Soviet agents in the United States didn't have any Russian ancestry. Sometimes all you need to do is to wave a lot of money.
Anyway, the flaw in your thinking is to think in terms of either-or. For example, all of those laptops that are made in China, where do you think the design work and a lot of the fabrication work for them takes place? In the United States. Intel, Dell, and AMD hire huge numbers of people in Austin area.
Cutting off trade with Asia would be a net job killer. You make laptops so expensive that people can't afford them, and so you kill all of the design and marketing jobs that are based in the United States.
On the other hand, I have seen reports that prison labor has often improved conditions for prisoners. In order to improve productivity and quality, the prisons have to improve working conditions.
The other thing is that if you don't get prisoners to work, then what are you supposed to do with them.
The problem with AI and HRW is that what they say is true but sometimes misleading. There job is to focus on human rights abuses, which is a good thing, but they sometimes make it look like the whole nation is some big gulag, which its not.
The threshold for getting into trouble with the government is organizing. No one is going to bother you if you have a sidewalk chat about politics in which you complain about how bad the government is. When you start organizing petition drives, that's when you get in trouble. The Chinese government has a reason for doing things this way, because it means that they don't have to monitor everyone, just the few organizers, and then rely on people's natural apathy.
As far as prisons. You do realize that China has its share of burglars, drug abusers, and prostitutes.
Again, it makes sense if you stop thinking about China in terms of averages. True 99 percent of Chinese couldn't afford an Audi, but 1 percent of a billion is enough customers to make luxury car manufacturers take notice. And what really has people taking notice is the possibility that 1 percent can afford the cars now, and maybe 3 percent, ten years from now.
and the main compliant that the China has against the United States is that it is selling high tech weaponry to Taiwan. If the United States abandons Taiwan, PRC can take over which is exactly what Beijing wants.
Also keep in mind that the only reason all Taiwanese high tech industries haven't moved to the PRC before is because of the the Wassanar Agreement that makes it easier for Taiwan to get technology.
Or maybe you are the Communist agent. You do realize that one of the main goals of the Beijing government is to have the United States withdraw support for Taiwan.
Nepotism and lack of transparency are not as big of problems as you think they are. If you are a Western company doing business in China, you will most likely find the brother-in-law of the Politiburo, put him on your board of directors, and pay him enough so that he doesn't mess things up for you. It doesn't cost that much more than a good lawyer would, and if brother in law of Politburo one demands too much, you can always drop him and go to nephew of Politburo two. (I'm oversimplifying. In most cases, you probably don't want a nephew of a Politburo member. The nephew of the county administrator would be more useful, but you get the idea.)
China is not Communist in any meaningful sense of the word. About 20 years ago, the Chinese leadership figured out that Communism doesn't work, so they junked that system.
I've actually doubtful that much will come of this in the near term.
1) Chip design is very hard and very capital intensive, and Intel and AMD have a lock on the market. Creating an indigenous world class chip is going to take decades.
As far the short term, I think that the chances for the dragon chip being a commercial success are far lower than the VIA CPU.
1) The big problem for Linux in China is that China has weak IP laws. Because China has weak IP laws, everyone runs with pirated copies of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
T-Mobile has unlimited GPRS data for very cheap (I think it was $29.95 month). I got it working with gprsec connected to my Sony/Ericsson via bluetooth.
A few gotchas....
1) I had to set the gprsec to use slot 2 for the GPRS number instead of default 1
2) There is a bug in the Sony/Ericsson stack which you have to work around if you use IRDA.
Sigh.....
It's amazing how out of touch people are. You obviously have never been to a Chinese internet bar, or even to China.
I doubt reading the NYT is the reason why they shut down the cafes. First, NYT is not blocked in China. Second, I doubt you could read anything in an internet bar, since its so darn loud from people fragging each other playing Doom 3. People in internet bars are not reading news, they are generally playing a huge number of pirated video games.
My guess is that the Chinese government did something after complaints by parents that their kids were played adult video games.
The irony here is that an internet bar would have a ***much*** harder time in the US than in China. Any internet bar in the US would get shut down in about five minutes because of copyright laws, and any owner of an internet bar in the US would likely end up in jail for criminal copyright infringement, since there is a staggerring amount of IP law violation that has to take place in order to get an internet bar working.
The number seems about right. Pretty much every city in China has many dozens of internet bars.
What you are missing is that the exist in China and not in the United States because of intellectual property reasons. In China, you find a storefront, buy some cheap computers, and get cheap internet access, and (this is the important part) a pirated copy of every pirated video game under the sun. You attract a huge number of teenagers who can play Doom, Counterstrike, and every MMORG that has ever been written. You can't do this in the United States because the software police will come in and shut you down. In China, intellectual property is something that no one cares about.
A typical internet bar is a loud video arcade where a lot of teenagers are playing MMORG's and downloading mp3's. When you log into one of those machines, you get this huge menu of all of the games that you can play, and they are really cheap , (about 10 cents/hour).
There is no way one could operate in the United States. Almost all of the software used in the internet bars is pirated, and anyone in the US who tried to set an internet bar up in the United States would get instantly shut down for copyright
violations. The Chinese government frankly does not care at all about this.
Curiously, my impression is that the internet bars
help the government stay in power. In areas where
there is high unemployment, a lot of unemployed people will
spend huge amounts of time in those bars playing
video games. I suspect that this gets out a lot of frustration and boredom that might otherwise be directed at the government.
1) I believe them because of the way that the firewall is structured. The Great Firewall of China works by IP blocks, which makes it trivial to get around. If it were the case that Western companies were helping the Chinese government develop data-mining techniques or anti-cryptography techniques, then you might have a point, and this would be objectionable (partly because those technologies would probably eventually be used by Western governments). But the evidence that this is not going on. You can reroute via a proxy server, and ssh/https connections aren't being blocked.
Getting back to the original point. Laying fiber is good because it makes it much *harder* to do content based filter. It's easy for North Korea to monitor all internet connections out. It's difficult to impossible for China to do so because there too much traffic which contains https, VoIP, video.
If you are the only one sending e-mail, it's easy to keep track of you. If everyone is connected to the internet, it makes it much easier in hide in the weeds.
2) Which defeats your purpose. The Chinese government will just slam the door in your face and keep everyone poor like the North Koreans. If you want to loosen the Chinese governments grip on power, you want to make people in China rich and well connected to information. Putting in internet connections *even with censorship* makes communications more open.
1) There's very little custom designed censorship technology involved here.
2) How do you propose to force the Chinese government to not allow censorship?
Not to be too harsh since your heart seems to be in the right place but.....
I think here GTE has helped free speech in China more than you have. A fiber system in and out of China which the government tries to censor is *far* better than no system at all. One reason that China is finding much harder to censor the internet than Cuba or North Korea is that there is so much traffic going back and forth that its impossible to monitor it all. Putting in fiber helps increase internet usage and makes it much harder for the government to censor it.
Something to keep in mind is that on the same weekend that Tiananmen happened, the Burmese government also shot a whole bunch of students. No one remembers or even knows about it, because there weren't a million television cameras in Burma that weekend.
Why don't people use freenet for swapping Mp3? Because there are easier alternatives available.
Generally nothing bad will happen to you if you
read subversive content, and the firewall is ridiculously easy to get around. If you are really paranoid you can log in at a random internet bar.
Bad things will happen to you if you post subversive content (and by this I don't mean post a bulletin board message I mean hosting an anti-party web site). Here freenet doesn't help you much because by just using a non-standard protocol, you limit your audience, and if you host an anti-party website in China, then they will track you down just like the RIAA will track down websites with bootleg songs. What you want is "no hard targets" that the government can track, and just trying to get freenet installed and running is a hard target.
There are ways around the second type of censorship. It's actually not that difficult to express or post views that are critical of the Communist Party or government even on government sponsored bulletin boards like the People's Daily board (which is much more interesting to read than you might expect). You just have to use code words and think about how to phrase things. (The closest analogy is trying writing a corporate memo that says that the CEO is an idiot. If you directly write that the CEO is an idiot, you are the idiot, but its usually possible to get that meaning out without saying it directly.)
The trouble is that the censorship technologies are pretty much the same as the non-censorship technologies. It's not that Cisco sells the Chinese government special censorship routers, the technology that the Chinese government uses is basically the same comodity technology that everyone else uses. The router has no way of knowing if its the Chinese government trying to censor political sites or a company trying to keep its intranet isolated.
But I also don't understand the logic behind some of the posts. It seems to me that it is far, far better for Western companies help the Chinese government get a censored internet than to take the moral high ground, and not sell the Chinese the technology at all.
Think of the Trojan horse. If you don't sell the Chinese these sorts of technologies, they are going to be less likely to develop internet infrastructure. If you sell the Chinese these sorts of technologies, yes the Chinese government will try to censor the content, but they'll fail miserably at it.
It's not. I've been there and it works fine.
Actually, I think you are "blaming the workers" when then fault is really in management.
Getting people to tell the truth is really hard. It's even harder if you are dealing with people who have been culturally conditioned to believe that very bad things will happen to them if they tell authority something that authority doesn't want to hear.
In managing groups of Chinese people, its very important to establish that nothing bad is going to happen to them if they point out a problem. It's also important to have channels by which people can privately and anonymously bring up issues without fear of retribution. Finally, its also important to have a sixth sense and realize that something is going wrong without having people tell you.
Getting back to the internet, one thing that is good about the internet in a Chinese context is that it makes it possible to post things more or less anonymously. (Yes you can trace the IP, but if it goes back to some internet bar which hundreds of people are using, then you are out of luck.)
Actually its very likely that they were questioning things, it was just that they weren't telling you that they were questioning things.
My experience in working with Chinese people, is that they do think for themselves. However, (for really obvious reasons), they generally are very reluctant to openly challenge authority. This can make really, really difficult to manage Chinese because they often know something is wrong, are talking about it among themselves, and scared out of their minds to tell the manager about it.
Yes, and then we should organize and condemn any
Western efforts to help the Chinese build their
internet infrastructure.
That way instead of having an internet infrastructure which the government tries and fails to censor, the Chinese will have no internet at all!!! It is after all much better to demonstrate our moral indignation than to actually do something useful to advance human rights and freedom in China.....
Wrong.
I've been on grant review boards, and being open source is big positive factor. Grant review boards are often concerned that 1) you aren't duplicating the wheel 2) that the software that you produce won't be orphaned once the grant runs out. There is also the "why aren't you funding this via venture capital" question.
And like all bureaucracies. its subject to ineffciencies.... So don't assume
1) that the regulations are going to be issued, and
2) that the regulations are going to be followed once they are issued. Particularly with respect to information technology, the Chinese government often issued regulations that everyone ignores.
I didn't mention this earlier because I didn't want Eolas to win, but I guess there is no harm in mentioning it now.
During the litigation, lawyers from Microsoft contacted me about a program that I wrote in 1992 called tkwww which was an early web browser. The important thing about tkwww was that it rendered images by calling an external application xli.
This was sufficiently close to what microsoft was looking for that a lawyer (who was named Vlad of all things) talked to me about what I did. I stupidly gave him a pointer to a URL through which they downloaded everything, and even more stupidly did not bill them anything at the time.
When I finally came around to sending them an invoice I got some stupid excuse about them might needing me as a witness so that they couldn't pay me anything. I never heard from them again.
The reason I didn't mention this earlier was because I thought that the Eolas patent was silly and I didn't want to say anything that would help them. Now that they won the case against Microsoft, I'd like to let everyone know about this prior art, in case Eolas decided to go against other people.
Since when is being oriental a requirement of being an agent of the Chinese government? I remember that during the Cold War, most of the Soviet agents in the United States didn't have any Russian ancestry. Sometimes all you need to do is to wave a lot of money.
Anyway, the flaw in your thinking is to think in terms of either-or. For example, all of those laptops that are made in China, where do you think the design work and a lot of the fabrication work for them takes place? In the United States. Intel, Dell, and AMD hire huge numbers of people in Austin area.
Cutting off trade with Asia would be a net job killer. You make laptops so expensive that people can't afford them, and so you kill all of the design and marketing jobs that are based in the United States.
On the other hand, I have seen reports that prison labor has often improved conditions for prisoners. In order to improve productivity and quality, the prisons have to improve working conditions.
The other thing is that if you don't get prisoners to work, then what are you supposed to do with them.
The problem with AI and HRW is that what they say is true but sometimes misleading. There job is to focus on human rights abuses, which is a good thing, but they sometimes make it look like the whole nation is some big gulag, which its not.
The threshold for getting into trouble with the government is organizing. No one is going to bother you if you have a sidewalk chat about politics in which you complain about how bad the government is. When you start organizing petition drives, that's when you get in trouble. The Chinese government has a reason for doing things this way, because it means that they don't have to monitor everyone, just the few organizers, and then rely on people's natural apathy.
As far as prisons. You do realize that China has its share of burglars, drug abusers, and prostitutes.
So where do you suggest we purchase notebooks from?
I don't think that there is a single notebook out there that doesn't have PRC or Taiwan somewhere in the supply chain.
Again, it makes sense if you stop thinking about China in terms of averages. True 99 percent of Chinese couldn't afford an Audi, but 1 percent of a billion is enough customers to make luxury car manufacturers take notice. And what really has people taking notice is the possibility that 1 percent can afford the cars now, and maybe 3 percent, ten years from now.
No I am serious.
t i_ 133.html
Read any issue of the People's Daily, like this
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/zhuanti/Zhuan
and the main compliant that the China has against the United States is that it is selling high tech weaponry to Taiwan. If the United States abandons Taiwan, PRC can take over which is exactly what Beijing wants.
Also keep in mind that the only reason all Taiwanese high tech industries haven't moved to the PRC before is because of the the Wassanar Agreement that makes it easier for Taiwan to get technology.
.
Or maybe you are the Communist agent. You do realize that one of the main goals of the Beijing government is to have the United States withdraw support for Taiwan.
Another person that doesn't understand China.
Nepotism and lack of transparency are not as big of problems as you think they are. If you are a Western company doing business in China, you will most likely find the brother-in-law of the Politiburo, put him on your board of directors, and pay him enough so that he doesn't mess things up for you. It doesn't cost that much more than a good lawyer would, and if brother in law of Politburo one demands too much, you can always drop him and go to nephew of Politburo two. (I'm oversimplifying. In most cases, you probably don't want a nephew of a Politburo member. The nephew of the county administrator would be more useful, but you get the idea.)
China is not Communist in any meaningful sense of the word. About 20 years ago, the Chinese leadership figured out that Communism doesn't work, so they junked that system.
I've actually doubtful that much will come of this in the near term.
1) Chip design is very hard and very capital intensive, and Intel and AMD have a lock on the market. Creating an indigenous world class chip is going to take decades.
As far the short term, I think that the chances for the dragon chip being a commercial success are far lower than the VIA CPU.
1) The big problem for Linux in China is that China has weak IP laws. Because China has weak IP laws, everyone runs with pirated copies of Windows.