My experience is that ebay is not useful any more for buying computer parts. The savings is not worth the hassle/risk. However.....
The flip side is that while it's a lousy place to buy stuff. It's a wonderful place to sell stuff.
The fact that the prices are not much about market rate is wonderful if you are a seller since you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to sell at the market rate, and
It's also a wonderful place to get naked
notebook computers (i.e. no OS). With other
retailers including online, it's a hassle to get them *NOT* to install an OS on the system. With
ebay, most notebooks come without an OS and are
$200 or so less expensive. This is good if
you are planning on installing linux or are
replacing another broken/stolen notebook.
We are a non-profit which produces free GPL'ed
databases of distance learning courses and
programs. We could use a donation. We could
use some coding help even more. Email me
at president@gnacademy.org if you are interested.
Knowing Chinese customs. Shipping the latest cool movie from the West is probably not a good idea. More likely than not, someone is going to find some pretext to confiscate the movie and take it home to watch it themselves.
Oh yes and in doing a threat analysis there are two factors that the Chinese government uses to determine how hard to strike.
Level of organization. Someone who just reads the Bible privately is unlikely to run into problems. Someone who holds house churches is likely to have to deal with some level of harrassment. Someone who manages to hold a demonstration of 10,000 people outside CCP headquarters (i.e. Falugong) is going to get hit really hard by everything the government has.
Leadership positions. In general the PRC tends to be lenient toward followers. It instead identifies organizational leaders and hits them hard. This is not due to niceness, but because the PRC can't jail everyone, and if you are nice to the followers and mean to the leaders, then a lot of the followers are going to reconsider being a follower.
Just one thing that puzzles me. Why is it necessary to have electronic communications with the outside world at all? It seems that the safest thing to do is to just go in, do what you have to do, and then get out. I'm not sure why e-mail contact is necessary.
People here seem to be making the classic mistake of security issues and talking technology without explicitly defining a security model. Assuming that you are doing something that the Chinese government does not like, this means defining the resources, constraints, and motivation of the Chinese government.
The PRC simply does not have the resources to monitor all internet traffic. It's efforts at internet blocking and encryption licensing have been pathetic jokes. Furthermore, it is too interested in making China an economic powerhouse to try the North Korean solution of blocking all links. So what it does is to focus on a few high profile cases, strike really, really hard in those few cases and let self-censorship take care of the rest. So your job is basically not to be one of those few high profile cases.
O.K. so what does the Chinese government care about? It really doesn't care what people think, what it cares about is largely staying in power. This means that it tends to focus on people who are creating an organization that could challenge the Communist Party. This means that you are not in particular risk if you just communicate private thoughts, but if you try to organize people, you need to be really, really careful. This is particularly the case if you are in any "leadership position." The PRC has extremely limited resources and so it tends to focus in on people in leadership positions and strike them really, really hard.
So in the case of China, the thing to do is to stay "under the radar". Reading Hotmail e-mail through https is unlikely to attract a lot of attention. Setting up an "down with the communist party" web and bulletin board site is likely to get you unwanted attention.
Also, something that should be quickly obvious is that there probably isn't a "one size fits all" solution. Something that works in China, would probably not work well in North Korea, Iran, or Syria and vice versa. In the case of China, the internet is well developed enough so that it's easy for a tree to hide in the forest. This is *not* the case in North Korea, and I don't know about Iran or Syria.
One final thing. Why am I telling you all this? I strongly suspect that if I knew your political ideology I'd strongly disagree with it, and I doubt you would care too much for what I think. The reason I'm telling you all this is that I think the key to Chinese political progress is the development of "civil society" and anything that makes exchanging ideas in China easier (even slightly) is a good thing.
First of all, just used encrypted e-mail or https. The volume of e-mail is so high that the Chinese government isn't even bothering to monitor e-mail. Moreover, the Chinese government for the most part does not care what people say in private conversations as long as it's nothing that can be construed as organizing opposition to the state. What you should be worried about is *NOT* the connection between China and the rest of the world. What you should be worried about is data physical residing in China. Talking about politics over private e-mail will *NOT* get you in much trouble. Setting up an anti-government website which is physically located in China will get you in a heap of trouble. Also, if what you are doing is construed as anti-government, and you are arrested or deported, all of the e-mail correspondence on your hard disk is likely to be read. So you could spend all of your time going encryption and all of that would be useless if the police get physical access to your machine. So your best bet is to run e-mail through https and a Hotmail server which is located outside of China. Also make sure you clean your caches so that you have *NOTHING* on your machine that would be of use to the police if they get access to it (i.e. lists of people you have been talking to). Not only would having interesting data on your machine be devastating if you do get picked up, it would also give the police an incentive to pick you up. China isn't a problem in internet communications. Places like North Korea and Iraq are. For all of its worries about political dissent, the Chinese government is more interested in economic growth and turning China into a superpower, and this limits the amount of repression that the government is willing to engage in (i.e. it would have no problems with internet dissent if it shut down all the servers but its not about to do that). Also, the problem really isn't in the technical aspects of communication. One thing that I've noticed is that people in the West are remarkably uninterested in what people in China actually think, especially when it is different from preconceived notions of how Chinese people should think. Sometimes I think it's amazing how people who campaign for democracy show such remarkable disinterest or in some cases contempt for what people really think.
Somehow I have the feeling that if the Chinese government really were to be banning Win Y2K that the news would come out of some other source than a small-town newspaper of little importance.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the prices are not much about market rate is wonderful if you are a seller since you wouldn't otherwise have a chance to sell at the market rate, and
notebook computers (i.e. no OS). With other
retailers including online, it's a hassle to get them *NOT* to install an OS on the system. With
ebay, most notebooks come without an OS and are
$200 or so less expensive. This is good if
you are planning on installing linux or are
replacing another broken/stolen notebook.
We are a non-profit which produces free GPL'ed databases of distance learning courses and programs. We could use a donation. We could use some coding help even more. Email me at president@gnacademy.org if you are interested.
No the internet won't turn China into a democratic nirvanna, but China is a lot more open and free with the internet than without it.
Knowing Chinese customs. Shipping the latest cool movie from the West is probably not a good idea. More likely than not, someone is going to find some pretext to confiscate the movie and take it home to watch it themselves.
- Level of organization. Someone who just reads the Bible privately is unlikely to run into problems. Someone who holds house churches is likely to have to deal with some level of harrassment. Someone who manages to hold a demonstration of 10,000 people outside CCP headquarters (i.e. Falugong) is going to get hit really hard by everything the government has.
- Leadership positions. In general the PRC tends to be lenient toward followers. It instead identifies organizational leaders and hits them hard. This is not due to niceness, but because the PRC can't jail everyone, and if you are nice to the followers and mean to the leaders, then a lot of the followers are going to reconsider being a follower.
Just one thing that puzzles me. Why is it necessary to have electronic communications with the outside world at all? It seems that the safest thing to do is to just go in, do what you have to do, and then get out. I'm not sure why e-mail contact is necessary.The PRC simply does not have the resources to monitor all internet traffic. It's efforts at internet blocking and encryption licensing have been pathetic jokes. Furthermore, it is too interested in making China an economic powerhouse to try the North Korean solution of blocking all links. So what it does is to focus on a few high profile cases, strike really, really hard in those few cases and let self-censorship take care of the rest. So your job is basically not to be one of those few high profile cases.
O.K. so what does the Chinese government care about? It really doesn't care what people think, what it cares about is largely staying in power. This means that it tends to focus on people who are creating an organization that could challenge the Communist Party. This means that you are not in particular risk if you just communicate private thoughts, but if you try to organize people, you need to be really, really careful. This is particularly the case if you are in any "leadership position." The PRC has extremely limited resources and so it tends to focus in on people in leadership positions and strike them really, really hard.
So in the case of China, the thing to do is to stay "under the radar". Reading Hotmail e-mail through https is unlikely to attract a lot of attention. Setting up an "down with the communist party" web and bulletin board site is likely to get you unwanted attention.
Also, something that should be quickly obvious is that there probably isn't a "one size fits all" solution. Something that works in China, would probably not work well in North Korea, Iran, or Syria and vice versa. In the case of China, the internet is well developed enough so that it's easy for a tree to hide in the forest. This is *not* the case in North Korea, and I don't know about Iran or Syria.
One final thing. Why am I telling you all this? I strongly suspect that if I knew your political ideology I'd strongly disagree with it, and I doubt you would care too much for what I think. The reason I'm telling you all this is that I think the key to Chinese political progress is the development of "civil society" and anything that makes exchanging ideas in China easier (even slightly) is a good thing.
First of all, just used encrypted e-mail or https. The volume of e-mail is so high that the Chinese government isn't even bothering to monitor e-mail. Moreover, the Chinese government for the most part does not care what people say in private conversations as long as it's nothing that can be construed as organizing opposition to the state. What you should be worried about is *NOT* the connection between China and the rest of the world. What you should be worried about is data physical residing in China. Talking about politics over private e-mail will *NOT* get you in much trouble. Setting up an anti-government website which is physically located in China will get you in a heap of trouble. Also, if what you are doing is construed as anti-government, and you are arrested or deported, all of the e-mail correspondence on your hard disk is likely to be read. So you could spend all of your time going encryption and all of that would be useless if the police get physical access to your machine. So your best bet is to run e-mail through https and a Hotmail server which is located outside of China. Also make sure you clean your caches so that you have *NOTHING* on your machine that would be of use to the police if they get access to it (i.e. lists of people you have been talking to). Not only would having interesting data on your machine be devastating if you do get picked up, it would also give the police an incentive to pick you up. China isn't a problem in internet communications. Places like North Korea and Iraq are. For all of its worries about political dissent, the Chinese government is more interested in economic growth and turning China into a superpower, and this limits the amount of repression that the government is willing to engage in (i.e. it would have no problems with internet dissent if it shut down all the servers but its not about to do that). Also, the problem really isn't in the technical aspects of communication. One thing that I've noticed is that people in the West are remarkably uninterested in what people in China actually think, especially when it is different from preconceived notions of how Chinese people should think. Sometimes I think it's amazing how people who campaign for democracy show such remarkable disinterest or in some cases contempt for what people really think.
I think the problem is that people really don't have good B.S. detectors regarding stories about China and computers.
Somehow I have the feeling that if the Chinese government really were to be banning Win Y2K that the news would come out of some other source than a small-town newspaper of little importance.