China Blocks Web Searches About Protests 134
itwbennett writes "China is blocking searches on Google and microblogs for Zengcheng, a city in the country's Guangdong province, where protests have erupted against local authorities. The move is part of an effort to suppress information on the rioting."
Peasant revolts (Score:3, Informative)
Not the usual news (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zengcheng (Score:4, Informative)
But would I have 50 cent or fifty cents [wikipedia.org]? HTH, HAND.
How's that Chinese tea that you're gulping down? (Score:4, Informative)
There's no excuse for what China does. You're using their excuses, their terminology, and their justifications. It reads like it was a scripted excuse instead of a sound justification.
All China did in 1980 was to find a way to cleanse their despotism. Seeing people like you, makes me think that it worked. Yes, that's a problem.
Unlike China, we like to still give the regular individual the chance instead of disappearing them, harvesting their organs for some Party member, and putting the family under house arrest for objecting to working conditions at the company town.
Not good enough (Score:3, Informative)
I am a Chinese, and let me tell you what might happen to such software, just like the fate of many similar-purpose software before it:
1. Restriction of distribution: people can't easily search for it due to keyword filtering, any local or foreign links for downloading the software could be promptly made inaccessible.
2. Technical disruption: for example, set up "watchman" peer-to-peer nodes that use the same service, which may collect the IP addresses of people using the service, monitor their online activities, then maybe perform sudden mass-banning from time to time that makes a wide range of ports on your IP address inaccessible from the Internet. I have little knowledge about networking, but I felt it might be naive to imagine there can never be any technical way to affect the service so it either becomes too slow to use, does not work all the time, or invoke fear of being monitored and caught. Especially when the attacker have firm control over the whole underlying infrastructure. It might even be harder to avoid technical disruptions if you try to make a service that is accessible to 'dummies'.
3. Bad publicity: propaganda and education could in fact make people believe they don't ever need to break censorship, that censorship or self-censorship is necessary for reasons such as protecting national security, fighting child pornography etc. Through propaganda you may give people the mentality like those in some religious conservatives who never want to read about atheist viewpoints because they have ingrained biases and negative predispositions. So people may not have enough motivation to use your software to begin with.
It is certainly worth mentioning that most useful information services that are blocked in China, such as Youtube, Twitter, etc. all have local-brand alternatives that cooperates with the government. It may also not be too surprising that the vast majority of Chinese-language information inaccessible in China are either propaganda against the Chinese government, or could be easily branded as such. This creates a situation that lead many Chinese people into thinking that the only reason to use anti-censorship is when they want to become a political activist. Then, without access to much of the information that could cause people significant discomfort, where is the motivation to become a political activist in the first place? This lack of motivation is strengthened even further with the propaganda that "political activists are trouble-makers who generates chaos and damages society". So in simple words, an uninformed Chinese may easily believe that "only bad guys who want to do secret underground anti-government business need to use circumvent censorship software."
Combining all the above, the end result is a great majority of Chinese people without much technical prowess either never gets to hear about such software, or have too much trouble making it useful, or were discouraged due to fear or simple lack of motivation. Those are some of the important reasons why anti-censorship softwares, despite having many of them been created already, never achieved truly great popularity in China except for a limited group of tech-savvy individuals, and the situation may provoke some thoughts that the problem may not totally be on the technical side.
Perhaps one of the ways for a truly meaningful opposition to Chinese censorship to happen is when someone first delivers a significant piece of censored information through hijacking of mainstream media (or when some mainstream media slips its control), THEN tell people where to find out more about it. Without first being convinced that there are some significant censored information they should be concerned about or interested in, many Chinese simply wouldn't want go through all the trouble of getting out of censorship just because you are waving a sign saying "Free Web" in front of them, and they few curious people who did peek out have never made much difference.