China Moving to Real Name Registrations for Blogs 228
dptalia writes "China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering."
oblig (Score:2, Funny)
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Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Xiang Zhongfa, Li Lisan, Wang Ming, Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian, Mao Zedong, Hua Guofeng, Hu Yaobang, Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. Pretty much the equivalent to someone in the US calling themselves George Washington, Abraham Lincold and so on.
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The skateboarder? That guy rocks.
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Re:oblig (Score:4, Insightful)
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How long? (Score:4, Insightful)
Additionally, tactics like this in China, I can't help but wonder, will this in some way allow US Intelligence to decide exactly who is responsible for attacks against US Cyber Targets? If people are required to use their REAL names when registering (let's say on Yahoo just for an example), and there is a Yahoo group comprised of mostly Chinese users, which post all kinds of anti-American things, or organizing these attacks, what's to stop US Intelligence from forcing Yahoo to turn over the names of those registered?
Furthermore, what if the US decides to expand the "Patrio" Act, to include requirements like this (Hell they've already forced ISPs and phone companies into turning over ludicrous amounts of information).
Maybe I'm wearing a tin-foil hat and not realizing it, but is anyone else troubled by the recent trend in online privacy intrusions? That is one thing that is nice about the internet, it affords you a certain amount of anonymity. Could we be witnessing the end of that?
Also, just how much REAL difference is there in the US's privacy invasion crimes, and China's? Could it be that China is just more blatant about it?
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Re:How long? (Score:5, Insightful)
yet.
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Look, if all else fails, you pay [Anonyous Proxy Registrar] to incorporate a limited liability company (LLC) which you use to register the blog.
You 'own' however much/little of the company so that your name does not have to be disclosed.
The primary contact, etc etc is the LLC you've just made, whose contact info goes back to [Anonyous Proxy Registrar].
^The above^ is the next step beyond a proxy registrar. If
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Simple! Convenient. Just incorporate a company so you can write a blog.
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Besides, it's not just about convenience. Many people simply cannot afford to form their own company and set up proxy servers. Freedom only for the rich?
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Juridiction (Score:2)
Simply because the server of the China branch of Yahoo who are legally forced to hold this information will probably be on chinese territory and thus, clearly outside the juridiction of FBI. ...at least unless AOL manages to buy Yahoo and decides to publish study...
Simetricaly, China's police won't be able to force any information out of the american branch of Yahoo...
At the top-level, multinationnal mega corp are
China -- thanks for the perfect example (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fine to authenticate financial transactions and what not, but there is no complete freedom of speech without the ability to be anonymous at times.
Re:China -- thanks for the perfect example (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you mean "there is no complete freedom from the repercussions of your speech without the ability to be anonymous at times."
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'Repercussions' is not synonymous with 'jail time.' And speech free from the kind of repercussions you're talking about does not require anonymity.
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Sure there is. There is just no *comfortable* freedom of speech without anonymity.
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Anonymity is required to stop the duct tapers in many situations.
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Re:China -- thanks for the perfect example (Score:5, Informative)
McIntyre vs. Ohio Elections Commission (514 U.S. 334 (1995)) ended with the Supreme Court deciding "an author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment." Talley vs. California was decided with the comment "[p]ersecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all."
Nor is fear of persecution the only issue. The Supreme Court also noted "On occasion, quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent."
Anyway, I don't envy the Chinese authorities investigating a blogger and having to walk through the country going "Is there a Chang here? We're looking for Chang."
yeah, the name's zhang (Score:2, Insightful)
How will that apply to laowai (Score:2)
While you may enjoy some courtesies in day to day life and doing business The Law is generally not to be messed with. As is distributing dissent in whatever medium you may choose no matter where you come from. I wonder very much how this will affect western news agencies as well. I had heard of thes laws coming ont he books when I arrived but this is the first I have really heard since.
Honestly though I dont think it will change too much for ordinary Chinese. The
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No, of course not - but too often it is the case in practice.
Yes it keeps foreigners coming in and spending their money whether it be investment dollars or tourism - but it also created A LOT of resentment from the people. A double edged sword at best.
A small practical example: when I moved here (Beijing) I was told that you are allowed to walk down the street with open containers of alcohol, so I did. Looking
From the ... dept (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From the ... dept (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting theory, but it makes me wonder, what about you and me, Mr. AC? You're an anonymous coward, and it would take a little bit of work for anyone here to get my real name. So why aren't we yelling "shitcock" at each other?
Are we allowed to divide our "Normal People" into "real normal people" and "closet fuckwads"?
a refutation (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'd be glad to send you one! name and SS#, please...?
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Mountains Out Of Molehills (Score:3, Funny)
Annoying, yes, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing that. I wonder why?
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Now if they were requiring that a person register with their ID number -- everyone in China has one -- that would be something. It surprises me, actually, that they're not doing
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Also, for the record, "Chang" is not a Chinese surname. I've never understo
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Maybe the grandparent is going to one of those internet cafes designed for tourists? Typically those have English, Korean or Japanese Windows installed on their machines, depending on the demographic they're marketing to. That might drive up the price a bit.
my thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
And by China I mean "Chinese government". Seems appropriate as the rest of the world mistakes US for US government!
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Where did the US government come from? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Furthermore, I don't think voting for Clinton was necessarily a "dumb" thing - we have had (and currently do, IMHO) far worse examples of men "leading" the country. Say what you will about Clinton, but his actions felt like they have far less impact on my day-to-day life than the current shmuck (although I think he wa
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Which isn't entirely unreasonable, seeing as the US votes in the US government, unlike China.
Ingenious (Score:2)
This is simply ingenious. Someone deserves a promotion. This is so good, I thought it was a good idea. It took me a couple of minutes to realize the insidiousness of this.
This isn't a problem or that much of a burden at all for all those people who want to blog about the same random stuff. What they did today, their fights with their friends, etc. While annoying, it's a definite step up from no blogging at all. This will probably make a great many teens happy (if they are anything like the people on blogge
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But it could just as well be ingenious in the opposite direction as well. I note that it says nothing about addresses being required. In a country with well over a billion people, what are the chances of anyone having a unique name?
As always with this sort of thing, the devil will be in the details. It may be as bad as you think, but it might be a clever sap for the PHBs with no teeth what so ever. Sort of a "Who is Wen Chen and why is he saying these horrible things about me?" situation.
--MarkusQ
Good luck with that (Score:3, Informative)
When I was in China in the 90s they had blocked cnn.com but only the front page.
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Is my sig - not the comment - though it is probably somewhat on topic.
It was the sign off from a radio news show in the 70s - The Last News Show - Skoop Nisker. As I didn't understand the rest of your question I'll leave it at that.
I, for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually think that this is a good idea (sort of). I think that when it comes to publications (not private data), anonymity is one of the Internets weak points. There would be less people mucking things up if they were personally identified.
I don't see personal identification as a problem in places like the US where there are laws that protect their right to speech and whatnot, but in China I have a feeling that this will get a lot of people in prison.
Sometimes people need to know who you are so that
How can they tell if a registered name is real? (Score:2, Troll)
ugh.... (Score:2)
Better hope the domain squatters are not reading this. You know.... the guys who register just about every available alphanumeric combination
Next thing you know, you'll go to register your blog under the name "ZapgunKing13" (out of your big interest in videogames) and then you find out that you have to pay some Hong Kong front company $39 in order to
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Knowing these, do you still think real name mean real name?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe many peop
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Re:It's a different society. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a different society. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would be willing to bet that the NSA can infer the owner by matching up previous call patterns.
But yeah, I'm not claiming equivalency, I'm just cautioning against pride and hubris.
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America is not very far away from Communist china or North Korea.. At least our current leaders are hell bent to get us to what they have.
I'm waiting for us to be required to carry our papers, and have a passport for inter-state travel.
Think I am joking???? It's on it's way kids, to help save us from T E R R O R I S M !
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Please don't be on my side.
Sincerely,
bunions
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4/19, nevar forget.
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The "right to privacy" (heralded by many a culture from as far back as the Magna Carter) is read by many citizenry (in the West) as equivalent to "the right to not be seen" and/or "the right to remain anonymous".
Most legal systems (including the US, England and other "traditionally western" governments) actually recognise it more like a "right to be left alone". It is that description which better embodies the ideals or free speech, free religion & ultimately universal suffrage than any condition of
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I'm sorry, but if your government thinks it's ok for authority to only protect or assist certain classes of people, your government is far down the wrong path already.
Re:It's a different society. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, lets get up on our moral high horse (Score:2)
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uh, yeah, it is. calls are tracked and callgraphs are produced using software from this company: http://www.cogitoinc.com/ [cogitoinc.com]
I didn't think this was even up for debate any more.
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what repression? I'm talking about call monitoring. The NSA has titanic datasets describing the origin and destination of every call made in the US. Do they have recordings of those calls? I seriously doubt it. But the call graphs are there.
> It would be so expensive to 'monitor all calls' that the government would go broke overnight.
I'll agree that recording the audio seems infeasible. But the records of who called who are defin
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Re:It's a different society. (Score:4, Interesting)
And just like I'm sure in China they will be scanning large amounts of date for keywords, the same thing is done here. Noone is sitting there reading everything but certain sites and certain keywords or phrases activate surveillance on you. Google Total Information Awareness and Ecehelon...
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There are also government departments and staff in the US and Canada whose job is to surf, looking for problems ranging from child pornographers to media and software piracy. Add in all the corporations doing the same to protect their concept of IP, the ease with which data traffic (especially email) can be sniffed, filtered and archived, and the limit to what can be done is not really technical any more.
It's just a matter of distributing the workload, maybe installing a government server at each ISP th
Re:It's a different society. (Score:4, Insightful)
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This i
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That's sweet. And completely wrong.
What changed was that the Bush administration felt that the NSA should be able to tap your phones without oversight. Period, end of story. FISA already provided an after-the-fact warrant process that protected national security. The FBI+NSA link, if that's another excuse floated by Bush, is a non-sequitor.
So the question becomes, what
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As for enforcing it, you just need to hire a few thousand people to work at the Ministry of Information, reading blogs and checking the registration of the blog. Check the IP address that the person blogs from and make sure it matches up with the registrant. If not, trace the IP. Pretty simple stuff, really.
fascist? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Given that "NAZI" was coined as a derisive abbreviation for Hitler's NASDP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers' party), that's hardly surprising.
That wasn't very deceptive (Score:2)
That was actually a matter of honest labelling. The Nazis were rather socialist (i.e. wanting government control of the economy), and have only superficial differences with other socialist movements.
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The difference was only in degree. The UK government after WW2 was only mildly socialist (even if it was more socialist than what was before it).
"You are an utter fucking twat."
What you lack in knowledge of history, you make up with in erudite insults.
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In the US, that sort of thing would be labeled fascist. What are their rights, anyway? Do they even have any?
Damn it, that's not fascism. China does share some of the characteristics of a fascist state, but there are many non-fascist states that do not allow free speech. Different societies have different values, and in the growing homogenization of the West, that's lost sometimes.
Re:It's a different society. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, and any society that stifles free speech is a society that needs to change.
Let's not pretend that "to each his own" applies when we're talking about governments/religions/societies that restrict basica human freedoms. The reason that "Western culture" is taking over in most of the world is because it is a BETTER CULTURE in many, if not most, ways. Too many people mistakenly wax nostalgiac for the good old days of the Old World, and forget that the Old World was mostly a living hell for the vast majority of the non-ruling class.
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You seem to think that the right to bitch and moan aka freedom of speech is more important than truly basic human rights
Here's the short list of "basic human rights":
The right to adequate food
The right to potable water
The right to shelter
The right to health care
How do you think people who are diseased, sick, starving, homeless and/or abjectly poor feel about freedom of
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How did the statement you referred to have anything to do with neoconservativism?
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Different society? (Score:2)
That's not a matter of "different values". It is a matter of government tyranny. In fact, such suppression of speech is one of the important "foundation stones" of fascism.
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Yes, they do: specifically, Chinese society values free speech, which is why the Chinese government has to take extreme effort when they want to suppress it. If Chinese society didn't value free speech, as you seem to want to imply, there would be no need for laws limiting speech because Chinese citizens would restrict themselves.
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Re:It's a different society. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/31/0
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You must give verifiable (in theory) information for ALL domain names in the ICANN/US Government controlled root. Proof your identity is bogus is grounds for losing the domain.
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Now I don't think I would want to do this for my user account at my LOST forums or Halo forums.
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