China Shuts Down 17,000 Internet Bars

Astin writes: "According to this article, Chinese authorities have shut down more than 17,000 Internet bars for failing to block Web sites considered subversive or pornographic. Out of the 94,000 Internet bars in China, 17,488 have been shut down and another 28,000 were ordered to install monitoring software soon. Of the 27 million Internet users in China, about 4.5 million rely on these bars. Foreign news organizations fall under the category of 'subversive'."

Re:They did try to revolt once

[BluePenguin]

Maybe they're afraid that a repeat of Tiannemen Square thrown by ultra violent, Quake addicted geeks.
Now that would be an ugly sight.

Online Heroin

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

The Chinese government did this, to a lesser degree, in July, shutting down 2000 internet cafes [newsfactor.com]. They'll continue to do this, as public anonymous entrance points to the internet are much harder to track and discipline; the user is usually long gone by the time you examine the logs.

There's a great quote from this article:
a Web site published opinions expressed by Communist Party leaders that excoriated the effects of "online heroin" on its masses, particularly on its youth

If the Internet is "online heroin", slashdot is "an online jet-powered crackpipe burning a two ton ball of primo Detriot crack, laced with LSD, PCP, Ecstasy, and some weird shit we've never seen before".

Re:Well yeah....

[Whom The Bell Trolls]

What about your right nipple?

All your bar are belong to us!

[The_Messenger]

You have no chance to survive make some chai

More power to them...

[Mustang Matt]

Maybe that will slow the flow of spam nailing my servers.

It seems like the Chinese can't (or don't want to) figure out how to secure a mail server.

Are there any Chinese readers here that can explain this? Anytime I have spam problems originating within the U.S. I have about a 99% chance of getting a cooperative ISP that fixes the problem within a few hours but because of the communication barrier I have no luck pursuing this overseas (generally China).

Short of blocking all traffic from .cn I don't know what else to do. Anyone have any suggestions?

Re:And the surprise is...?

[isa-kuruption]

How is though that the US is prepared to kiss ass in order to trade with them when we spent close to fifty years fighting the Red menace before?

The U.S. has spent years trying NOT to make it easy for China to trade with the world (and join the WTO) because of it's human right's violations. I do not know how you can all of a sudden say we are "kissing ass" to trade with them. The ONLY reason we trade with China is to allow their people to feed themselves. Other than that, it's cheap labor... but we get that from Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Korea, Taiwan, etc (and any other countries I can insult today ;)

Re:Well yeah....

[easter1916]

It eloped with my third nipple.

Re:They did try to revolt once

[mESSDan]

I think that The Onion said it best:

"Stirring symbol of human spirit difficult to wash out of tank treads."

Re:More power to them...

[Tackhead]

> Short of blocking all traffic from .cn I don't know what else to do. Anyone have any suggestions?

Bounce all mail from China with:

"550 FCJHV URTIG HRVCP JRIUA KQWHB - covert channel located, transmitting message block UYMPW"

...and use a cron job to regenerate the blocks of random letters every couple of hours.

After enough bounced spam with apparent cryptographic content, the Chinese government will "fix" the relay for you. Or they'll "fix" the relay's administrator.

As a bonus, you can know that the more time the Chinese government's thugs spend chasing wild geese, liquidating incompetent sysadmins, and decrypting random noise, the less time they'll have to oppress their own people.

Re:Normal Students?

[istartedi]

Talisman

Be on the lookout for dyslexic special forces.

Re:Fear the Net

[cybercuzco]

move into the mountains of Colorado without
running water or electricity and carry a shotgun... you'll get PLENTY of privacy.

Tell that to the unabomber. He couldnt even mail out a letter without people banging on his door, and then transporting his house to a secured facility.