China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day 297
TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."
Surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. If the UK tried this, not only would it not work, it would somehow leak all the troop and ship locations to everyone in the world, along with Gordon Brown's gay lover's telephone number.
Re:Surprising (Score:5, Funny)
along with Gordon Brown's gay lover's telephone number.
Oh.. ha ha... Unrelated note: I need to go change my phone number right now.
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Re:Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.
The Chinese government is capable because unlike most countries, it has to be. For countries like the U.S., Japan, and most European countries, the citizens are fairly free to go about their business without fear of government reprisal. So, these countries simply don't care (nor do they need to care) about the best ways to shut off their citizens' freedoms.
Other highly controlling countries, such as North Korea, have citizens who simply don't have access to these things to begin with, so there is no need to shut them off.
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Gee, I could be mistaken, but I think he's saying all the non-violent offenders in our prisons should consider themselves lucky that we don't just execute them, since that's apparently the other option.
Or he could be saying that it's proper to compare the U.S. to oppressive theocratic regimes, rather than other Western democracies.
Or it's the "Hey, at least we're better than [insert the worst thing here]!" defense, which is a form of unintentionally damning with faint praise.
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Yes. (Though I am not the person you are replying to)
Other countries that are "less free" have lower incarceration rates. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but its laws are nowhere near the harshest.
For example, Japan has a far lower incarceration rate despite its laws usually being stricter than the USA's. Those nonviolent drug offenders in the USA would be jailed in Japan as well. But the population doesn't do drugs as much, and the police are probably not as good at catching them be
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Because our punishments are mild compared to those elsewhere.
If the penalty for stealing was dismemberment or painful death, a lot less would-be shoplifters would act.
Other countries have similar high-stakes. While it may not be as plain as my above example, they are just as strong in those cultures. For some, being ostracized would be a very severe punishment.
It all depends on the culture. When you look at ours... it's so empty that there is little to discourage (that we will stomach enough to utilize).
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Because our punishments are mild compared to those elsewhere.
Right. Because the US is all the way down to number 4 in the number of executed prisoners per year by country.
For some, being ostracized would be a very severe punishment.
So like the sex offender registry?
You're also making some specious claims about the deterrent effect of harsh punishments. 20+ years of the war on drugs should be ample evidence that just ratcheting up punishments does not necessarily lead to fewer offenders. And US punishments across the board are almost all more severe than their european counterparts. Why doesn't France or Norway have a hi
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You really think that most governments are clueless?
Almost all the industrialized nations have access to experts that could block tor just as well.
They don't do it because it is illegal to do it in those nations or they find it immoral to do.
I always thought it funny that people thought that TOR was unstoppable by the Chinese or any other government.
The elected officials may have limited knowlege of technology but they don't handle the details they give the orders.
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors. They started the killing; then they reaped what they had sowed.
Do I feel sorry they Japanese had to die? Yes. Do I think there was any other choice? No. When someone points a gun at you, you don't hold up a target to help them aim better. You fire back.
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If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors. They started the killing; then they reaped what they had sowed.
While it may have ended up as some perverse National Karma, I sincerely doubt the U.S. nuked Japan in order to help the other Asian nations.
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I'm quite certain you'll find most of the citizens of the country have very little to do with the firing of the weapons.
You'll also find very few people who think the nuking of a civilian population is a good thing from a historical perspective either.
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Yes, but unfortunatly there was no historical perspective when it came down to the nukes.
Besides... it's not like we did it with no warning, and had backed them into a corner with no chance to supplicate.
If there's a big sign above a button that says "warning: pressing this button will result in your death" - is anyone to blame but you for pushing that button?
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You do realize that the bombs were dropped after the battles at Midway and the invasion and taking of Okinawa? Little Boy (Hiroshima) was dropped August 6, 1945, and Okinawa ended in June, 1945.
In other words, the war was effectively over. By the end of the battle of Okinawa, Allied victory in the Pacific was pretty much guaranteed. The Japanese lines had been broken, and the Allies had a strong foothold on Japanese soil. They most certainly did have a choice about whether or not to drop the nuclear bombs.
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:4, Informative)
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Beginning of the war, end of the war. Same war. The Chinese were still fighting the Japanese as our allies as part of the same, ongoing war, right up until the bomb forced the Japanese surrender.
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So... it's cool to hold Hiroshima (a 20th century massacre of civilians) against the US, but mention Nanking (a 20th century massacre against civilians) and suddenly we're in "no that was a loooooong time ago!!1!" territory, solely because it's Japan?
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Furthermore, you should probably do a little research on:
a) Japans war with China
b) Japans request that we stop providing aid to China
c) why the U.S. placed an embargo on Japan
d) how that ties in to the bombing or Pearl Harbor.
Add a bit of general WWII history and then we can have an intelligent conversation about this topic
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>>>1937? Separate, historic issue. Nuclear weapons came a lot later.
According to the famous documentary "Why We Fight", the Japanese branch of World War 2 started in 1931. So the invasion of China, Rape of Nanking, and final surrender of Japan were all part of that overall fight.
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:5, Informative)
The dead of Nanking would like to courteously disagree with that assertion.
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Don't want to do that? Don't go to war.
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
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Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
And people with mindset like that disgust me. But don't get me wrong, killing other people does too. But you're *not* going to shoot armless, defenseless people and even more so woman and children. Even if they belong to a country of your political enemy.
Another completely retarted fight and killing of people is the fight of Jerusalem and Israel stuff. They're killing thousands of people just to fight over some goddamn land.
I bet lots of people don't care because it doesn't really concern them and it's just
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"But you're *not* going to shoot armless, defenseless people and even more so woman and children. Even if they belong to a country of your political enemy."
Japan did in mass.
Really read about the rape of Nanjing or how they treated the Koreans.
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But you're a moron if you think the death of a man is of any less significance than the death of a woman or a child.
Not the death, but generally men have better capabilities to defense themself.
Of course we are on slashdot so thats besides the point, but still.
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Actually, no. The death of a man IS less significant than the death of a woman or (female) child.
From a long-term standpoint, the destruction of an enemy lies in destroying their ability to reproduce as fast as your tribe/civilization. This is less true now, due to technology, than it was for the past ten or twenty thousand years. But killing women and children is the only way to really co
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When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Ah, I see you subscribe to the theory that war is a state of affairs completely separated from regular politics. It isn't. It's merely the pursuit of political goals with other means.
Here's what killing "every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country" nets you: eternal war, with one person left standing. You want to know why? Because for one, it is impossible to kill every man, woman and child in your enemy's country. More capable people than you have tried and failed. Furthermore, a country is not an
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>>>It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war i
Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.
Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.
The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.
Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.
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It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
It's easy to transpose a specific ideology onto history if one does not actually look at said history with its full complexity and inherent ambiguities.
The estimate of hundreds of thousands of lives lost was created after the end of the war to justify dropping the bombs. No, seriously, go look it up.
The vast majority of urban infrastructure was already destroyed, many estimates placed Japanese capitulation just weeks later if the bombs had not been dropped. The civilian population was training to fight of
False dichotomies are bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.
Indeed.
The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
While that is the simplified history, it doesn't really represent the real choice that was being made.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
Which is basically why the actual invasion was off the table. It was unnecessary in any event, and by the time it could have been implemented, Russia would have been involved and we would have been dealing with a joint surrender in any case.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
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In fact, factories etc are now often targeted at night so fewer civilian casualties occur.
I think you'll find it has a lot more to do with anti-aircraft/missile batteries being less effective at night (harder to see incoming aircraft or munitions) than there being less people around.
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Idiot. Civilians are the financial branch of the armed forces. If you want to avoid dying in place of your soldiers perhaps you should control them...
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Yup. Cowards kill civilians. Stupid, savage cowards.
They also ran Unit 731, conducted horrible experiments and vivisections on civilians and prisoners of war, butchered their own schoolchildren out of fears the invading enemy would be as brutal as they are, cannibalized Australians and live in a culture of institutionalized racism to this very day.
Man, historical revisionism is AWESOME! *beats off to 2chan instead of going outside*
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According to the famous documentary "Why We Fight", the Japanese branch of World War 2 started in 1931. So the invasion of China, Rape of Nanking, and the Pacific war were all part of that overall fight.
And a lot of Chinese, Filipinos, and other occupied Asian nations cheered when Japan fell in 1945. They were just as much celebrating victory as we were.
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No. Its a case of historical ignorance on your part. America was going to war with Japan irregardless of Pearl Harbor. The only thing Pearl Harbor did was push up the timetable. It was already planned to take on Japan due to their invasion of our allies in the Philippines and other nations in south east Asia once we had finished with Germany.
The purpose of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to show the emperial cultists that they would die horrific deaths with no honor, to deny them the glory of their bushido death
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Pearl Harbor was the justification, but the US had been waging economic war for some time, prompted primarily by the Japanese actions toward, and invasion of, China.
Key aspect: Japan was dependent upon the US nearly 100% for its oil. Without oil, they could not hope to continue waging war on the mainland... so when the US enmbargoed the Japanese in 1941, it lead directly to Pearl Harbor.
The US knew it was headed to
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The US went to war when we where attacked that is true but the US was supporting China and England before Pearl Harbor.
The US sold China the best fighters that the US had in service at the time the P-40, they where embargoing Japan for the war in China, and members of the US military where fighting in China as "Volunteers" as the Flying Tigers just like they where in England in the Eagle Squadron. Also a US Gunboat in China was attacked before Perl Harbor as well.
As to the Filipinos the was a US territory
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Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ridiculous; go read the Geneva Convention.
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Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
That's ridiculous; go read the Geneva Convention.
You are ridiculous.
http://www.icrc.org/IHL.NSF/WebSign?ReadForm&id=375&ps=P [icrc.org]
If you think that there are NO countries, signatories or not, that would violate the shit out of the Geneva Convention should it suit their purposes; you are more than ridiculous; you are criminally naive.
It's a freaking piece of paper, and more useless than most.
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You mean the one that is enforced by nations so if a real world war starts it will get thrown out the window in two weeks?
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Re:(Un)Surprising (Score:5, Informative)
100% pure bullshit.
For one thing - the purple hearts awarded throughout WW2 were ordered before each campaign or major action. The bean counters got really, really accurate when estimating how many to order. They seldom missed by more than a couple percent. Look it up, google is your friend.
The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
Then, the bombs fell. Japan surrendered. Those 1/4 million purple hearts are STILL being used today. Casualties from every single conflict that we've been involved in are wearing medals that were intended for the invasion of Japan.
And, that 1/4 million is ONLY American casualties. Estimates for Japanese casualties? Look 'em up. You'll be amazed. Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise.
The rest of your post is just as ridiculous. Japan would never have been "contained" in 1945. Fanatical supporters of the Emperor were still coming out of the hills in the 1970's. Contain? Yeah, right.
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The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
No, they weren't. Truman was never seriously considering invasion when deliberating on how to end the war. Him, his cabinet and advisers, and all his generals were convinced that Japan would surrender without invasion. In particular, they were sure that once Russia declared war on Japa
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powerless to stop them (sound like any country you can think of these days?)
Nope. Not at all.
You mean, powerless to stop it without any risk to themselves, without taking time out of their day, without having to learn about the issues involved.
So yeah, if saying "I didn't want this" while paying your taxes is the best you can do, maybe you should suck nuke... If you want to avoid it, control your military - use a gun locally to avoid sending a soldier overseas needlessly.
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>>>So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?
If my family is building guns/bullets that I am using to kill-off your wife, your daughter, your parents, and so on...... then yes I think you have every right to stop them. If you can't find me, then you kill my suppliers so I don't have anything to fire.
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"stop them" != "hunt down and disintegrate"
According to LOAC, you could target their bullet-building factory (home?) and if they are inside, then that's tough luck. But you can't directly target them under current international law.
If they tried building another factory/house, you (you are a country, right??) could occupy their territory, imposing martial law, and send to jail any non-combatants that aided the enemy. But you can't just shoot then w/o trial for making ammo them unless they become unlawful
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BTW:
The firebombs that Britain used in Germany were FAR more deadly than the 2 nukes the USA dropped. The nukes killed a few thousand, while the firebombs killed hundreds of thousands. Example: It is said the fires in Dresden raged so fiercely that the oxygen was sucked out of the air, and people suffocated to death. They just fell dead whereever they were - in bed, hiding in basements, running down the street.
To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had
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Those nukes we're intentionally made to kill civilians and destroy normal cities - not to attack against military targets.
Your "few thousands" killed is a 'little' bit off too;
The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945,[4] with roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings. Amongst these, 15–20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness.[5] Since then, more have died from leukemia (231 observed) and solid cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs.[6] In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.[7][8][9]
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The Dresden bombing wasn't really a military target either. Most of the industrial infrastructure was outside of the city, but the firebombing was concentrated on the centre. Estimated dead there were 135,000 to 500,000; more than at Nagasaki, probably more than Hiroshima, and possibly more than both combined.
Not to justify the nuclear bombings, but they weren't the only atrocities committed by the 'good guys' in World War II. It's only in comparison to the Nazi extermination camps that the winners ma
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To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.
It's not odd to single them out. After all, no weapon anything like them had ever been unleashed. Even previous weapons that had changed the face of warfare -- the longbow, cannons, machine g
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So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree? Is that the policy you're advocating here? Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
Your logic is not extreme enough. Nuke his home planet! He is the same carbon based life form that caused the problem in the first place.
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Are you aware of the term 'Total War' and how it applies to WWII? Yes, the US did horrible things during WWII, I'm not saying they didn't and I'm not saying that it was right. But to argue that Japan posed 'no further military threat' is shortsighted and, quite frankly, revisionist.
The people in power of Japan at that time had a history of war crimes and human rights abuses, including but not limited to: the murder of "6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese" prisoners of war,
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Well, KILLING people is horrible but sometimes unavoidable. That fact that it was done with a nuke is morally neutral; it doesn't make it better or worse. Firebombing the cities with conventional weaponry wouldn't have been somehow better.
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not like we did not warn [trumanlibrary.org] them [pbs.org]
and the bomb was no worse then Japans [wikipedia.org] actions [wikipedia.org]
Ah, the "our actions were no worse than their actions" argument. So what does that make us, and how does it justify it? I would say that it wasn't any better either. I don't see how one country's atrocity justifies another country's atrocity. Moral relativism, at its finest.
We all agree that the Japanese did probably some of the most horrific shit any country could during WWII, but your argument implies that it was perfectly fine to nuke their civilians as well, most of whom had nothing to do with the atroc
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In the alternate history "Fatherland" Hister builds the nuclear bomb first, and uses it, which ends World War 2. A cold war develops between Germany (occupying from Spain to the Ukraine) and the United States. Good book worth checking out.
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It's not unusual for governments to devote their greatest abilities to the worst ends (see: Hiroshima, Japan).
Fortunately, the US stopped all that by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender and deterring the USSR from continuing its evil, expansionist plans.
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So what? There's always only clerks in the inner workings of the government. Maybe censorship == clue.
I love this (Score:5, Funny)
It gives me hope to see how people can get around this sort of oppression, I am hoping that it stays that way, that we will always have the option of communicating with each other, that no corporation or government will strangle.
I truly hope it stays that way.
An open Internet is power to the people.
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> I truly hope it stays that way.
At "tens of thousands" of Tor users out of a population of over a billion? I'm sure the Chinese government agrees with you.
The U.S. and the EU have the same power. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks. Many of the EU states have similar capabilities. We look at China as an example of government censorship, but maybe we ought to look at our own homes as well.
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This.
I think China is bad, moving in a positive direction. Aging dictators, a colossal age gap, then a young generation who came up with grass mud horse, and will eventually topple the censorship.
We're one dodgy ground at the moment, and moving in a negative direction. Internet freedom in the west is on the edge of the abyss.
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Re:The U.S. and the EU have the same power. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, I'm just not willing to use my resources to promote the exploitation of children.
But do you think Tor should exist at all? Or should governments aggressively stamp out any programs which attempt to provide their users with anonymity?
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Re:The U.S. and the EU have the same power. (Score:5, Informative)
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc.
You could set an exit policy to do just that, check the tor documentation. It might not stop other people from allowing Web traffic, but it would ensure people wouldn't be using your exit node for child porn. (Binary Usenet transfers or transfers over IRC aside.)
Hell, you could even limit what Web sites people can get to through your node. So you could still allow access to, say, Google and Wikipedia but no other sites.
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Well, you can restrict the ports available on your exit node, such that only connections to NNTP or IRC services are available. Because nobody downloads cp on IRC or Usenet. It's n
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Are you really so naive as to think that IRC and Usenet can only be used to transfer plain text? Ever hear of uuencoding (encoding binary data as base-64 text)? Some (old) SMTP systems are limited to 7-bit ASCII; that doesn't stop anyone from using them to transfer binary attachments.
All you've done is made the network less efficient, without limiting how it can be used.
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I think you're doing it right. It is just as much your right to run the exit node as it is to decline to continue to do so, based on it's apparent use.
Re:The U.S. and the EU have the same power. (Score:5, Informative)
A picture is worth 1000 words. What would the press value be of text statements about the Iranian protests compared to the value of a picture showing 100,000 people in the streets? If you restrict the anonymous networks to text only you destroy the press value. Pictures are the basis of modern press. The picture or video of the police beating someone has value, a text statement by an anonymous eyewitness is easily refuted by the authoritarian regime but the video or picture can't be refuted easily.
The problem with believing in free speech is you have to tolerate all speech. You are unwilling to tolerate all speech so you throw out all the value of the really important, possibly world changing, speech. To me it's called throwing out the baby with the bathwater but to each his own, but you aren't on the moral high ground you think you are.
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I had that problem with Freenet back in about 2001 or so.
I have no idea how much content on the network then actually was child pornography, but nearly all the main search/index pages had links claiming to be child porn.
And I was paying for bandwidth to host a node.
After a while I thought 'you know, I really do not need to be facilitating the distribution of this stuff. Whether it is or is not child porn I don't know and I'm not going to click to find out, but it's claiming to be, and that's way too squicky
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Was it actual child pornography, or just children without clothes? There's a difference. The former is sick, but the latter is legal.
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In a free country, that 10% justifies the other 90%. It's better to set 10 guilty men free than keep an innocent man in jail and all that.
there's a concept you should learn: "scale" (Score:3, Interesting)
to honestly sit here and put forth the idea that the level of censorship in the west is anything remotely near what china does, you've arrived at intellectual fail. the SCALE of the effort matters. if the west, for example, tries to find kiddie porn, it is entirely in your right to debate that effort and question its relevancy, effectiveness, and the direction of such laws
now, if you were to actually engage in such criticism in china, a nice young man or woman in one of the many banks of party loyalists who
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China is simply the testing ground where they are working out all of the bugs with the hardware and software. When all of the censorship was happening in Iran around the time of the disputed elections, it came out that Nortel was working with the Iranian government to filter the internet traffic coming in and out of the country. It wouldn't surprise me if multi-national corporations weren't playing similar rolls in China's networking infrastructure. If not Nortel, then Cisco, or Juniper, or one of the ot
Joseph Javorski. Respected scientist. Now a fiend. (Score:3, Funny)
"TIME FOR GO TO BED!"
That Tor just cracks me up...
I'm getting old (Score:3, Funny)
go ahead china (Score:4, Insightful)
joust at that hydra
control freaks have at their psychological root a toxic amount of insecurity. the grumpy old men in beijing have to make sure society is "harmonious" even if that's nothing more than media shorthand for placid lies. the truth is often ugly, dissent is always ugly. but when you expose yourself to dissent and ugliness, you do nothing but strengthen your mind and your convictions and your bullshit detector. all china is doing with the massive amount of societal control is producing a generation of chinese minds that have nothing but cotton candy between the ears: unable to handle anything except the most stultifying of platitudes about the world and its nature, wilting at the slightest sign of trouble
china is supposed to be emerging world power? when chinese raised in the hermetically sealed climate controlled media environment of modern china interact with their compatriots from india, brazil, japan, usa, germany... what are these dunderheads going to be like? when they encounter the slightest bit of provocation or contrasting opinion to the almighty sense of "harmony" what are their social skills for that resistance? censor? ignore? run away?
a "harmonious society" seems nothing more to me than a way to ensure chinese minds in the generations to come are weak brittle minds incapable of understanding or processing criticism of any kind, because it's not "harmonious". "harmony": what a fucking bullshit codeword for "i'm insecure at the top, don't think anything that might make me feel threatened". this isn't about cultural differences, this is is about a colossal social weakness of modern china completely of chinese making, a society-wide achilles heel: "we can't handle criticism, cover your ears"
enjoy your cottonheaded future china, so sorry for my dissent. you can just ignore, dismiss, and censor me. that's obviously the best way to handle these words. pffffffft
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What you say is true, in varying degrees for most every government I have ever read about. Not that I am anti government, anarchy isn't likely to get us anywhere fast. But people by and large the world over are afraid of unknowns, and will seek to shelter themselves and their progeny from the things that scare them. And of course there are plenty of power hungry asshats who will take advantage of any little power they are given to gain more by pandering to the masses in this regard.
firewall vs. drywall (Score:2)
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It is strange what they filter... (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't know dyndns is a threat in HK.
Tor team prepared for this, still works in China (Score:5, Informative)
GFW in China (Score:3, Interesting)
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Indeed. Tor functions on trust.