New Compilation of Banned Chinese Search-Terms Reveals Curiosities 43
An anonymous reader writes Canada's Citizen Lab has compiled data from various research projects around the world in an attempt to create a manageable Github repository of government-banned Chinese keywords in internet search terms and which may appear in Chinese websites. Until now the study of such terms has proved problematic due to disparate research methods and publishing formats. A publicly available online spreadsheet which CCL have provided to demonstrate the project gives an interesting insight into the reactive and eccentric nature of the Great Blacklist of China, as far as outside research can deduce. Aside from the inevitable column listings of dissidents and references to government officials and the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, search terms as basic as "system" and "human body" appear to be blocked.
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because chicks are crazy. especially Chinese ones.
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... so what you're saying is that in China, baby chickens eat cats? Aren't you thinking "In Soviet Russia..."
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Note that all the terms are not "banned". Searching for "system" will not take you to a blank results page. They are just terms for which some results are filtered, so I guess for "system" maybe information on alternative systems of government or something.
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(Yellow)
Or is that racist?
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It's still on the menu at my favorite Chinese restaurant. Only they prefer that you call it chicken [staticflickr.com].
Re:How about a list for Australia ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was thinking exactly that. Why China? If anything, we'd be far more interested in the relevant lists of the countries whose ban lists have an actual impact on us.
Who cares about what's censored in China? We want to know what's censored at home!
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China has a history of blocking many sites they deem inappropriate for people to visit. You think the list of words that the country with the (now) largest economy in the world DOESN'T have an impact on you?
~~
You think that's air you're breathing now? Hmph..
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There is a blacklist in Australia that the Govt is open about the existence of. The problem is you dont get to know what is on it and there have been numerous cases of sites being taken down for being incorrectly put on there.
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To add - the Australian list is called the ACMA Blacklist - it was leaked in 2010 by wikileaks
Re:How about a list for Australia ... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a secret blacklist in the UK called Cleanfeed - it's supposed to be for child porn, but the contents of the list is a closely guarded secret, and it's already known from an incident where Wikipedia was briefly blocked by mistake that many ISPs will spoof a 404 message rather than reveal the reason for the block, so it's impossible to say how many non-child-porn pages are blocked.
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There's a secret blacklist in the UK called Cleanfeed - it's supposed to be for child porn, but the contents of the list is a closely guarded secret, and it's already known from an incident where Wikipedia was briefly blocked by mistake that many ISPs will spoof a 404 message rather than reveal the reason for the block, so it's impossible to say how many non-child-porn pages are blocked.
Given the porno laws in the UK the very *words* in the blacklist would probably make the list itself child porn.
So thats why they can't show you the blacklist; they'd be distributing child porn!
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Given the bans on credit card contributions to WikiLeaks and he behavior of RIAA and MPAA, and the very strange intellectual properties concerning computer software and the DMCA? Yes, I'd say content is being filtered. Also, given laws about child pornography and human torture depictions, I'd say yes, content is blocked in the USA and internationally.
China's filters are much, much broader, but it does not mean speech is completely free elsewhere.
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Never encountered a "We had to remove 2 results due to some DMCA rubbish" search result from Google?
And don't gimme "but that's the law" bullshit. It's the law in China to censor those pages that you don't get to see. Just 'cause something is the law doesn't mean that it's right.
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Who cares about what's censored in China? We want to know what's censored at home!
Google doesn't censor based on keyword in the US, or in almost any country. They do, however, remove websites from the search results. When that happens, they put a message in the results informing you what happened.
Also, they keep a collection of every website that's been removed, [google.com] so you can see it.
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There is no more "good guy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I was from China
There supposed to be a difference between the "Good Guys" (ie The West) and the "BADDIES" (darn commies), but with all the NSA snoopin', the CIA "extraordinary rendering", the congress voted away all the rights of the citizens, and all that ...
Honestly, I dunno anymore
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Disclaimer: I was from China
Was? And now you're no longer from China? :p
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Honestly, I dunno anymore
Sounds like you lack the ability to differentiate the gap between "sort of bad" and "terribly oppressive".
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You are literally arguing that nationwide searches and torture are "sort of bad". When they come for the Muslims, you said nothing because you were not a Muslim.
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No, Im arguing that relative to the vast majority (90+%) of regimes current or historical, we are not that bad. You seem to think that torture is a recent development, or that echelon hasnt existed for decades. You also seem to think that a reasonable comparison between China's human rights issues and ours can be made; it cant.
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Some would argue China is that much better than "we".
Those people are ignorant. I have read China's history, I have been to China. The degree of government control and "fake" freedom is astounding. You can be arrested for speaking of religion to a minor; you can be arrested for handing out political pamphlets (I actually witnessed this, and had a pamphlet confiscated). I've flown into Shanghai airport, and seen a river so dirty that you can see precisely where the water meets the ocean, not because of the surrounding land (which is hard to see because of
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Of course, this completely ignores the 100,000,000 people that the US government has murdered since 9/11, but hey. We can't all be perfect.
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Well, there is the fact that the Chinese commies murdered 60,000,000 people in pursuit of their utopia. And dammit, didn't achieve it. I mean, if they HAD achieved socialism, it would have been worth it. 60,000,000 human beings dead, but the end-state would have justified the means. The best part would have been that they PROVED that it could work, and provided the rest of the world a template to get there. Of course, the road would have been paved with murdered humans, but that kind of thing gets glos
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Ìt's getting harder to tell by the minute. The paranoid in me would probably say that there are no good guys left, it's no longer white hats vs black hats, it's all just different shades of grey.
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I found the one for Britain [independent.co.uk]
Another suggestion: (Score:5, Funny)
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You actually search for that? What kind of masochist are you?!
Worst website ever (Score:3, Informative)
Great, GitHub will get blocked again in China! (Score:1)
I wonder if they are aware of this possibility.
How many mythical creatures of Baidu is it now? (Score:2)