Yahoo Confirms Beijing Blocking Flickr

slashthedot writes "In another instance of censorship against websites about anything anti-establishment in China, Flickr, popular among a growing class of digital photo enthusiasts in the world's second-largest Internet market, has not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week, amid rumors Beijing took action after images of the Tiananmen massacre in early June 1989 were posted. "It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end," a spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said in an email in response to a Reuters inquiry."

Old News...

We knew this a while ago, but still, whenever I hear about my dear Internets being censored, it makes me sick.

Re:Old News...

Nothing like a country terrified of its own citizens, or the companies out of the supposed Free World who won't pull the plug to prevent their technologies from being used by these kinds of pathetic cowards. It's alright, though. Investors are making money, so fuck liberty.

Forgive my ignorance

But I have never used Flickr...is it owned or partially owned by Yahoo?

Only reason I ask is why would Yahoo be saying it isn't something technicaly on their end unless they own/run it...

China Evil or Not

I keep hearing to many Pro's Con's about China. On one side you have the people bashing the government for it's internet filter system. Then on the other side I hear about how China is the new super power, with the greatest economy growth and potential. Even where I live (semi-major city) the news is ridden with (Businesses start deals with China, China Buying out more than Japan during hte 80's, China best business partner, Outsource to China, China Could Save local economy, etc, etc). Even the local college have signs "China #1 growth market, succeed in the future take Chinese 1 this semester" So is China Evil or Not?

Re:China Evil or Not

That is kind of like asking if the US is evil or not. The answer is both yes and no.

Re:China Evil or Not

Being a superpower with a great economy and being evil aren't even close to mutually exclusive.

At any rate, if you're judging countries by the same standards as you judge people, all or nearly all of them lean towards evil. The few that are very strong tend to oppress the rest, and those aren't really "good". They just don't have claws.

i wonder just how successful this will be?

will people post the pictures all over in a rebellion, a la AACS? or will all the image providers cave a la google.cn, where an image search for tiananmen massacre returns pictures of puppies and gerbils [google.cn]...?

Their country, their choice

Who are we to say that our way of life is better? Don't we have rising illiteracy, crime-ridden cities, corrupt politicians, rapacious corporations and wars we don't believe in killing bucketloads of civilians?

Let's be tolerant of other points of view, please! (There may be a large cynical but friendly emoticon attached to this message. YMMV, but TMTOWTDI.)

Re:Their country, their choice

If the Chinese people truly want to live under technocratic tyrants, then so be it. What I don't like is Western companies, who blossomed in an environment of political liberties who happily shed any notion of those liberties to make a buck. If that's what the Chinese want, then they shouldn't get help from Google and Microsoft, and those companies should be fined substantial amounts of money every time they help the Chinese authorities jail someone. Let China develop their own tools of repression. Why the fuck should we let Cisco do it for them?

Re:Their country, their choice

"Their country, their choice" doesn't work when, for many of them, it's neither.

Who are we to say that our way of life is better? Don't we have rising illiteracy, crime-ridden cities, corrupt politicians, rapacious corporations and wars we don't believe in killing bucketloads of civilians?

They have rampant illiteracy, crime-ridden cities, corrupt politicians, (the same) rapacious corporations, tens of millions of intentionally murdered civilians shoved under the rug, and censorship that dwarfs the crap the FCC tries to pull.

Seems logical

For some time now, China has been blocking [wikipedia.org] sites [wikipedia.org] like BBC News, CBS News, Wikipedia, WordPress, LiveJournal, U.S. Department of State, etc. I am surprised Slashdot is not on the list, bunch of freedom-loving Linux-huggers that we are.

flickr just added traditional chinese to its list

Wow, I feel bad for the developers who spent time incorporating Traditional Chinese into flickr. now no one who speaks it will see the site. Terrible timing!

http://blog.flickr.com/en/2007/06/12/flickr-intern ational-launch/ [flickr.com]

How it works..

So does the Chinese government own all the ISP's in China? Or how exactly can they just filter out any content from any website?

Yahoo shouldn't mind.

Yahoo has often said it's better to provide the Chinese partial content rather than none at all. Therefore, shouldn't they be perfectly happy that Chinese users are at least seeing the big white webpage with some text scattered around a broken-JPEG icon, rather than no Flickr at all?

Ah, yes

Tiananmen Square: The PRC's worst-kept secret.

Re:Ah, yes

many of them have no idea it ever happened

That's a bit simplistic, don't you think?

I've had work meetings/visits to Beijing and other parts of China. Not only have I not met anyone who has not heard of it, I've met coworkers who openly tell me that they were at the protests themselves when they were at university.

People there just don't care because they're too busy making money.

The Moral Optimum ?

Criticising Google and Yahoo for capitulating to the Chinese govt. seems to be "the thing" to do on Slashdot these days. But let's see if it is indeed clear what the "right" thing is here.

1. Can we really blame Google and Yahoo for following the law of the land ? What gives an American (or any foreign) company the right to decide which laws are fair in China ? Even democratic countries have different opinions on what exactly freedom of speech is. Should google decide whether it agrees with German holocaust-denial laws, or Indian laws against whipping up religious hate ? Also, isn't it a bit arrogant to assume that American laws are the moral optimum ? Shouldn't Google also refuse to honour DMCA take down requests ?

I recently read an article in the IHT, speaking about how a Chinese official once justified their censorship / torture system by saying that these laws were necessary given China's economic and social conditions (and you can't deny that China has indeed seen phenomenal progress under these laws). The article goes on to then discuss the west's moral dilemma in criticizing China given the recent happenings since 9/11 - basically, when America felt threatened it almost instantly decided that torture was ok for the greater good. I'm not trying to troll with this paragraph. I'd choose liberty with poverty over affluent slavery any day. But who are we to dictate what kind of laws China should have in terms of protection of dissenters and minorities ? Why do we assume that a majority of the Chinese population isn't ok with this tradeoff between liberty and stability - given that half of the US is probably OK with torturing terrorists and holding them without trial ?

2. There's also the dilemma of turning over information that'll help identify a dissenter. Now, does Google get to decide that its more competent and fair than the Chinese judicial system ? Didn't ISPs in the US hand over private customer data, all in the name of "homeland security" ? I'm not suggesting that even with recent happenings the American human rights / judicial system is even a tenth as bad as that of China. But at the end of the day, I think all systems of govt. are imperfect (some a lot more than others) and it is not for private foreign companies to be the vehicles of political change.

3. If Google and Yahoo do not follow these laws, they'll be kicked out out of China(just like they'll be sued to oblivion if they don't honour DMCA takedowns). The Chinese govt. will not be brought to its knees and forced to reverse its policies because of pressure from a freakin' foreign search engine company ! So who will this help ? The Chinese people who will now have no access to google at all ? Is it ok for us (google/yahoo/slashdot reader) to decide for the Chinese people that no access to information is better than tainted access ?

Just my 2 cents.

If you were not going to like them posted,

you should NOT have done it.

people will be seeing what crap you "people's" republic have pulled on people despite your muzzling attempts. get over with it, "party".

Massacre?

There was no massacre in the square. That is just a theory like evolution. Many say it was a rave by drunk students. They don't know what happened to their friends because they were drunk. Pay no attention to the lies! Especially since now HD-DVD players that cost $20 will come soon due to the efficiencies of Chinese labor! You want this, and to help your ailing relatives, a new crop of prisoners are eager to repent for their crimes by offering their organs to you and yours at very low cost.

"The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope." - Karl Marx

Was it even posted by Chinese national

So they say Flickr was disconnected because images of Tiananmen Square were posted. Who knows if it were even a Chinese national who posted them? Now I'm thinking, we could have us some fun, and help to highlight Chinese net censorship at the same time.

Post pictures of Tiananmen Square EVERYWHERE. Upload photos to Flickr, send video to Youtube and its 100 clones, post accounts on blogs, news sites etc. Let's see them disconnect their populace site-by-site until there's nothing left. Only then might it prompt a revolution that China appears to need so badly. At the very least it'll stop all those random port scans. If anyone's in doubt, it really happened [bbc.co.uk]

Ironic, eh?

Yahoo sucked up to the Chinese government by ratting out a journalist [wikipedia.org]. Fat lot of good that did them. Instead the Chinese give them a nice ole' kick in the crotch.

Is Slashdot blocked in China?

I wonder if it is...since it posts articles like this?

true.

I was in Beijing on Saturday. Flickr was in fact inaccessible. Right now, China is undergoing Olympics Madness. Particularly in Beijing, they have stores dedicated to Olympics schwag with T-shirts, toys, pencils, bags, you name it. There are posters, TV advertisements and billboards plastering the entire country. China is racing to get ready for the impending event. The week before I arrived, they installed small ratings boxes at immigration, with four lit buttons showing faces ranging from smiling to frowning that you can choose from after the official stamps your passport to rate your experience. We already know the Chinese government takes a rather narrow view on freedom of speech, and in the middle of what might be their biggest P.R. effort in history, they're going to spare no effort to clamp down on negative press--especially when it touches on the heart of Beijing.

makes sense

Right now, it would take too much processing power/time to review all the information being conveyed in picture form. Unlike Carnivore or whatever else the FBI and NSA are using to illegally spy on American's text communication, pictures aren't so easy to trace automagically.

Not that I agree with the censorship, but if you're going to run your society that way, you've just taken care of a major leak in individuals ability to communicate on the sly.

Good.

As always, I'm happier when the Chinese are blocking things than when the companies self censor....

Quantum networks

Every time the issue of internet censorship comes up on /., I think of the experiments they've done sending quantumly-entangled particles across some distance X, trapping them locally, and then pinging them to communicate faster than the speed of light. Would it be possible to create a network of quantumly-entangled particles that don't subsequently rely on optical fiber to transmit information, and which can't be blocked, jammed, surveilled, or otherwise censored?

The arms race toward quantum encryption would then be almost totally irrelevant, because there would be no discernible signal to encrypt/decrypt, just a quantumly entangled particle in a basement talking to another quantumly entangled particle in another basement somewhere else.

And if you could separate infinitely variant states from a particle and dish them out to whomever requests an entangled state, then it seems like you could theoretically create a massively interconnected panopticon where each node is directly connected to every other node. Hey presto, instantaneous communication with no possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks, no possibility of back-tracing packets. Total anonymity, total security from big brother.

How nodes discover each other in the first place is another question, but IANAP (physicist) nor IANANE (network engineer).

Parallel to an earlier period?

China was politically and culturally weak during the 19th century, and Chinese fought one another over foreign money. This has largely attributed to the downfall of China as a nation.

With the Patriot Act, mishandling of the Iraq War, and companies forfeiting principles for the pursuit of profits, are we destined to follow China's footsteps as well?

Is the sole purpose of firms to pursue profit for shareholders? Or do firms have social responsibilities domestically and abroad?

Flickr co-founder explains censor workaround

Tips on subverting China's censorship of Flickr. [com.com] (cnet/news.com)

Specifically, Greasemonkey needs to run a script that changes the Flickr server name into its numeric Internet Protocol address, Butterfield said. That would indicate that the China block uses the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates alphanumeric addresses such as "Flickr.com" into the numeric addresses actually used to route packets of data over the Internet.

How soon before China starts censoring by IP range?

Yahoo confirms it ?!?

Meh.... wake me up when Netcraft confirms it.

As bad as this is...

...worse is (IMO), that flickr started to censor images for users from Germany, Signapore, Hong Kong, and Korea!