China Anti-Corruption Web Site Crashes On First Day 169
An anonymous reader tips us to news out of China that the Web site of the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention crashed on Tuesday, just hours after its launch, as droves of people logged on to complain about corruption among officials. "The number of visitors was very large and beyond our expectations," an anonymous NBCP official said.
Hmmm.... (Score:2)
doh (Score:5, Funny)
It didn't crash. it just got corrupted.
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What does he Supervise? That people celebrate the "Two minutes' Hate"?
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No, duh, he makes sure Superman doesn't go around peeping, of course!
His next project is to extract lead from toy manufacturer's paints to make lead-shielded underwear....
Windows site? (Score:3, Funny)
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It seems silly to me to bother bribing the local officials if one isn't also bribing the people that are checking for corruption as well.
The traffic will go down after a period, but it isn't surprising that they would have this kind of difficulty estimating how much public interest there would be. There probably won't be
We didn't know that many people cared. (Score:5, Funny)
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URL? (Score:1)
Re:URL? (Score:5, Informative)
http://yfj.mos.gov.cn/ [mos.gov.cn]
Re:URL? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:URL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice to know that, no matter what part of the world you're in, people are willing to listen to "my brother's little kid, he's great with this world wide web stuff!" and actually pay them to do some work.
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Re:URL? (Score:4, Insightful)
It sends a 3504 pixel by 2336 pixel JPEG with quality level 97(excessively high), and the page directs the browser to scale it down to generate the final 200 by 142 image.
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bragging about their 20+ megapixel cameras (or whatever they're up to)
It doesn't help that they're taken with shitty mobile phone camera lenses, so no matter how
big it is, it looks like the insides of an outhouse.
(Rant mode off. We love them for their business, but we hate having the email client
hog our bandwidth while downloading their latest product catalogs!)
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Everyone head on over to yfj.mos.gov.cn. It's up.
Right in the article, too.
China and Technology (Score:2, Funny)
Re:China and Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:China and Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
No. As Opportunist said, "Racism is in the intention, not the word". Someone noticed that a double entendre existed. The fact that the word the word has a history of racist usage is entirely incidental to unique linguistic coincidence arranging that double entendre. The poster noticed a funny twist of language, and the linguistic facts pretty much precluded any freedom in how to construct the joke.
The poster was anonymous, so it is certainly possible he's a flaming racist, however I see nothing in his post indicating the presence of any ill will intent to disparage Chinese.
I just got through with a post raking someone over the racism coals for objecting to "interbreeding". I am disgusted by racists and people who actively use racist language. However I am also sick of politically correct epileptic fits treating words themselves as radioactively infectious. I am sick and tired of hearing TV reporters say "the N-word". If some racist yahoo calls a black congresswoman a Nigger Bitch, then the news reporter should damn well SAY a racist yahoo called a congress woman a Nigger Bitch. A news reporter using a word in accurate factual reporting of a literal quotation does not make the reporter a racist. And if someone viewing that news show finds it offensive - good. But their anger should be at the racist yahoo, NOT at the reporter or the news show.
A reporter going on TV and saying someone called the congress woman an "N-word B-word" sounds like an absolute moron. What are we, little kids in 6th grade? Is the reporter going to "catch cooties" if he says more than the first letter?
The word is "nigger".
The word is "bitch".
Someone who hates a congresswoman and goes ranting niggerbitch-this and niggerbitch-that desperately needs a brainwipe, but I am not going to put up with the notion that there is anything wrong or racist about the way I used the word nigger the six times I used it in this post.
Grow up people.
Hate racists, but get over the childish idea that a word itself "gives you cooties".
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(BTW I checked out the CoR stuff... the idea is great, but the founder comes off as a loon.)
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I am saying almost exactly the opposite.
Words only have the power we give them. A reporter who goes on TV and says "N-word" is saying that they are reacting in fear of the word "nigger", that they consider the word itself to have power, and that in fact it has the power to control their emotions, to control their thoughts, to control their language, to control their behavior.
a black woman who has suffered under grinding racism
Such a woman certain has a much better cas
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Unfortunately I think I'm about to cause you some pain. It's worse than that.
In during the 2000 election process, in Alabama there was a state ballot item...
40% of Alabama voters voted to keep an archaic state constitution article prohibiting interracial marriage. 38% in South Carolina voted the same on their state constitution just 2 years earlier. They were last two states to officially remove such articles, but still quite appalling
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Now, while THIS may be considered a racist remark, I don't think it's supposed to be. It's in the intention, not the word. A racist using the most PC-possible word to describe a person of different skin color will still use it with the intention to depict that person of lower value. Would it be l
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Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh no. And now the slashdotters are comming!!!!
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the first time it crashed the statistics were
99% users from china
1% Others
the second time it crashes it will be:
28% USA
24% UK
22% Germany
19% Sweden
5% France
2% other
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Referer:
98% www.slashdot.org
2% other
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Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA should get one of these... (Score:5, Funny)
(I hope the above isn't construed as a death threat against Bush! And his staff. And Congress. And the Senate. DHS... TSA...)
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In soviet China ... (Score:1)
(Somehow makes too much sense)
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There ain't enough power in America to power that many electric chairs.
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Do I have a blog? No, I don't have any extra time in my day to talk to myself. I've better things to do.
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Well let's see. The geek solution is a technical one (website.) While the common sense solution involves people physically doing something, like their civic duty (do I really need to explain what those are?).
Wow. I'm reading this comment at -1. W00T for the Slashdot groupthink. Apparently, AC, you should have mentioned what the civic duties are. If you live in a democracy, as this poster (though not TFA) is referring to, and you don't like the people in charge, you VOTE FOR THE OTHER GUY in the next election.
Whine about things on the internet is +3 Insightful and this is -1?
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Re:The USA should get one of these...Alive Citizen (Score:2)
Yes, that would be great. This is China, a lot of people died the last time they tried the "common sense solution".
/code? (Score:2)
Is it "helping" the regime there to have the corruption reported, as in providing a place for the populace to report the corruption, which allows the central government to get a bigger cut, or is it, in the long run, likely to open that government more, which autocrats tend to perceive as "not helping", but which could improve the lives of the proletaria
Reactions to be expected (Score:1, Interesting)
I guess the result of the examination will be the blogging about government activity should be curtailed.
Re:Reactions to be expected (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps they actually want to do something about corruption, but hadn't counted on just how many would try access the site. Corruption is widespread in China, and very unpopular. The only people who want is the people - the criminals - who benefit from it. This is the people, nor is it the national government, because it causes unrest, which the national government has to deal with; and I don't think they want that.
The chinese government are like most governments in most modern nations - they by and large want to do what is best for the people, or what they think is best. They are not monsters that enjoy making the population as unhappy as possible, despite the picture that gets painted in the more reactionary media in the west. The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources; that and the fact that corruption has been part of the Chinese society for well over 5000 years. It will probably take at least a generation of modernisation to change this.
Every time there are news from China, it is interpreted in the worst possible light - if they put a man on the moon, it must be because they starve their poor and want to rain death on America, if they tighten copyright laws, it is 'repression', if they don't, they are 'thieves'. Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?
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I totally agree with what you've said. Especially on Slashdot, news stories about China tend to be interpreted negatively, and in a very 1-dimensional way. The things that Slashdotters associate with China are always negative: the Great Firewall, jailing dissenters, censorship. I don't agree with these things either, but this is just a very small part of China, which is an extraordinarily vast country. For a country that has been growing so fast since Deng Xiaoping took office, there are bound to be som
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And a fairly important part. It's your government, I'd think that's important, right? (Furthermore, the original post here was not making a sweeping statement about China itself, they were making a statement about what is obviously a move by the Chinese government -- which is the very organization which
Re:Reactions to be expected (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they are not. They want to stay in power, and keeping to people from starving is necessary to do that. Everything they do for their people is to keep them from rebellion.
"The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources;"
If they wanted to help the people, they wouldn't spend huge sums of money on monitoring their population, torturing dissidents, and building the world's most advanced censorship regime. India has a billion people too, but they seem to run their country without wide scale torture.
Their big "problem", is that their people are only being kept from rebellion because of unsustainable economic growth, which the Chinese government is pursuing by inflationary monetary policy and environmental degradation on a scale unseen since the industrial revolution.
At some point, the growth will stop, and China's ethnically fractured population, made insane by generations of propaganda, will assert their power. I don't imagine it will be pretty.
"Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?"
Hitler did an amazing job building Germany's Autobahn network, Pinochet lead Chile to a path of economic prosperity, and China has build a great deal of infrastructure. We don't talk about these things, because they are far outweighed by the overall evil of the perpetrators.
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"99 percent of everything done in the world, good or bad, is done to pay a mortgage." -- Thank You For Smoking
They by and large want to succeed.
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Welcome to Slashdot! You must be new here.
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Wrong.
As I'm sure the Chinese government has discovered, it is not the corruption which causes unrest, it is news about the corruption. And when the corrupt control the news, it becomes very easy to make you believe everything's alright.
To some extent, that goes for the US, also, but there are things the government here cannot control. We have b
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You must be new around here.....
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But I don't agree with the "serve the people best" part. I'd rather guess the goal is to "line your own pockets best". Again, not a hit at China, that's just what I expect from any government. Most of all from mine.
The difference is just that I get every 4 years to choose my favorite thief.
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One announcement on TV to, oh say, 200 or so million viewers, and then a few seconds of fast paced texting and in less time than you can make instant noodles you've got, oh say 200 or so million clients hitting the site. No mystery why...
They have announcements down pat. However, they are still learning about the risks involved in hiring the first guy that claims he knows how to run a website.
/dev/null (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything, the corrupt Chinese government officials were just going to use the information to decide which citizens to throw in prison next.
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This web site was only meant to pacify the citizenry, by making them feel heard.
There's no reason to immediately jump to that conclusion. Many Chinese officials actually do care about the citizens of China and want to work hard to make China a better place. Their ideas of what is best may be very different from yours and mine, but that doesn't mean they get off an making people suffer. Why is it so difficult to believe that the Chinese government is serious about this, that it really wants to improve?
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Because then they'd have a free press. Consider the direction of the information. In a free press, the information moves from the people through the controlled media back to the people. The degree of control is inversely proportional to the number of media outlets - a government can not quickly curtail embarrasing information across thousands of independent news channels and news papers, b
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We should consider the possibility that the reason China doesn't have a free press is because for whatever reason the Chinese government really thinks a free press would be bad. Maybe they actually just want to control the public, to keep themselves in power, but anybody who believes that should arrive at that belief after consideration of evidence, and they should be willing to change t
Re:/dev/null (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't share your cynicism. Feel free to criticize China for being authoritarian and for opposing what the Western world considers to be fundamental human rights, but don't assume that everything about China is bad. Corruption will cause the top of China's "Communist" party to lose power and money; they will fight it out of self-interest, not altruism. Government leaders acting out of any other motivation is a rarity in human history.
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A good sign (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming that the complaints are actually investigated, that the investigations are fair, and that most people don't make false accusations of corruption, that is.
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Back to China, what pisses the average Joe off there isn't so much corruption between high profile people, its when they find that their land, house, cow, donkey, car or some other piece of property is stolen by the government in the name of progress - and worse still, none of th
Re:A good sign (Score:4, Insightful)
And in the UK, were such a thing to happen the Government would make promises to tackle the issue. They'd appoint some sort of quasi-governmental commission that was essentially accountable to no-one and "investigate". They'd then generate large and frequent reports that hid problems in obscure language deep into the report to ensure no-one ever read them, and occasionally set targets that no-one would ever reach. No-one would be held accountable or punished for those charges not being reached. This, despite vast amounts of tax payers money being used in the whole fiasco. The logo for the new commission alone would cost a few million just to start with.
The "free" press (the government owned) BBC and the more than 50% that's owned by New Corps International wouldn't report much as usual.
No, this is not unique to China -- but on the bright side, in China the people don't have 5 million security cameras following their every move.
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They didn't [bbc.co.uk] report much [bbc.co.uk] about that [bbc.co.uk], did they?
Yes, the government are incompetent, but to claim the BBC "wouldn't report much" is false and can be demonstrated as such.
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I figured that just meant, make sure your bribe is high enough.
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Who would be brave enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
With that government, i know i wouldn't. Hell, I'm almost afraid to complain about mine these days..
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"The Manager's Wife" (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know... (Score:4, Funny)
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I apologize for this... (Score:2)
I'm going to burn for this
As a general rule ... (Score:3, Funny)
Absolute power... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The bureau has been entrusted to collect and analyze
information from the banking, land use, medicine and
telecommunications sectors, among others, and to share
it with prosecuting organs, courts and the police.
Share the information with police, who might actually come after the people making the most complaints?The cynic in me says that this is probably merely an initiative by the government to see where the problems are, rather than a true attempt to end corruption. A few high profile cases will be dealt with, but the rest will be window dressing. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the loudest complainers are quietly dealt with.
I think the Chinese authorities are realistic enough to know that they face an impossible task. Witness the first 'death penalty for corruption' laws enacted, with great fanfare, well over ten years ago. In spite of much PR and many executions, corruption remains as widespread as ever. The death penalty certainly doesn't seem to be a deterrent against corruption.
One of biggest problems facing China's government is ensuring its own long-term survival, and corruption is a big danger to the government's survival. They should know. The communist revolution itself was a reaction against corruption.
As they say: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Re:Absolute power... (Score:4, Interesting)
The death penalty is not a deterrent for anything. There are some pretty draconian laws for capital punishment for street crimes in the US, but it's not like those US states are safer than Canada because of that.
Corruption is deterred by transparency, street crime by welfare, equal opportunities and affirmative action, but the death penalty is a so much more spectacular way of convincing voters you are doing something about it when you are actually not.
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China has executed some people fairly high up the food chain, like their FDA chief, or a bank official [pitt.edu]. These are not your regular, fairly anonymous people like those executed in US states, but are among the small, wealthy minority of people who wielded significant influence and power.
Slashdotters are always complaining about how laws never get passed that touch the wealthy in western countries, or they skip out of the country and retire
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The death penalty is a deterrent for reincidence.
So are prison sentences for that matter: they make reincidences less frequent.
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Check out the ongoing election process in (e.g.) Morocco. There are tons of encouraging news articles but in the comments everyone says "Eh, our government is corrupt, nothing will change." It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hopefully out of China's
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No. 2007 is now. And yes, in 2007 another public official was executed for corruption in China. Zheng Xiaoyu was probably not the only, nor will he be the last, government official to be executed in China for corruption. Believe it or not, I am aware that China still executes govenment officials (and also the occasional businessman) for corruption.
Please re-read what I wrote:
The dea
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All he is saying is that executions don't seem to effect corruption. Zheng Xiaoyu was just one of those executions.
Learn to read, then I might take your opinions "serious".
I think you are missing a point there (Score:2)
In purely internal affairs nobody gives a damn - all china cares these days is to crush any internal commentary and keep up appearances for the west.
tagged "humor"? (Score:4, Insightful)
corrupt public servants are being executed in china,
so we are talking about a webinterface to a death-list here!
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IT'S A TRAP (with historical precent). (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign [wikipedia.org]
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Besides, the Hundred Flowers wasn't about "whistleblowing". It was about free speech.
great... (Score:2)
Why the site is so slow (Score:3)
The site has too much junk on it. No wonder the server is overloaded.
There are several .swf objects. Some are movies. There's a Javascript picture rotator. There seems to be server-side Java; if you try vote.jsp [mos.gov.cn] on the site, you get a Java backtrace.
The "vote" script is amusing. The web designer seems to have copied a "suggestion box" script from somewhere, then commented out the "vote" capability. It's so PRC. The government is terrified of their people voting on anything.
In other news... (Score:2)
The anti-corruption web server in the United States of America, housed in the vice presidient's office BLEW UP and started a 2 alarm fire last week.
I was sure the software was robust. (Score:2)