China Begins Monitoring Billions of Text Messages 178
eldavojohn writes "The Telegraph is reporting that China has begun monitoring 'billions of text messages' in order to increase censorship. However, a People's Daily article claims they only monitor users who have been reported, and only shut down their message service if the complaints are true. Anything considered pornographic will require the user to bring a letter of guarantee to the local public security bureau promising to never again send such messages before service can be reactivated."
Monitoring is universal (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:4, Informative)
Those were pager messages, not SMS messages (the way pagers work, any dude with some equipment can listen to *everything*; the way SMS works, only the phone company can listen (well, and anyone who can order the phone company around)).
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?
It's 140 characters. It's expensive per tiny unit of information (UK). It spawned a whole degenerate sub language, and it's just about the lamest way that two humans can communicate.
In china it's cheap, but I still wouldn't use it for my revolution planning. Encrypted XMPP/self run multi-protocol gateway (MSN, ICQ etc)/VOIP over 3G FTW.
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And then bring a letter of guarantee to the local public security bureau promising to never again use encryption before service can be reactivated.
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Whats needed I think is a way to pass very small chunks of encrypted information from point to point in UDP packets. Literally, text messages, but not sent by sms.
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Now thats a thought.
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:5, Informative)
As for cheap, in parts of Africa there's almost a whole "language" based on the messages you can send just by calling and hanging up before it answears. the time of day or no. of missed calls forms a code that can be transmitted for free.
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It has been a killer app since the late 90's, when prices dropped.
When mobile phones first became popular in the UK text messages were free - the phone companies couldn't believe that anyone would find 160 characters of text a useful medium of communication. They couldn't have thought of a better way to embed a new sub-culture, if they had done it on purpose it would almost be worth doffing ones hat to!
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It's 160 characters if you use 7 bit ascii. and you can send multipart sms which allows up to 39015 7 bit ascii characters.
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Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?
Yes.
It's 140 characters.
You still have an ancient phone that limits you to 140 characters? Any phone will automatically split them up for you, and join them at the other end, it's been that way for years.
It's expensive per tiny unit of information (UK).
Yes that sucks, but the key words are per unit of information. The absolute cost is not necessarily expensive, depending on your network/contract/etc. E.g., my texts are 10p each, whilst Int
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There are many companies and plans now that allow you 2000 sms per month included in the plans price, and those aren't all that expensive (starts at 10e/month i think).
SMSing the world (Score:2)
Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?
It's 140 characters.
Just ask any Twitter user.
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At least in the US, most any person who uses them to any real extent buys an unlimited text plan - the cost is only high if you pay per message.
But yes, I use them to send more complex messsages. Most often it's just to send something to someone who may or may not have time to talk at the moment. Same in reverse - if I'm at work then family and friends know that I might not be able to talk, but if they send a text I'll read it when I get to it.
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A data point for that:
I'm on a pre-paid plan, since I'm not interested in being raped with a contract. Since I don't text much, I pay per-text. The no-plan rate is $0.20 per text sent or received. Since I only go through 0-20 texts per month, I suck it up, despite the fact that I know damn well that it doesn't cost more than a cent to send those characters.
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It's actually a very appropriate, even polite, method of communication in many circumstances. One that doesn't scream at you "ANSWER NOW! I DEMAND TO TALK TO YOU RIGHT NOW!!!"
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It's actually a very appropriate, even polite, method of communication in many circumstances. One that doesn't scream at you "ANSWER NOW! I DEMAND TO TALK TO YOU RIGHT NOW!!!"
If only there was a way to leave a voice message when the other person doesn't want to talk to you right away.
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Voicemail still has much larger potential of being abused, of disrespecting time of the recipient. Especially since people too often don't give up with trying to contact you directly, and try another time...and another.
SMS tends to be more to the point; and people can read several times faster than somebody can speak.
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Exactly, and with voicemail the recipient still has to turn it on. And I don't always want to talk to everyone even if I'm basically free (playing a game, watching a movie or whatever). Sending a sms on a non-urgent and not-so-important issue is a lot less intrusive and a lot more polite.
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140 characters is a lot in Chinese. While most phones are not limited to so few characters anymore, even if they were, you can cram a lot of information into 140 Chinese characters. Easily enough to plan riots; the anti-Japanese riots several years back were orchestrated and planned almost exclusively over SMS.
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For Chinese characters (and some accented letters), the limit is not the same, you can only write 70 characters. Still, it is possible to express a lot of things in 70 characters, I think more than in 140 in English.
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'Does anyone, in any country use SMS for more than "meet in bar at 7"?'
You mean more important stuff like:
"Blessent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone"
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Most young people here in Germany write more SMS than they talk minutes on the phone. (Usually the same price. Yep, this means calling would be cheaper, but... oh well. ^^)
And from what I heard, vending machines even work with SMS in the Nordic countries (e.g. Finland, Nokia’s home) for a looong time.
I know from around 2003, that in Danmark, they all just had ICQ or something on their phones, and texted trough that because it was cheapest.
I wonder what they all are up to, now that it’s 2010!
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Unsurprisingly, it's the same in the UK. Teenagers text because they aren't allowed to make calls in lessons, after "bedtime" at home, or don't want people to listen in.
Lots of places in the UK now let you pay for on-street parking by text, but I haven't heard of much else, except the usual stuff (ringtones, charity donations etc). In Sweden you can buy (some?) train tickets by text.
(PS "Denmark" in English. But still "Danish" and "Dane".)
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In addition to vending machines and such (those have been around from the time sms was introduced, from what, 1996 or so?), you can also pay your meals in Subway and some other fast food places and like you said train and bus tickets can be paid with sms too.
Not that it would be in lot use (maybe more with teens, as in our time too), but they are available.
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Unlimited minutes: $99
It's not a hard choice. Not to mention that people can get back to you when you're not busy without stupid voicemails and texting is easy to do while doing other things like cooking.
But in the us you don't go to jail for religion th (Score:4, Interesting)
But in the us you don't go to jail for being a part of the religion that is not the one the sate forces you to be in.
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But in the us you don't go to jail for being a part of the religion that is not the one the sate forces you to be in.
Give us time. Soon we'll be able to send you to jail for using too much fuel or electricity or driving the wrong type of car or not buying health insurance. The difference between China and the US is that China tells you what religion you can or can't be where the US government is becoming its own religion.
other places make you buy health though tax (Score:2)
other places make you buy health though taxes and jail has free health care.
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You mean unless you’re a muslim, or vaguely belong to religion that some “terrorist” belongs to...
Hey, you know that the US is having the most active terrorist training camp on the planet? ;) :(
It’s called Gitmo, and I heard it’s still not closed yet.
Or rather:
Evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, they feel EXACTLY the same way (Score:2)
But of course, you are right, and they are wrong. Funny that, they also think EXACTLY the same thing.
Evil? Try arrogant (Score:2)
The PRC is no farther up the evil scale than many other governments in the world, but they have more power to utilize their evil.
On the arrogance scale however, China probably holds a 10 out of 10.
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I wonder how feasible it would be to bypass Chinese filters by posting text in .JPG or .GIF images (or some other format) instead of easily parsed Ascii?
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Censorship is always evil. It doesn't matter whether they're trying to hide the fact that they're censoring communications or not. Further, while most western countries have nutters that scream for censorship, very few have actually taken the steps to create anything within an order magnitude of the great firewall. Even Australia's blacklist is no where near the scale that China's censorship program is.
Run over with a tank subjective? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Find a large square in the capital, occupy it with thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people for a few weeks and you don't think the government will clear it?
Which government are you referring to? Sure the Chinese one would. Don't know about other countries though. Some have a history of letting that sort of thing slide for a while.
Yes! China *SHOULD* elect Bush! (Score:2)
Unfortunate (Score:2)
Text message technology actually makes it easier to spy on people because you can just filter for words like "democracy" rather than actually having to pay an operator to listen to people's phone conversations. Many human rights activists in China had previously reported having their phones tapped.
Really? This is designed to increase censorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Chinese government is clearly fixed upon the value of censorship. Censorship is what they're trying to promote, clearly. Cutting naughty or unacceptable words out of daily conversation is their endgame. They're certainly not monitoring billions of texts messages to identify and locate dissidents, increase their understanding of social networks that may work against them, or to increase their control over their citizens. Censorship is totally what they're after.
Self censorship and conservative thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting naughty or unacceptable words out of daily conversation is their endgame.
Look. What they are doing is persuading people to censor themselves, and to think conservatively. The endgame is behaviour modification.
You don't actually have to read every message. You simply tell people that everything they write or say is monitored.
It's literally FUD.
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They monitor Slashdot (Score:2)
The Chinese government requires every Slashdot subscriber to send an official letter of apology, and promise never to read Slashdot again.
Context (Score:2)
If they put half their censoring effort into.. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Human rights and the well-being of their population, they probably wouldn't have half the dissent and problems they have now.
Yes, but they wouldn't necessarily be the ones in power. And frankly, I'm surprised that they don't have a lot more trouble with dissent.
Which would, in turn, require less effort to police the people and would result in much less of a need to 'control' their population.
Yes, but they're not concerned with the most efficient form of governance. They're most concerned with the one that keeps them in power.
You cannot completely control a population the size of China's. If you want them to conform you have to win them over.
You win them over by presenting a point of view that's favourable to the ruling party, and one aspect of that is censoring anything that is inconvenient to that.
I find the above unpleasant, and do not condone it, but nor is pretending ot
Pornographics words not to use in SMS while in Chi (Score:5, Funny)
Down with CCP
Free Tibet
Free Xinjiang
Rule of law
Down with the Great Firewall
Human rights
Multiparty sytem
Accountability
Melanine
Children crushed by crumbling schools
Forced abortion
Chapter 08
You have nice pecks baby.
Just think of the children!!
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Don't forget:
No lead paint
No cadmium toys
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Down with CCP
What does protesting the practices of the company running Eve Online have to do with anything?
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Semi-related: I've heard that you can disconnect Chinese WoW users advertising in-game for gold selling services, by whispering "Free Tibet" to them. Don't know if it's true or not.
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Careful, the first one's always free, then they jack up the price. That's how they get you.
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I wonder how far they can push it (Score:4, Insightful)
Logistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethical concerns aside, it would be extremely interesting to see how censorship on this large of a scale is implemented.
I wonder how effective automated modern systems will be at filtering, and how much of the censorship will have to rely on human employees. Total cost? Effectiveness? Cultural implications?
idk (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it'd be hard enough for computers to decipher English LOL-speak, much less Chinese.
Sooo, who is going to offer the first hardware encryption in handsets...and how soon would THAT be forbidden?
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I guess you haven't received texts from my father - encryption is already here, done in meatspace!
English companies will help... (Score:3, Insightful)
With a project of this scale, and with the wallet and determination of the Chinese government, it's more than likely that an advanced Western IT company is going to be helping out with this monitoring task. They helped out with Iran, after all, which is much more taboo than helping out China.
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You get 140 bytes of data per SMS, so with the default GSM 7-bit alphabet that gives you 160 characters.
I can't remember how alternative encodings work, but I seem to recall you get about 70 characters when you text with extended character sets, suggesting that it's some sort of UTF-16 like encoding scheme. That number drops if you start doing message concatenation.
I'm fascinated ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... by the parallels between the Chinese and American right wingers' war on pornography. I'd think that the Chinese would be more intent on stamping out possible challenges to Communist rule (Falun Gong), independence movements (Tibet) and threats to national security. The American conservative logic is more understandable. The economic conservatives don't care about porn per se (its just another business after all), but in order to assemble a viable voting block, their 'deal with the devil' (the religious right) requires that they adopt their position that every ejaculation must have a name. The Chinese don't suffer from the same political pressures as the GOP does. There's no opposition party espousing sexual freedom that could benefit from the circulation of porn. Sitting at home wanking in front of the computer screen is not an activity around which groups tend to organize.
Although the battle cry of our right wingers has been "Godless Commies", it seems that these two groups share quite a bit of ideology.
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Have you discovered a method to monitize trolling? Can we subscribe to your newsletter?
Western influences (Score:2)
Porn and freedom are both seen as bad things from outside. The perception is that if you get one you get the other.
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Porn and freedom are both seen as bad things from outside.
Porn is bad?
The whole "sex is bad" theme is primarily from Judao-Christian-Islamic religions. Eastern religions seem to have a much more open attitude towards sexuality. So, I'd expect a "Godless Communist" government to reject the tenets of western religions as "bad things from outside". To the degree that religious influences of any type would be tolerated in China, I'd expect that they'd promote the domestic ones over ours.
The perception is that if you get one you get the other.
They don't seem to have a problem adopting capitalism and numerous other outside
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At least in America, that's why we love/d Ronald Reagan.
Remember, before Reagan the religious were largely Democrats. Particularly in the South. Economic conservatives (those damned Yankees, northerners, the 'social elites', etc.) didn't have enough power to get into office. So the idea of "social conservatives" was invented. And Reagan got elected.
Don't confuse social conservatism and morality with economic conservatism and law and order. The two are a poor fit. The demands that social conservatives place upon the legal system to include their agenda into the
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Sitting at home wanking in front of the computer screen is not an activity around which groups tend to organize.
Do not forget that:
1) prostitution is illegal in China
2) pornography is illegal in China, so it's not possible to get porn videos easily
3) in the current generation, there are more men than women (because of the unique child policy, the chinese preferred to get guys than girls), so it's not easy to get married
Add to this the fact that they can't use Internet for pornography, and we can just imagine the level of frustration.
Such an amount of frustration will only lead to increased violence (and the women are
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Do not forget that:
1) prostitution is illegal in China
2) pornography is illegal in China, so it's not possible to get porn videos easily
My question is why this situation exists. Not having access to something because its illegal is circular logic.
3) in the current generation, there are more men than women (because of the unique child policy, the chinese preferred to get guys than girls), so it's not easy to get married.
This is the best argument yet for opening up some brothels. Give the single guys something to do. Instead of the (unwilling?) girl next door.
Add to this the fact that they can't use Internet for pornography, and we can just imagine the level of frustration.
Such an amount of frustration will only lead to increased violence (and the women are the first targets with rapes).
Better to release some of that frustration with a few JPEGs than the girl next door.
add to that parallel muslim fundamentalists (Score:2)
they are all control freaks. every society has control freaks. its psychologically inevitable that a regular dribble in any society will consist of zealous control freaks absolutely fearful of losing control over... who knows what. their bowels i guess. its the trailing end of the bell curve, what can you do? just look at all these low iq tea bagger morons in the usa. too bad their so goddamn loud
they all rally around a banner, and the banner is always the magical past. the real past was full of just as muc
Here's the deal. (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who doesn't think every SMS in the US (for example) is passed into the NSA is naive beyond belief. The difference is that in the west doing this snooping is still a 'dirty secret', while in china they see value in the people knowing they're monitored. Keeps everything calm. In the west being open about this would have the opposite effect, and we all want everything to remain calm, right? They all do it "for the people" of course.
The EU as a whole isn't there yet, but the infrastructure is coming up as fast as the laws can be pushed through.
Even if your local government quite dislike the idea of Total Interception, they'll still do it because information is the currency in the global military industrial information complex. If moscow will trade you information about Al-Qaeda for information about some chinesee dissident in your country...
Sheesh, nowadays you can't talk about the world we live in without sounding like a friggin nutcase.
why do you think it is valid (Score:3, Insightful)
to compare what a western government does to its citizens to what a country like china does to its citizens?
western governments are democracies, they rule by consent. therefore, there is a natural limit on what their citizens will tolerate before the government is voted out. china is an autocracy. a small select class of elites rule by fiat. fear and force is therefore how they rule. it doesn't matter what the citizens think, it matters only what a few grumpy technocrats in beijing think. furthermore, china
Because I'm human. (Score:2)
I find your argumentation to be borderline strawmanish and succumbent to the very intellectual dishonesty you accuse me of.
>fact: no government, historical, present day, or hypothetical, will not snoop for one reason or another, good or bad therefore, that you can find some snooping a government does is therefore without probative value.
So you're saying it's the will of the people to be under mass-surveillance, because you just said:
>western governments are democracies, they rule by consent. therefor
pick an extremely liberal government (Score:2)
say the dutch or the swedes
right now, the dutch and swedish government are monitoring information and any chatter within its borders. terrorist cells, mafia organizations, pedophiles, and other possible criminals they have leads on. this is normal, this is status quo, and this will always be the case. why do you have a problem with this?
right now the chinese are monitoring chatter as well. the scale of the monitoring is many orders of magnitude larger than the liberal governments (adjusted for population ev
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Anyone who doesn't think every SMS in the US (for example) is passed into the NSA is naive beyond belief.
Uh-huh. I want to know who has the thankless job of reading all that crap. Page after page after page of "c u l8r" "u r hawt" "wot u meen?" "lol wtf kthxbi"
THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! (Score:2)
theres a good side... (Score:2)
There is a good side, now the hackers that attacked google will be busy sifting through billions of texts saying,
"DOOD, too much rice-wine! just had sex with a goat! gonna hurl..."
me lv u lngtme (Score:2, Funny)
Sent from Longh Whang...
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Re:Doesn't this violate the 1st Amendment? (Score:5, Funny)
Score:-1, Facepalm
Re:Doesn't this violate the 1st Amendment? (Score:4, Informative)
No. They live in China, they don't have your fancy 1st Amendment.
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China and the US both need to upgrade to Constitution v2.0
Remember all those laws the US passed? Communications Decency Act....
With the right party in power (unfortunately), I could see the US having gone down the same path.
There's already much precedent in this area.. think FCC regulations and TV/radio broadcasters, talk shows, etc.
The reason would be the same as usual.... think of the children!
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With all those Amendments, US just needs to rollback to Constitution v1.0.
US 1st amendment corresponds to their Article 35 (Score:5, Informative)
No. They live in China, they don't have your fancy 1st Amendment.
You're right. All citizens of China have is Article 35 [peopledaily.com.cn], translated: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."
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Complete freedom to do it, and enjoy the consequences before, during and (if conscious) after!
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No one posted that...it was a joke. Read the damn comments, there were only 2 of them that you had to go through, and based on the topic headliner, the one that got modded up wasn't a response to anyone.
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+1, totally awesome!
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Yes - you're missing the fact that China has been around a lot longer than some small bunch of European expat who decided to start their own country in the New World.
WTF makes people believe that the US constitution has any force outside the United States? Do you even have any idea how much world there is outside of the United States?
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"you're missing the fact that China has been around a lot longer"
which China ?
I propose we rewrite the history books in Europe and former colonies to make it all about Rome: Eastern Rome, Western Rome, Transatlantic Rome, French Rome etc.; change the word "state" with the word "dynasty", so it would look like there is only one state, just has a bit of trouble staying in one piece right now ... or even better, start with Sumer and have one 5000 years old country to best the 4500 years of "China".
Chi
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no, more like the Holy Roman Empire ... the German one
Re:Government protest? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a similar procedure, but when you go down to the local public security bureau with your letter of guarantee they shoot you in the head and harvest your organs.
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Re:Why does China dislike porn so much? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also, while suppressing such powerful force in them, people need / try to find internal rationalization for the state of affairs; otherwise it would be unbearable. They actually start to be deeply convinced in all the BS, makes the whole thing easier for them without feeling alienated (and humans generally fare bad at dealing with alienation).
It causes them to pass, themselves, without strong external pressure immediately present, the trait onto their children. Which, among other factors, nicely ensures sel
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Don't think so evil (Score:3)
Governments are rarely evil, in real life they are misguided trying to do what they think is the right thing but going about it wrong.
Terry Pratchett's "May you life in intresting times" touches on it briefly. A rebellion is forming in the counterweight continent (china) seeking to overthrow the government and liberate the peasants... and who will then lead those peasants? The leaders of the rebellion, who will for the greater good of the peasants tell the peasants how to lead their life, how to farm, desp
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Where does the fear of pornography originate from in China?
Come on, the fear is the same everywhere, even if the response is different.
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Nordic countries? ;) Sea-faring ships? ;p
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Oligarchies operating under the veil of social equality, such as the Chinese one (or those once present in Eastern part of Europe) sometimes work, well, in mysterious ways.
Semi-officially it could be something such trivial as the will to distance themselves from the "rotten West", a way to prove that "we are better" (while the pornography "issue" almost arbitrarily fell into it as one of the categories). Semi-officially...and still likely not very accurate explanation.
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Google Voice and other similar sites will be used to create generic SMS accounts that smartphones will then be programmed to send random 140 character junk messages at random intervals just to skew the results and make it more difficult to track individuals sending pornographic texts. We may not have privacy anymore, but what does that really matter when we can just hide in the torrent?
This causes minor confusion for a short while until someone figures out a fairly straightforward pattern to the artificially-generated messages, manages to filter them out, then goes back to looking at all the *real* SMS messages sent by people under a false sense of security.
It really annoys me how naive and shortsighted the people who propose all these "swamp them with bogus data" schemes are. Even if something works in the short term, the messages have still been recorded and can easily be re-filtered