US Gov't Pushing News Through China's Great Firewall 116
eldavojohn writes "The US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors has revealed in a completed FOIA request the development, testing and planned use of Feed Over E-mail (FOE) to push news through China's firewall. This FOIA request (PDF) indicates that the US government is interested in making sure Chinese people receive up-to-date news, and it wants to expand the arsenal of anti-censorship tools (for news at least). The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG."
OSS propaganda is good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OSS propaganda is good? (Score:5, Insightful)
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BIG QUESTION:
How do I install this thing on my computer? I can't find a download link. Also it says "works on most email servers as long as the user has access to POP3 and SMTP." Does that include yahoo or googlemail?
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It sounds like something out of the 1980's internet . Back then, many corporate websites didn't have high-speed T1 lines, let alone broadband to access gopher, ftp or USENET. Workers were lucky to get a 64-kbit ISDN link to serve an entire office block. The solution to downloading large files, was to send a Email request to an server, which would in turn ftp the relevant file, chop the file into little chunks and uuencode them to you by E-mail. It would be up to you to reassemble them or to use a suitable E
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How does it work? (Score:2)
I'm puzzled how this works. the description does not make sense to me:
"FOE is different from the average feed reader in that it's able to fetch content from censored sites without requiring the user to visit those sites to set up the feed. Once FOE fetches the content, it encrypts it and sends it via e-mail much like an attached file. The user's client gets decrypts the feed once it's arrived and displays it on the local machine. Ho adds that FOE should be easy for activists to set up and maintain because
How it works (Score:2)
The only article I've found so far that explains this mystery is this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6028780/What-is-the-Feed-over-Email-system.html [telegraph.co.uk]
But this seems to say it requires a special server. In which case it seems like this is just an encoded version of the 2008 service "feed-my-email". it still has to have a special server that the user must communicate with.
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To hell with China's rights as a sovereign nation, we are the good guys, we know best. If they did that to us,we would be up in arms ( and rightfully so ), lets hear it for being hypocrites. Go team!
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Yeah, imagine the repercussions if China were to ever give the rest of the world access to Chinese news.
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>>>imagine the repercussions
The nearby Philadelphia station (Megahertz or Link - channel 35.3) plays Chinese news three times a day. Nothing shocking about it. Also Korean, Japanese, French, German, British, and Euro.
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You mean TV CCTV-4 International, as made available on the Sky network in Europe?
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If they did what to us, push information through our government mandated internet censorship filters? If China insisted that we should have freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom to assemble? Yeah, we'd be pissed.
Re:OSS propaganda is good? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's already happened once, in a law passed nearly 100 years ago, and repealed in 1920? Well then, I think they've definitely established a tremendously scary pattern of censoring everything they don't like, both in terms of the frequency of the abuse, and in the severity! This jackbooted thuggery cannot be allowed to stand - Katie bar the door, pass the gunpowder, and PRAISE THE LORD!
What was it I was reading about in another article about how people have a difficult time comparing the impacts of things
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It's the Chinese government, they don't want freedom of press or speech because it would make it harder for them to control their own population. The Chinese people might very well want freedom of speech, press and assembly, but they aren't the ones working to keep this out. It is also worthwhile considering that Chinese culture is collectivistic and that it can be a lot harder to get collectivists to go along with the sort of things that it takes to have such a significant course correction.
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This is exactly what I always said about the Nazis! And Pol Pot! And Rwanda! And Haiti (early 90's Haiti... but I suppose humanitarian aid is precluded by steadfast nationalism, too...)!
Whatever happened to sovereignty, huh?
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This isn't about pushing a point of view, it's about making tools available to those who want greater breadth of information.
The government report on the testing said the technology can carry news feeds as well as vital software applications like Tor, which helps Internet users stay anonymous online, and Freegate, which can be used to access blocked Internet content.
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The US government has done a good job, for a very long time, of producing reasonably unbiased news reporting. In fact it may well be the only country where the government funded news media is prohibited from broadcasting to its own citizens, specifically to prevent the temptation of political manipulation and interference from becoming too great.
Go right ahead and be righteously indignant, but we all know the track record of the two countries involved, and its hardly debatable whos interests are more in li
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Does making it FOSS make pushing one countries point of view make it right?
It's not "pushing" one's POV to make it known to someone who would otherwise be prevented from knowing it.
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So...the point of view we're "pushing" on China here is that people should be free to read whatever news they want? And you're not ok with that?
How did this get modded up to +5 Insightful? It's beyond ignorant, it should be +5 Evil.
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i think u mean
"GREAT, now i remember i GET to play touhou for 20 hours strait. i bet that WOULD NEVER be censored in china as only evil people would censor touhou"
F.O.E. (Score:3, Funny)
Even in your internets... FOE [youtube.com]
Funny (Score:1)
A more direct approach (Score:1)
Just tell them to free up political speech or we'll stop buying their lead-filled shit. Let's stop being pussies.
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If we stop buying their lead-filled shit, they'll stop buying our shit-filled bonds.
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That's what happens when you deal with the devil too long.
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That was my thinking. We in the US are going to have to stop wasting so much money on defense and start paying down our debt. Realistically the Chinese can't afford to pull out of our bonds any more than we can afford to default on them, however there is also nothing that compels the Chinese to buy our debt instruments other than artificially devaluing the yuan.
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Yeah! If they don't, they obviously know what we'll do for situations like that. I mean, just look at Egypt!
I hope those Chinese bastards at the top of the chain of command are ready for all the "No comment" and "We are watching the situation evolve" statements that they can handle. Especially the ones that are managing the $900B in U.S. Debt.
Granted, I shouldn't forget that Egypt isn't even going to the extremes of censoring the internet, all they did was turn the whole thing off.
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As much as I like freedom of speech and democracy (real democracy, not the kind where you choose between a few figureheads who then go on to do nothing of what they promised), at this stage of its development dictatorship is probably a good thing in China, it allows them to get things done. India could never do what China is doing with their infrastructure, they'd be tied up in the courts for years.
Pushing news over the Wall (Score:1)
There's actually a tradition of this sort of thing, I think. E.g. like listening to the Voice of America on shortwave radio when outside the U.S.A. and starved for English-language news. Although that isn't quite the same as it is our one's own
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But generally, isn't the story about... mailing list software?
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Except the Chinese aren't consumers, that's the biggest problem with their economy.
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That's not really a problem. I know that it's popular to claim that consumer spending is important, but that's only in countries like the US where we're pillaging foreign countries for wealth, what little work is left tends to be service sector. An ideal economy would be balanced such that there's as much being produced as there is being consumed and that increases in efficiency would lead to decreases in actual work done.
This is a bit simplistic as it doesn't account for trade and that it's more efficient
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With theirs? With OURS!
Because in the equation of current global economy, we're the consumers, they're the producers. What people didn't figure out apparently is that to consume, you need money, to have money, you need to earn it, to earn it, you need a job and for a job something has to be produced HERE.
It baffles me how nothing was learned from the depression of the 30s, which had pretty much the same reason: Good produced cheaply by people who cannot afford them due to wages that did not allow them, a sa
Why GPL? (Score:2)
Patriotism (Score:1)
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A freedom fighter is also nothing but a terrorist who won. If you didn't figure out that labels are attached by whoever writes the history books and news, you should maybe do some catching up with reality.
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The difference being that that information endangered the lives of so many innocent people.
In fact, here's a list of all of the people who actually died because of those leaks:
Isnt it ironic. (Score:5, Insightful)
question was rhetorical. it is ironic.
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Is the US government soliciting and obtaining Chinese government classified documents and then broadcasting their contents worldwide? No, they are not. There's no irony or hypocrisy here. Give the Devil his due, why don't you?
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If that holds any drop of water in court, most journalists and their papers (at least those still worth the name) should better hire a lot of lawyers.
Publishing dirty laundry of some company? Must have been spying, we sue.
Publishing anything about celebrities they don't want you to know? Must have been spying, we sue.
Reporting pretty much anything someone does not want you to know? We sue.
In short, news will be even more boring, even more drivel and even more "everything's perfect" propaganda than they alre
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I'm trying to understand you, unity100. I know you support Wikileaks as I do, but do you also support this initiative that targets Chinese people?
Also, the appropriate word is "hypocritical". Of course, that would require the US to actively censor what its citizens can access in the name of "social harmony" as China does.
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But do we really need to do one thing at a time? Can't we make progress on both fronts -- encourage the US to be more accepting of WL, while also supporting this initiative? Like Obama once said, "it is not necessary for us to think we can do only one thing and suspend everything else." How about it, can this project get some words of encouragement from you?
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simply, it is illogical to support an endeavor for spreading information by a government which has been hostile to freedom of information regarding itself.
see ? it doesnt have enough credibility. had the american government been open to freedom of information up till this point, one could say that 'well, depending on their record, we can say that they
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Rare cases of abuse notwithstanding, most ICE seizures are related to ip issues, i.e. stopping counterfeiters, or the online hosting of copyrighted material.
You can of course take a fundamentalist view of freedom of expression and include protection for counterfeiters and copyright violators, but that brings with it an even larger can of worms.
Your last sentence seems confused, as you seem to agree that censorship is indeed bad, yet you immediately fall to the "they do it too" fallacy. It's difficult to dis
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Really, so where in the article do they report that we're stealing classified Chinese military & diplomatic documents, and publishing them for the entire world to look at with this software?
I must've missed that "ironic" part!
This is what's going to happen (Score:1)
a proper name (Score:2)
What about... (Score:3)
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That said, they always make these stuff a big deal, as if general Chinese population really care about news from foreign source.
See, it's not like Chinese really can't push through the firewall if they really want. tens of thousands of Chinese quickly break through the firewall to view a Japanese porn star's blog (twitter? I forgot) after the news about her blog got spread through the word of mouth, adding tens of thousands of "follower" to her blog in just a few days.
But how many push
This is how it was invented: (Score:2)
Some American official: I know what to do -- we should SPAM them with propaganda!
Not new (Score:2)
This is a natural extension of Voice of America in the internet age.
The only problem I have with it (Score:3)
The problem I have with the US's zeal to "export democracy" is that they go so overzealous with it that there's now a shortage of it at home.
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Or (Score:3)
Or you can just use Alta-Vista or any other not-so-well-known news provider. That's what I did last time I was over there, in China that is. I was reading a lot of African newspapers online as well.
All it requires is a little imagination people. These are dullard Communists who specialize in IT who set the Great Firewall up.
Waste of US tax payer money (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: just a short length of pipe (Score:1)
Good for them. (Score:1)
FOE SPAM in 3....2....1.... (Score:1)
V1@GRA
SSH tunnel (Score:2)
Any computer with an SSH server installed can act as a SOCKS5 proxy.. Seems like it would be somewhat easier to just set up a few of those and allow the Chinese people free roam of the Internet. (of course then they could learn all sorts of things not endorsed by the US government, that can't be good :P)
Messing with a big bully here... (Score:2)
I am not sure if they understand the implications, but let Obama tighten the bonds first before you go muck about in someone else's backyard and ruin not only diplomatic ties, but also alienate a nation that is already control hungry, and needs any excuse to bombard us again with cyber activity.