China Pledges To Step Up Internet Administration 52
angry tapir writes "China says it will step up administration of the Internet this year while continuing to build out the country's fiber-optic backbone and expand broadband access for consumers. Internet administration was mentioned in a keynote report on the work of the government to China's parliamentary session. It underlined the importance of culture and noted the need to 'strengthen the development of civic morality' and 'speed up the establishment of moral and behavioral norms that carry forward traditional Chinese virtues.' The pledge comes amid revelations that DDoS attacks against WordPress last week allegedly originated from China."
Authortarian Vomit (Score:5, Insightful)
Or in other words: suppress the flow of information that might threaten CCP rule, and push more magical-thinking hogwash created by the CCP down the people's throat. Just like every other "morality" or "virtue" rule the CCP has pushed in the past 30+ years.
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Exactly what I thought when I read that. The internet shouldn't be "administered" at all, especially by any governmental body, and DEFINITELY not one that fears freedom of information, communication, speech and press.
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and DEFINITELY not one that fears freedom of information, communication, speech and press.
What else is there?
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Just like every other "morality" or "virtue" rule statists have pushed in the past 10,000+ years.
FTFY. Not that the Chinese government isn't the ultimate example of this kind of thinking in the 21st century, but this kind of hogwash and claptrap has been the bread and butter for statist pigs for millenia. Anytime someone tells you they have the answer to what is just and moral, and all it takes is you giving up your free will to conform to it to make the world a better place, well, they can just go fuck themselves.
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pigs
This doesn't help your rhetoric.
Returning to the topic, if you construct an evil straw man the opposition will rise up to fight it and as a consequence take some small degree of resemblance to it. If however you encourage their developments to fit your own, positive, expectations they will also rise to this challenge to some degree. Which one of this approaches you choose, positive or negative, speaks a lot about your own disposition.
Do you want to be "knee-jerk", or "smart"? Slashdot has chewed the same ne
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Whatever about states and statists, this kind of press release is pretty typical of what has come out of corporate PR offices in the last decade or two.
I digress by noting the cosy relationship between corporations and the Chinese state over the same period.
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Re:Authortarian Vomit (Score:5, Insightful)
And the US is complicit, as long as China keeps paying.
The infrastructure that powers China's firewall (interconnections, deep packet inspection routers, software filters, etc) was built and configured by US corporations.
China is not the only place where economic considerations trump human rights for many people.
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Yeah I wasn't saying it was exclusively US companies, but I do know that companies like Cisco played a big part.
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Yeah I wasn't saying it was exclusively US companies, but I do know that companies like Cisco played a big part.
They just got the ball rolling. I don't think China has any intention of being dependent upon Cisco (or any other foreign corporation) for critical infrastructure for any longer than necessary to develop their on in-house replacements.
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If the US is complicit in Chinese traffic filtering, then gun manufacturers are complicit in all bank robberies, knife manufacturers are complicit in muggings, and beer manufacturers are complicit in bar-brawls.
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Eh, give them time to develop the 30 minute sit-com. Then these hamfisted methods won't be needed anymore. But I have to ask, who's making more noise about wikileaks?
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ONLY thinks like child porn? ONLY things like mass produced soap operas? I take it you welcome porn for adults, "Return of the Condor Heroes", news of the Jasmine Revolution? BTW, the phrase "information shaping" is a bit revealing.
Yes. Synonymous with "filtering based upon identification of specific content."
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If it's filtering things like child porn and mass produced soap operas - information shaping is fine by me...
That's fine and all, however,I wouldn't trust the P(i)R(a)C(y) to administer anything. The P(i)R(a)C(y), for the last several thousand years has a checkered past of corruption at all levels of government. The only half credible government, IMHO was the Ming dynasty, and even that, I'm sure, had its problems too.
Chinese virtues as in blocking and tracking (Score:3)
Chinese virtues as in blocking and tracking what people post?
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Chinese virtues as in blocking and tracking what people post?
No, but rather on the line of "To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the highest skill". Which translates to:
Government's fault (Score:1)
Why is it that when a attack originates in China, people immediately think it was ordered by the chinese government, but if it originates from Turkey -- not so much?
Perhaps because we don't understand the Chinese too well?
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Please. The Chinese "People" are ordinary people, much like the rest of us. They go to work, build friendships, try to get laid... imposing their control and world view in a global sense isn't much of a concern for them. But we're talking about someone that has these inclinations of imposing control.
Now, the Chinese Government calls itself "The Ruling Party", and mobilizes their police force to prevent international news reporters from actually reporting anything that has to do with a certain inspirational
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...replaced with something better.
Do you have something specific in mind that will do the same job as DNS, work reliably, and not require any entity like ICANN?
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It's only 4 bytes -- you can remember them.
(This post brought to you by 2001 -- where 2^32 addresses are enough for anyone, nobody gives a damn about newfangled IPv6 thing, and the childrean are all above average.)
A nation of administrators (Score:5, Insightful)
If politically, the US is a nation of lawyers, then, as a single-party state, the PROC is effectively a nation of administrators. The US Congress might debate about network neutrality, but in China all issues pertaining to the Internet are viewed as problems of administration (management). China, Inc. makes more sense than the old Japan, Inc.
The PC World article references a downloadable PDF translation of Premier Wen's report to the National People's Congress from the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com]. The part about administering the Internet comes from a section titled "Vigorously enhancing cultural development".
The word "administration" occurs at least 15 times throughout the document, chiefly in the construct "social administration" and goes well with an image of Wen as some sort of company president or CEO delivering his annual stockholders' (party) report.
Geek note: The ~3 MB PDF appears to be a series of scanned pages overlaid upon the OCR [wikipedia.org]'ed text version of the document. So you can actually cut and paste the text.
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I'm sorry, what was your rambling point about? Superiority of the CCP or something?
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
The Chinese government has a tough problem... how do you transition a nation of over a billion people, mostly subsistence farmers, into the 21st century?
Unfortunately, one of their chosen means is to attempt to maintain an authoritarian regime. Do the actions of the CCP qualify as "... direct [the internet] in a positive way that benefits everyone in society" ? No, they don't... they seek to maintain power by maintaining order, which they define as maintaining a stranglehold on the expression of ideas. This is done for the benefit of the CCP, not the benefit of the nation.
I can't help but note that you started out as if you were claiming that the Chinese government was acting in such a way as to benefit the Chinese people... but then you describe the government as an elitist oligarchy based on factors as irrelevant to good governance as one's Mandarin accent. You then go on to reference the US debt as if that was somehow relevant to your assertions concerning the Chinese government.
The reader is left wondering what you think you point might be, and what you think constitutes support for that point.
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Isn't it funny that China's government recognizes the role the internet plays in culture? And wants to direct it in a positive way that benefits everyone in society? The entire idea is anathema to Westerners, isn't it?
Hahahahaha. You're pretty hilarious. China is just like the US, which is to say, controlled by entrenched interests who have the nation by the balls. The fact that it's different in practically every other way (except, apparently, self-entitlement) is basically irrelevant as long as the country is in the control of capitalist interests.
It's rather like the US State Department or maybe Harvard, where you have to be really smart or have family connections to get in.
And where if you don't parlay intelligence into connections, you're going to find rapidly that you don't get to play.
As opposed to, say, America, where the government's idea of benefiting everyone is running up a $223 billion deficit in March 2011 alone, more than all of 2007.
I'm sure the Chinese people are going to look back on thi
SSL is the key (Score:2)
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China already has a "People's OS" based on Linux. I bet there's already a "People's Browser" packaged with it. The government could just mandate all Chinese e-commerce sites only support the special backdoored Chinese encryption standard, and block or DNS reroute the international sites to the Chinese copycat sites.
The Chinese e-commerce revolution will become a walled-garden party for the Party.
Re:SSL is the key (Score:4)
Even factoring in the People's OS, evidence shows that they have no OS chokehold over their supposedly oppressed citizens: By Microsoft's shamefaced anti-IE6 campaign figures, the Chinese are the kings of the IE6 holdout with 35% --a full 10% lead over the South Korean runner-ups. [ie6countdown.com] Other analysts placed China at 45% last November [googleusercontent.com], when 15% was the world's average.
An older article article stresses CCW Research's statement that 33% of new PC buyers uninstall that Linux derivative right off the bat, [googleusercontent.com] but the PC shop tends to do just prior to the sale that for them as a loyalty perk. More unsettling is that IE6 isn't the only IE... IE7 and IE8 numbers has to push the balance even further away from the People's OS --new pirated PC's don't easily get XP even in the USA, especially in the mobile form-factors. That counts for fewer Windows downupgrades to XP that would otherwise beef up IE6's numbers in China.
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Forgot to add this: back in 2007 MS had 90% OS share in China [techrepublic.com], which makes 'which Linux penetration do you have' just an exercise in futility.
How much market share might MS have lost to Red Linux / People's OS supposing the govt mandate did take effect after that techrepublic article was written 3 years ago?
American Corporations and Business Leaders in Bed (Score:1, Interesting)
Stop Up (Score:1)
I read that as "stop up internet administration". I think my version is more likely to come to pass.
Good for them! (Score:1)
Wouldn't be surprised to see the same here... (Score:2)
Well, if you're a gambling man I think you could call an eventual attempt by the Republicans to speed up the establishment of moral and behavioral norms that carry forward traditional American virtues ("virtues" which will be defi