China Grows Its Own Twitter 120
Stirfry192 writes "Twitter is banned in China, and the authorities are trying to foster a censored version of the service, but the speed and nature of such services calls into question China's ability to retain control — especially in combustible, highly emotional situations."
Re:hate to post off topic, but is it just me? (Score:4, Funny)
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It's 4th of July in the States. Most of the folks have lives, friends, and social things to do: probably around beautiful girls, drinking beer, and eating hotdogs and hamburgers.
And here we are on Slashdot on a Saturday holiday weekend night.
Could. We. Be. More. Pathetic.
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Yes. [facebook.com]
Re:hate to post off topic, but is it just me? (Score:4, Insightful)
And here we are on Slashdot on a Saturday holiday weekend night.
But look at the bright side. Other folks have to deal with their relatives, drunken friends, taking stupid, ugly girls to see movies that any normal man would hate, drinking reused "beer", and eating stuff that kills.
Faithful geeks, on the other hand, don't have to go anywhere; if their friends are drunk it's a problem only in `svn diff`; their girls are the most beautiful and the least demanding (being downloadable.) Food, however, is a problem - neither them nor us eat at most exquisite French restaurants.
But the question in the end of each day is simple: what have you done today to make this world better? If you say that you ate a bunch of hotdogs, no brownie points for that. But if you wrote 10 lines of code that someone, somewhere needs, it's a good thing. At least that's what workaholics say :-)
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Most of the folks have lives, friends, and social things to do: probably around beautiful girls
Mod parent -1 posting in wrong forum.
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Only old people in Korea troll /.
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No wonder they beat me to the first post every time. Damn them and their 300+ APM.
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Maybe nerds just don't find Slashdot as interesting as they once did? The multitude of Anonymous-hacked-fer-the-lulz and China-is-no-good stories can only sustain the readership's interest to a point.
Have to agree, lot less tech news, lot more of the stuff above or Timothy's endless Apple promoting (is he sponsored by them?).
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Because most of us are on vacation and partying and not spending time here
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Wow, Canada is ranked above US?
I realize it's the 4th of July, but US still have 10 times the population.
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May be China grew it's own slashdot & and all them previous posters are posting there.
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Slashdot broke AC commenting for a few days, though it now works again. That might contribute.
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Perhaps it could be the fact that they used the word "grow" in the title about a web service being "developed", "programmed", and/or "implemented".
I never stuck my laptop in a pot of soil, watered it, and fertilized with shredded pieces of programming books and woke up the next morning with a web site programmed. I find it disappointing every time I try it too. I will let you all know when I succeed.
Additionally, the summary reminded of me Eddie Murphy. At first glance it sounded like the Chinese came up
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Seems like there has been a drastic reduction in the number of comments for almost all stories, I just noticed it, it could have been going down for a while I guess, but I Often see stories with low double digits, and rarely see any with triple digit comments, what happened?
For a couple months, anyone (such as myself) with a Slashdot username that contained spaces was unable to log in. If you were already logged in persistently, you were fine - but once you logged out you could not get back in.
This only got fixed in the last week or two - so it's possible a significant number of users are unable to participae (and unwilling to post anonymously).
they can use it to track down people who post and (Score:2)
they can use it to track down people who post.
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No, no. The Chinese really know how to make money. They will make it ad-supported and force people to post. Not twitting daily will become a subversive activity.
Seriously, though, according tot TFA it's a Chinese company that is doing this. So this is not an evil masterplan of the Chinese government to track down everyone (governments already monitor Internet usage, if it is not HTTPS they know exactly what you're writting/reading).
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Posted by Stirfry 192? Really? (Score:2)
Looks like they have some catching up to do. (Score:4, Insightful)
"A lot of the injustices in China aren't necessarily new, but people are just starting to hear about them."
Wait until they hear what really happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Or what their company town's party boss was really doing to the town.
Re:Looks like they have some catching up to do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Looks like they have some catching up to do. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wasn't alive at the time, but I did learn about it in history class here in the US years later. I got to hear everyone who had an opinion condemn the national guard rather than the students. I learned there was the memorial paid by public funds, and the commemorations that happened year after year. Not to mention the greater emphasis on non-lethal means of riot control brought forth as a result of the incident.
Were you trying to equate Kent State to Tiananmen? Because you failed really hard.
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You didn't understand what he was getting at.
I was 4 years old in May of 1970.
It didn't even cross this little kid's mind that people died at Kent State, let alone that it was the National Guard that did it.
When I got to High School and we learned "US History from the Civil War to the Present" Kent State came up in passing and about 10 minutes of discussion and never heard from again, because it was all about remembering the shit for the test. It didn't strike me until many years later what actually happen
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Good point, protesting the foregone past does seem pretty silly. But what would you say about a memorial being built? Or perhaps a solemn discussion of what transpired, and the lessons we've learned as a society? Well, in China attempts to do either have been met with censorship and punishment.
What did we do after Kent State here in the US? We mourned, we fought for answers, we reflected, we changed, we put the shameful truth in our history books for all to see. People grow up on the knowledge of this event
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Do you know how long it took for a national WWII memorial to be built here in the good ol' US?
It took over 40 years for it to even be proposed. Bill Clinton signed it on the 4'th try.
Memorials are hard, even when they're uncontroversial.
--
BMO
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What did we do after Kent State here in the US? [...] we changed
Wishful thinking at best. The students were protecting another war being started [wikipedia.org], this time in Cambodia. How many wars of choice the USA is currently in? Count Libya too.
What changed is simply the policy. Draft was politically unacceptable. However if you hire mercenaries and send them to fight your wars then the society will be enjoying explosions all over "enemy" cities. That's the only change that is obvious. Citizens of Yugoslavia, Ira
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Clinton killed 74 people at Waco in 1993;
Yup, nothing to do wih the nutjob David Koresh.
If you open fire on people serving a search warrant, what the fuck do you expect's going to happen? The government will just ignore it and let youcarry on with your insane paranoid commune?
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Yup, nothing to do wih the nutjob David Koresh.
It is a standard operating procedure in the US media to label undesirable leaders as "insane", "strongmen", "dictators" etc. This dehumanizes them. I don't see why normal people should lap it up. We don't know if Koresh was or wasn't sane, though many would say that his religious beliefs indicate insanity. But then most humans on this planet are insane to some extent.
Regardless, the government isn't supposed to kill insane people; it may kill people who ar
Re:Looks like they have some catching up to do. (Score:5, Informative)
If you think that they don't know, then you are kidding your self. They see the injustice. However, centuries of philosophical teachings (Confucius, the guy really was evil) have made them more accepting of inequality.
I remember, I had been in China for about six months and a friend told me that she wanted to show me something. However, the instruction was that as I went through the gate she was going to tell me to stop. I was to act as if I didn't understand her. At that point she would chase me down (now entering the facility herself). We then wandered around for a while.
What was the top secret facility we entered? It was a school for the party members children. It was the type of showcase school that we see when we look at pictures of Chinese schools. It had air-conditioning, and desks, and chairs. The dormitories were clean and the students had windows. They even appeared to have had modern books. This was nothing like the schools for the peoples children; which were dark, crumbling, plaster buildings with poor equipment and facilities.
The Chinese people are aware of these things. However, they accept that this is the way things are and spend their energy cheating and squabbling with each other under the premise that there is little they can do to bring about meaningful, and positive, structural change. As such all effort goes into improving personal lives, not into improving society as a whole.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Just a "what he said" post. I can confirm that the Chinese hospitals are cash in advance. I have waited in those lines. I have also seen some pretty messed up (as in blood leaking through makeshift bandages) waiting in line to pay cash in advance at the hospitals.
There are many things that China does well; however, one of the the most glaring things about China is that it is such an example of capitalism run completely amuck.
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I'd love to have UHC. But America isn't institutionally ready for it yet.
So arguably the US isn't a fully developed nation either.
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Yes, it was in a rural area. Most of my stories reflect rural China. I have been to Shanghai several times. It is very different than the city I live in
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I have also had encountered a few similar toilet rooms, but these were much worse. I have seen a few guys shitting inside; no, seriously! And then, I came across a legendary phenomenon that perhaps takes place in China only: two guys using a single commode and peeing together. This scene was something that money can't buy!!
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. Here before me stands a man in his 40s working his glorious soul-sucking job of collecting toiletry money
Most flash clubs in London have attendants in the toilets who you have to tip after they hand you a paper towel. Big deal, it's not a job I'd want to do, but then I wouldn't want to be a rat catcher, sewage pipe cleaner or coal miner either.
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equality cuts both ways.. we are not equal. we're not clones. we are different. ignoring differences and glossing over them with propaganda is no better than what the chinese are doing. if anything, they're a lot closer to 'equality' than we are: they're all poor...almost.
enriching our personal lives is the best way to enrich society as a whole. the needs of the self and the needs of society are not always diametrically opposed.
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While you might think that you know the "truth" about Tiananmen or any other story that makes it into the popular western press, you don't know the whole story. You really can't know it because you are so completely immersed in western ideas of society, social contract, societal roles and the place of the individual in society. Because you can't hold the western and the eastern view simultaneously you define yours as "right" and theirs as "wrong". They are "bad" while you are "good".
Well, that is just too
Speed, no... (Score:1)
censored how? (Score:1)
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And I guess the meaning of "kill switch" will depend on exactly what is tweeted.
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I'm guessing it's less that it's censored and more that the party controls it and has immediate access to the logs and whatever relevant information they need to come down on the poster. Much of the internet is problematic as Chinese laws don't apply to the server end of services that have no host in China, they can try to get the people making the posts, but it's a lot harder as they have to track the posting in real time rather than peruse the logs after the fact.
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If it's anything like the typical online filtering, anything that contains sensitive words will never make past the submit button. It just won't get published, and if you keep at it you'll get the 502 bad gateway error (ip lockout) for the next 15 minutes. If you post something egregious like asking other people for support (trying to form a rally group), you might get a knock at the door.
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whats it called? (Score:4, Funny)
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And all have one key feature working for their advantage: the service is in chinese
I wouldn't use a site which main interface language is russian, as I don't speak/read it. Same logic applies to chinese using twitter.
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Another important feature those services have is that since they comply with the government monitoring policies, they don't suffer "sudden, unexplainable cuts", like other services.
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Never buy another product. Money talks; bullshit walks. And we had the money.
FTFY.
I should use it. (Score:1)
Being a Chinese Internet Company (Score:2)
Besides, he said, Sina executives "understand the political baggage that comes with being a Chinese Internet company."
File some paper-work, take the sub-secretary of public information bureau out for abalone (first the seafood, then the other kind), get a list of words people cannot say in your product emailed to you then do some filtering. In exchange, you get your foreign competitors either blocked completely, or simply a story on CCTV1 every week about this competitor corrupting the minds of Chinese. And patents, copyright, trademarks? Well, that's all dealt with. Ah, to be a Chinese Internet company.
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abalone (first the seafood, then the other kind)
Erm... what is the other kind?
Thiefs (Score:1, Troll)
The whole lot of them.
That's nice (Score:1)
Thank the chopstick god (Score:1)
China will implode like everyone else.
Thank his noodly appendage.
It must be (Score:3)
All that Vlag7a.
Whack-a-mole Beijing style (Score:3)
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You bring up an interesting point with "whacking words". I tried to think of things like censor filters were stuff like "cr.ap" or even "crÃp" gets through the censure, and everyone on the board knows the codes. But China isn't dependent on ASCII and single characters often mean ENTIRE concepts, so that the same kind of playful splitting and unicode bitshifting isn't available to deceive the filters.
So, knowing some things about Kanjis and ideograms, and how instead of syllables the Kanji-based Eastern
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I think the reason why things are blocked in china is not so that a few people who are interested in enough to try to decipher any kind of codes like those you mention) can find out, actually most of these issues are probably less unknown and secret to chinese than what you think. It's about keeping it away from the great masses, not
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All credit goes to Joe Wang: (Score:2)
Hu cares.
QQ has been doing this for years now (Score:2)
This thing I thought when I saw this was, why is this special?
China has QQ, which has been doing the same thing for years. In fact, you'd be surprised the type of stuff that fines it way on QQ. QQ puts 4Chan to shame on bad days.
I actually think this quote from the article has a valid point about western media in this case...
Or they could directly respond and participate... (Score:2)
but the speed and nature of such services calls into question China's ability to retain control — especially in combustible, highly emotional situations.
Or they could directly respond and participate, which would be much easier. Of course, the problem is that the Chinese government is not used to doing that.
Lesson From Egypt (Score:2)
I do a lot of used computer business with Egypt, have friends who set up internet cafes and other geek traders, share with them on Facebook and Twitter etc. Last January, they were all trying to encrypt the posts "3gyp7ian R3v0lution" style. http://tinyurl.com/3phbv7j [tinyurl.com] Hopefully China will find it similarly impossible to keep the genie inside the bottle.
On the other hand, if they succeeded, and they recreate a Twitter with nothing provocative, political, or edgy.. The only thing that saves twitter is the
Stuff that really matters - SLASHDOT WORKS IN PRC! (Score:1)
The Chinese Twitter? (Score:2)
Zhou: I love living in China, our government is the best!
Lee: I love living in China, our government is the best!
Lian: I love living in China.
Official Chinese Moderator: @Lian, you will get the glorious opportunity to learn that our government is the best in our new re-education camp!
China Grows Its Own Twitter (Score:2)
*snicker* LOL!!!1one
Yay! for the 12-year-old-friendly headlines.
well...I am from China.. (Score:1)