Greatfire Keeps Tabs On Chinese Censorship, Automatically 30
First time accepted submitter percyalpha writes "Greatfire is a website that automatically monitors Internet censorship in China. Recently, we improved our system to share all testing data with Herdict, a project at Harvard University on Internet blockages. User reports on Herdict of websites inaccessible in China are automatically imported into our system, and our data of websites blocked in China is also exported into the Herdict database. If you ever explore the first ten pages of the Herdict database, chances are all block reports are from China and imported from our system."
well... about that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Her point was: <quote>The west has Muslims with their hatespeech towards jews, and all is well because they are a miority, but if the same thing is said by (white) neo-nazi's then suddenly it is wrong. The western politicians basically tell you what you can or cannot hear, and it is fine. But, the second OUR government decides that WE are not allowed to hear something, THEN it is all wrong. What kind of a double standard is that?<unquote>
Then I tried to tell her that I dont want the government to get involved in freedom of speech AT ALL. One can disagree about something, but then lets agree to disagree. This was also strange to her, because: <quote>You chose those people to speak up for you right?? That is what you call democracy isn't it?<unquote>
I dont want to start a flamewar here, just give it a thought, try to see it from their perspective.
I felt almost felt sorry for her, being between hammer and anvil.
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I agree completely! Having discussions with your co-workers about their ideas and culture is UNACCEPTABLE. The other day we were asking one of our Australian co-workers about some of the dangerous animals over there... I'm surprised the whole company wasn't fired over this complete violation of human rights!
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they'll just send in the drop-bears.
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which is probably why the Chinese tend to mostly have gripes with peace-loving types.
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Well, I feel sorry for her too. I am a Chinese, lived in US for several years, living in China right now. I am so sick of these communism sh*t, even bloomberg.com and businessweek.com are being blocked in China right now, how sick is this? a goal of mine is to change my nationality to a free country someday, just can't stand it any longer.
Your friend, just like billions of Chinese, got brain washed so badly. You might think 3 years living in a free country, she will get a good taste of freedom, but the sad
Re:Interpret Censorship as Damage and Route Around (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, China is a whole lot more collectivist than the US where even if they had the ability to do something, they wouldn't because they've been told lies all their life about how you've got to give up freedoms to have prosperity for others...
We Know What China Censors (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, NPR ran a story on this recently. It turns out China doesn't really censor criticism of the government, but they do censor attempts to organize [npr.org]. If you want to call the Chinese government a corrupt evil organization, the censors will usually allow it, but if you want to have a barbecue and invite more than 10 people to it, they will take that content down.
This actually groks with what I've seen on the Chinese version of twitter/facebook weibo [weibo.com]. There's plenty of criticism of government organizations some fair and some I was surprised the censors were allowing (my favorite innocuous criticisms were in a thread on school buses after a crash killed a dozen children, where many commenters were posting pictures of American school buses (which look like tanks) and saying we were doing it right), but I have never seen anything about attending concerts, parties, or other public events. I didn't think anything of it until reading the NPR article.
Re:We Know What China Censors (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm... Unfortunately, looking at the list of blocked URLs [greatfire.org] does provide examples of censorship of political dissent. Mostly I see facebook, twitter, most google services blocked, netflix, porn sites, piratebay, more porn sites, wikimedia, and Chinese Wikipedia. My amateur opinion would be that these blocks are due to porn being illegal there and the government eliminating access to websites that compete with their own services and social networks that the government cannot oversee.
There's also a bunch of blogger and wordpress.com blogs. While many of these have titles making them sound related to China, I'm not understanding many of the censors, like this poetry site [wordpress.com] which is simply artsy, this blog about a teacher who loves Chinese culture and is visiting the country [wordpress.com], and this pro-China pro-Communism site [wordpress.com] and others that have no content posted to them at all like sinologica [wordpress.com].
There are a few that do appear to possibly be blocked for challenging the government, like X in China [wordpress.com] (link is to a post listing blocked Weibo words), SmurfWillBeFree [wordpress.com] (a free Tibet blog), a blog focused on bad economic news about China [sinocism.com], and wikipedia articles on Chinese political issues [greatfire.org] (ie "Dalai Lama", "Tank Man", etc).
This is just my quick random sampling of a few dozen sites out of 2163, so take it with a grain of salt. At some point a plurality of anecdotes becomes data, and this post doesn't come anywhere near that threshhold, but it does provide some nuance to the NPR article I cited above.
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An app to sneak past the great firewall? There are thousands. I'd start by suggesting TOR, which is designed partly for the purpose and has no problems with it.
It isn't just politics (Score:4, Insightful)
What to website fails to capture is economic censorship. This is the restricting of bandwidth in order to push users to domestic services. The target website is still accessible; but, it works poorly. This has the effect of pushing users to domestically owned competitors.
An example would be Google. While Google is accessible much of the time, and note that I did not say all of the time, following links from Google is often impossible. This has the effect of pushing users to Baidu, an underdeveloped Google clone that is popular, and owned in, China.
Another example is Photobucket. While the website in the article claims it is no censored, it is not usable. Links between pages do not work so it is impossible to sign in and pictures can only be accessed by typing in their exact URL. While it will return a ping, it is not being given enough bandwidth to function properly. The restrictions on social websites, such as this, are not purely political. They are also driven by an attempt to push all traffic to the domestically owned (and really poor in usability) q-zone.
The articles website fails to capture the entire problem and fails to understand that the problem is not just politics. It is, as is seen so often elsewhere too, business colluding with government.
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There was a TED talk on this subject recently. I was very disappointed that it missed a very key word: "protectionism". There's a huge number of factors at play here, but certainly a lot of is about giving domestic providers an advantage. You'd hope the WTO would be more involved in dealing with this as it really is a trade issue.
Regarding the partial breakages, there is a good talk by Jacob Applebaum and Roger Dingledine on Tor censorship. They focus quite a bit on China, and how simply throttling a servic
We do detect restriction (Score:2)
About Google. Google is in fact accessible(might be slow) most of the time, at least until you search something with it. If your keywords accidentally contain restricted words [greatfire.org], such as carrot in Chinese which contains one word of a commonly used family name, also a family name of one of the Chinese leaders, then your connection t
Bottom line (Score:1)
The hard, inescapable fact is that the recent success of Asian nations is linked entirely to their adoption of western ideas and western style government. (This is the part where PRC shills scream bloody murder, like when you mention tibet.)
I don't' care if china has a rich 5,000 year old culture. It is, at it's core, grossly inefficient. It allows the toxic institutionalization of corruption and exploitation under the guise of "culture". Corruption and exploration are nasty and inefficient economic mechani
CSV? (Score:1)
So where is the URL to download the CSV automatically on a weekly basis and import it into my proxy?
Put everything through proxy! (Score:1)
I forward all my traffic through a proxy service. I have a separate list for Chinese websites, their traffic does not go through the proxy. This way I don't have to worry about the new websites Chinese government decides to block.
There is a large Internet cultural difference between Chinese population and foreign population. A typical Chinese citizen never really needs to go over the firewall. Pretty much everything has a domestic version.
Another project by us (Score:1)