Researchers Made a Fake Social Network To Infiltrate China's Internet Censors 49
Jason Koebler writes: In order to get inside China's notorious internet filter, Harvard researcher Gary King created his own fake social network to gain access to the programs used to censor content, so he could reverse-engineer the system. "From inside China, we created our own social media website, purchased a URL, rented server space, contracted with one of the most popular software platforms in China used to create these sites, submitted, automatically reviewed, posted, and censored our own submissions," King wrote in a study published in Science. "We had complete access to the software; we were even able to get their recommendations on how to conduct censorship on our own site in compliance with government standards."
I skipped to the ending (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I skipped to the ending (Score:5, Interesting)
the Chinese government would see it and crack down even harder on net access
Um, how, exactly?
It's not like they're going to change their standards over this. What allowed this to happen is that the task of censorship is so time consuming and broad that the government had to outsource some of the work to the site runners.
(Government) censorship is always top-heavy, and always relies on a degree of volunteerism from the populace. The most this researcher did is made the government a bit more paranoid about the actions of foreign nationals.
Studying governments and cultures is an important branch of academia, and while it was ethically questionable, it's still entirely within the domain of critical examination.
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The paper isn't a security research paper. They're social scientists trying to put a tighter pinpoint on the behaviors and methods of the Chinese government.
Re: I skipped to the ending (Score:1)
Espionage is not science. There's this thing called the scientific method, look it up.
I hope this guys career ends it the toilet. It takes a real scumbag to carry off this kind of hoax.
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Espionage is not science. blah blah blah...
Espionage can be science!
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
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How on earth does this make him a "scumbag" and why do you want his career to fail, exactly?
Ever heard of something called integrity? This man has none. He crafted a huge lie and operated under false pretenses. Who cares why he did it? He did it. Nothing he says or does can be trusted now. People who spread lies and misinformation like this JUSTIFY censorship.
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Re: I skipped to the ending (Score:1)
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The scientific method doesn't cover all science, just things like physics and chemistry. There's also things like detective work, which is more about predicting behavior based on past behavior.
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If that's the ultimate censorship case for China? Air-Gapping the whole world and using its own countrywide Intranet?
No. China is not going to do that. People in the West often misunderstand the Great Firewall of China (GFoC). It is relatively easy to bypass, and Chinese people are generally better informed about what is going on in the world than people in most other countries. Keeping information out is not really the point. In the West, there are three types of information: 1) Information that the government approves of and promotes, 2) Information that the government prohibits (child porn, holocaust denialism, v
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Wow, how did this bit of nonsense get modded up.
Chinese people are generally better informed about what is going on in the world than people in most other countries.
Do you care to back this statement up? In what way are they better informed, and which countries fall into the "most other countries" category that are less informed than the Chinese public in general? I can only think of a few countries with more censorship then China.
Information that the government prohibits (child porn, holocaust denialism, videos of journalist beheadings, etc)
You're only one for three there. That's worse than dumb luck.
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Wow, how did this bit of nonsense get modded up.
Chinese people are generally better informed about what is going on in the world than people in most other countries.
Do you care to back this statement up? In what way are they better informed, and which countries fall into the "most other countries" category that are less informed than the Chinese public in general?
I like what you did there, with the pointless yet seemingly going somewhere questions, can I try.
I can only think of a few countries with more censorship then China.
Do you care to back this statement up ? how many is a few countries ? which countries are they ?
Do you care to back this statement up ? in what way is the censorship more in those countries, how is the censorship measured, where is your citation ?
err probably made a mortal enemy for life, but though it was funny. !
Information that the government prohibits (child porn, holocaust denialism, videos of journalist beheadings, etc)
You're only one for three there. That's worse than dumb luck.
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The end of paywalls is near [libgen.org]
Of course (Score:3)
If you want random strangers to do your censoring for you, expect random strangers to know the details on what you want censored.
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The abstract linked in the summary doesn't even suggest the paper contains a list of "what" is censored. It's more about "how" its supposed to be censored.
Qualifications about processes for popular users, manual deletion, automatic deletion, when to user ban, when to IP ban. They only briefly mention a few specific keywords: riot, terrorism, masses.
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The abstract linked in the summary doesn't even suggest the paper contains a list of "what" is censored. It's more about "how" its supposed to be censored.
If the censor doesn't censor it, then it's not censored. The keywords tell you what the government wishes to censor, the algorithms tell you what the government does censor. If the two don't match, it means either the government is failing to censor stuff it wishes to censor, or is incidentally censoring stuff it doesn't want to censor.
!infiltration (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't "infiltrate" the censors, they just got the same standard access to tools and communication channels as any other random social network site in China. This tells us absolutely nothing that isn't already public information if you simply read Chinese posts by people who have used the system.
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Research in general isn't "real" until it's in a published journal someone can cite in the future. There's like a "purity of information" thing.
Also: social and political science isn't humanities.
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"Also: social and political science isn't humanities" or science
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or science
Not absolutely in a purist sense, no. It's less oriented on documenting fundamental and immutable phenomena that the universe operates on.
Howerver:
It certainly uses the scientific method. Modern social science(less so political science) is predicated on using objective measures, falsification, and experimentation.
It definitely is intended to provide useful predictive models.
There is the expectation of academic rigor, peer review, and ideas standing with respect to tradition(except inasmuch as tradition its
People of China (Score:2)
purchased a URL (Score:1)
"purchased a URL"
Where do they sell URLs?
I've only ever managed to buy domains.
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Deja Hu (Score:1)
So Chinese people are allowed to say whatever they want with their little tiny microphones that nobody hears. The government only gets involved when a message seems to reverberate through the public and actually threaten to cause the citizens to rise up.
That totally doesn't sound familiar *at all*.
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WOW, what a shock, they helped you enforce their laws?
No, laws are made by statute which are passed by the governing assembly bodies when those are in session, Statutes are almost always available to the public with only modest effort or even published freely. These censorship standards are regulatory in nature which means not only do they change at the whim of the administering beaurocrats but also (especially in less democratic countries like China) unpublished to the public and either require significant effort to obtain or aren't available at all.
good point (Score:1)
How to organise a protest (Score:2)
From the article: "Chinese people can write the most vitriolic blog posts about even the top Chinese leaders without fear of censorship, but if they write in support of or opposition to an ongoing protest—or even about a rally in favor of a popular policy or leader—they will be censored."
That is interesting. I am glad someone has discovered this. So perhaps the way to organise a protest, is to use secret messages coded in the form of vitriolic comments. Eg, "Mao Tsedong is an idiot" = Meet at Ti
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What's the secret message for "remember to bring the anti-tank explosives?"