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Censorship China The Internet Apple

Joining Apple, Amazon's China Cloud Service Bows To Censors (nytimes.com) 51

Days after Apple yanked anti-censorship tools off its app store in China, another major American technology company is moving to implement the country's tough restrictions on online content. From a report: A Chinese company that operates Amazon's cloud-computing and online services business there said on Tuesday that it told local customers to cease using any software that would allow Chinese to circumvent the country's extensive system of internet blocks (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). The company, called Beijing Sinnet Technology and operator of the American company's Amazon Web Services operations in China, sent one round of emails to customers on Friday and another on Monday. "If users don't comply with the guidance, the offered services and their websites can be shut down," said a woman surnamed Wang who answered a Sinnet service hotline. "We the operators also check routinely if any of our users use these softwares or store illegal content." Ms. Wang said the letter was sent according to recent guidance from China's Ministry of Public Security and the country's telecom regulator. Amazon did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. The emails are the latest sign of a widening push by China's government to block access to software that gets over the Great Firewall -- the nickname for the sophisticated internet filters that China uses to stop its people from gaining access to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as foreign news media outlets.
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Joining Apple, Amazon's China Cloud Service Bows To Censors

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is there a particular reason any of us should be surprised by this? China has been the way it is for longer than most of us have been alive, and looks to be that way for many more.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Money and power is more important than freedom and liberty to these people.

  • ...emails to a cousin in San Francisco reading "Get Me Outta Here! Get Me The Hell Outta Here...!"
  • When a species lives isolation, it evolves differently. With China blocking Google and the technology answers Google answers, China's technology will evolve differently. Because technology is changing so fast this evolutionary process to will happen very fast.
    While I lived in China, I used a my own private VPN to access Google for technology searches. Baidu may be good for searching the latest pop song in Chinese, but useless for technology searches. Right now I am programming in Vue, a very popular web
  • Except that it is not a law if it was written by a totalitarian dictatorship, it's a diktat. This is calculated posturing by Apple.
  • There is always a tightening of censorship before the twice-a-decade party Congress. The upcoming one is particularly sensitive as President Xi moves to consolidate power and is expected to replace practically all of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest governing body
  • It's a NY Times article. Has an actual reputable news organization checked the sources?

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