
China to require PCs with software to block sites - nickb
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSSP43021520090608
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liuliu
"And the truth is: there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't
there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you
had the freedom to object to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have
censors and surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting submission."

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brfox
Does this mean Windows is the only approved OS?

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jganetsk
Is the Great Firewall of China not effective enough?

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dfranke
I suspect this is motivated by performance concerns. The overhead of the
centralized filtering they do is massive, and a friend living in China tells
me that it hurts net responsiveness badly. Since the Chinese government
already seems to have decided a while ago that it's only interested in
preventing casual access to subversive material and doesn't care about anyone
determined enough to bother connecting through a proxy server, it makes sense
to decentralize the load by moving the filtering logic onto the client.

If I'm right, though, this presents an enticing opportunity for some vigilante
freedom fighting: write a worm that disables the filtering software.

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graemep
So how long till the rest of the world adopts the same approach. Australia is
having problems with proposed filtering because of performance concerns, so
this would be a solution from their point of view as well.

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netsp
I hope you're right. Requiring censoring software to be installed on people's
PC's may get people's attention. Currently awareness here is very low. The
performance issues have been getting a big portion of the attention, if is to
be had. This has been ammunition for the opposition to the plan on with hand
but a mask on the issue with the other.

The ISPs and other opposition press the performance issues because it's easy &
doesn't require value judgements. But we should be talking about (I hate to
sound like an American Libertarian) the liberty issues.

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3pt14159
Question: Would VMing Ubuntu get you around this problem, or does the software
block reach into it?

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JVeinbergs
Maybe you can just uninstall that sofware? If it is not programmed into NIC...

