

Bill Gates: Chinese censorship is "very limited" - ilamont
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15466/bill_gates_chinese_censorship_is_very_limited

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nailer
I quite like a lot of Microsoft's older products, and I think the Bill &
Melinda Gates foundation does great work with his (and others' contributed)
money. But every so often I, along with everyone else, gets reminded of Bill's
ethics.

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dublinclontarf
Sorry as someone who lives in the mainland I can tell you that it is NOT easy
to get around the GFW(Great Fire Wall).

All websites related to T-o-r are blocked, even if you can get a hold of T-o-r
the GFW blocks the IP that T-o-r initially connects to as well as the default
ports.

Web proxies are useless unless they are https and even then if there are the
wrong keywords in the https get request it's blocked. The GFW uses deep packet
inspection, so not only are there blacklisted websites but they also analyse
the content your viewing.

People say there are trivial methods to get around the GFW but I haven't found
any that work(short of buying access to a VPN, and currently unless you have
an international creditcard you can't). Where are the trivial methods that
work if there are so many of them?

This is a censor-ship net where the gaps are constantly being closed, a few
years ago it WAS trivial to get around, not anymore, and it's becoming more
difficult as the GFW systems and methods advance (using technologies provided
by western companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft etc)

note-formatted so post can get through the GFW

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maconic
I've spent some time in China and found Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot, BBC (just
to name a few) to be entirely blocked while I was there.

While it's debatable as to whether or not these Western websites are important
to average Chinese, it seems like a mischaracterization to say blocking
several of the top 10 most popular websites in the world is "very limited."

Another experience which spooked me a bit (I don't know if it was purely
coincidental or not): I was visiting some fairly obscure websites while I was
there and they were accessible. Yet, within a few days after I first visited
them, some of them were blocked. That made me wonder if there are human beings
checking websites to decide whether or not they need to be "harmonized"
(Chinese joke).

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araneae
And livejournal.

I haven't been to China, but a friend of mine taught English at a university
there for 2 years. She used a proxy server, but none of her students had even
heard of them. (She was subverting the gov't by gently encouraging them to use
them.)

It's irrelevant how _easy_ it is to get around the censorship for Bill Gates.
What's relevant is how _effective_ the censorship is for Chinese people- and
it is.

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helveticaman
This fits with Mencius Moldbug's idea of rule by the smart:

"Yet, even within the ballpark of restricted democracy, racial qualification
is an incredibly crude measure. A much better result would be achieved, for
instance, by psychometric qualification. If your IQ is less than 120, you have
to go through life with the dunce-cap of a nonvoter. On the other hand, you
get to go through life with a government elected by those whose IQ is over
120. Even better, the result of the test could be undisclosed - so you have no
idea whether or not your vote matters. You feel no humiliation if it doesn't;
you receive no advantage if it does."

This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when you're
eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you have
power, and if you do poorly, you don't. By the same token, if you're smart
enough to download and set up Tor, you can access to controversial
information. If you can't set up Tor, you can't. It's an IQ test.

The thinking here is one I have met in peopel from the East, and it goes like
this. A little learning is a dangerous thing. You can't have innocent fools
upset with the goverment because you just can't have a revolution every thirty
years. It's a mess, and you never get ahead as a country.

Not my opinion, but if you ever found the rule of the nerds appealing, (I for
one am a nerd and sort of do), now you know: that's China.

~~~
tsally
_This is essentially how China is run: you take a standardized test when
you're eighteen or so, and that test determines your life. If you do well, you
have power, and if you do poorly, you don't._

I wonder how China's Steve Jobs did on the standardized test when s/he was
eighteen. Our Steve Jobs hadn't even met Wozniak by that point.

There are many types of intelligence and only one type is measured by
standardized testing. Indeed is it probably all the other types that will
become increasingly important as society adjusted to its complete saturation
with technology. Ken Robinson's TED talk addresses this far better than I
could:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html).
If you only watch a few TED talks, Ken's should certainly be one of them.

As you point out, the picture you paint of China is strangely appealing to
those on HN (myself included). I think our types tend to be good at
standardized testing and we enjoy highly efficient systems. However there is a
massive cost to such a system because the Steve Jobs of the world are less
likely to thrive. Once you look past the initial appeal of efficiency, it
becomes a scary ideal indeed.

~~~
elblanco
It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright
and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well.

Selecting people based on standardized tests means that you have selected
people who are good at standardized tests not necessarily the smartest or most
creative people.

There's a growing consensus that, at least at present, while China is
certainly capable of producing complicated stuff (TV's, Cars, Electronics,
Plastics, etc.) and very large numbers of well educated engineers, there is
very little Steve Jobs type innovation happening in the country.

~~~
tsally
_It's interesting though, there is a very large population of extremely bright
and creative people who tend to score poorly on standardized tests as well._

That was the point I was trying to make. At 18 years old Steve Jobs was only
just beginning to develop that intelligence of his we see so often today.

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est
> "The Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. It's
> easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is
> very important."

It's true to someone like Bill Gates. But for average Internet users in China,
the Internet propaganda and censorship mechanism works great.

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noarchy
That's the kind of rationalizing I'd expect from someone with such a poor
standard of ethics. Gates is not going to be alone here, of course. Everyone
doing business in China has to be telling themselves stuff like this.

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Klondike
At least Google's initial rationalization was (paraphrasing) "even though
China's censorship sucks, we think we can still benefit people's lives there
by censoring the bare minimum possible". They've always acknowledged that
China's censorship is a form of repression, and never emphasized the "we're
just following the rules" bit over the actual ethical problem they were
dealing with.

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elblanco
Really? Did somebody just run through this entire topic and downvote every
comment? (8pm EST)

(seriously, every single comment in here was sitting at 0 points right after
about 8pm).

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rbanffy
Let me be the first to say I am not surprised.

