
China Clamps Down on Web, Pinching Companies Like Google - digital55
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/business/international/china-clamps-down-on-web-pinching-companies-like-google.html
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westiseast
More and more I feel like this is pure protectionism and not internal security
or censorship.

The Chinese government already has a vice-like grip on the internet and has no
qualms about locking up dissidents. We know from the Harvard social network
study that they really only care about activism and not criticism. Most of the
population has been through the Chinese education system and they are
generally speaking apathetic and passive when it comes to politics or the
possibility of change. And, don't forget, just like most Western netizens,
users are mostly interested in non-political aspects of the web - chatting to
friends, getting work done, watching movies online....

The only sense for this blanket ban/slowdown/disruption of big foreign online
services seems to be to shelter Chinese companies from foreign competition.

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k_sze
That does seem to be the case. This July I travelled to the Hubei and Jiangsu
provinces. I couldn't get on Gmail or Dropbox without going through Tor.

But I had no problem opening the zh.wikipedia.org (the Wikipedia in Chinese),
which has content that the Party decidedly would not like to see, such as the
account of the Tiananmen events. And I could do that with HTTP or HTTPS,
without VPN or Tor. I'm guessing they don't block Wikipedia because nobody in
the population really cares anymore, and Baidu is not making enough money out
of Baidu Baike (Baidu's online encyclopedia) for it to matter.

~~~
1stop
Or perhaps they just edit the chinese version of the wikipedia article to be
more sympathetic.

It's not like chinese don't know that tiananmen square happened. They just
(generally) don't believe it was wrong.

Also studying the event, it's pretty grey in general. The west's portrayal of
it is not without bias.

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k_sze
"They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong."

That's not exactly true. The deeper issue is that the Party wants the people
to _forget_ the incidence or make it look trivial and insignificant, so that
any discussion about right or wrong does not even surface.

In fact, there isn't much that the Party needs to do about it nowadays. The
population is literally drowned in entertainment, amusing themselves to death,
which is part of the reason the government can start to repurpose the GFW
towards protectionism.

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iliketosleep
I've been living in China, and I can definitely feel a shift here. These days,
as an English-speaker in China it's almost impossible to get anything done
online without VPN. Google, for most practical purposes, is blocked. Using
other search engines, a large percentage of sites won't load when you click on
them. Considering the scale and importance of China's economy, the Chinese
gov. is moving in an ominous direction.

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Kaihuang724
My family has done business in China pretty much my whole life, and my take on
it is that the Chinese gov. is more or less a bloated system. As the economy
grows, greater access is definitely needed and I think top gov. officials
realize this, but really nothing can be done in a timely fashion there because
of how their politics work.

~~~
iliketosleep
If they realize it, then why is access becoming MORE restricted than ever
before? Ever since Chairman Xi came into power, all I can see is more
restrictions and tightening of gov. policy.

~~~
est
> If they realize it, then why is access becoming MORE restricted than ever
> before?

Believe it or not, network filtering is a huge business in China, especially
selling products to gov.

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riverain
I'm a Chinese software developer. In China, VPN or other proxy tools are
essential for anyone who need look up serious technical materials online. We
call it "翻墙"(Go Over the Wall), which is a basic skill.

And about the reason why these sites are blocked: just BECAUSE THEY CAN! (They
even blocked github for mysterious purpose once!) There is no public
rule/law/principle to tell us why a foreign site is blocked. The just kill
sites silently and pretend nobody cares.

Fortunately enough, HackNews has not been blocked, yet.

(Sorry for my bad English)

~~~
possibilistic
Do you think this harms new engineering students in China when they don't have
access to tools and knowledge that the rest of the world does? I can't imagine
having Github blocked.

Does there seem to be a pattern to the blocks? Or is it just completely
random?

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2muchcoffeeman
Maybe it helps weed out the lesser engineers. Step one is trying to work out
how to get the information you need.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Maybe it helps weed out the lesser engineers.

Problem is VPNs require money, not just skills and tor can be dead slow.

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ChuckMcM
This isn't really news is it? Putin and Xi both defining what is and isn't
allowed to be shared/said/stored in machines on their soil. The next step can
start pretty much at any point, its going to look like the old ARPAnet, where
a set of protocols, defined by group sharing a common interest in
communication, creates a network that empowers new work and new industry. Back
in the 70's the big issues were bandwidth and signalling technology, today the
big issues are interference from the government. But from an engineering
standpoint its just getting signal through the noise. As I mentioned earlier,
UUCP through Tor has a lot of potential for creating a pretty decent source
routed email network without central control. Add homomorphic encryption on
routing/packet management and you have the basis for building the first
network within the network.

~~~
dengnan
Tor does not work in China. Since their servers' addresses are publicly
available, it is quite easy to block.

To access real Internet inChina, it is not only about encryption, nor
anonymity. you have to hide the fact that you are accessing a foreign server.
GFW has this feature: if a node inside GFW access a foreign address too
long/frequently, the foreign address will be temporary blocked. This is a very
rude but powerful feature.

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pwarner
How is this allowed from a free trade perspective? Not to diminish the human
rights portion, but even from a purely financial standpoint how does China get
away with this?

~~~
w1ntermute
The same way the US flouts free trade agreements:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/01/17/263101422/why-
u-s-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/01/17/263101422/why-u-s-
taxpayers-started-and-stopped-paying-brazilian-cotton-farmers)

When you're big enough, the laws don't apply to you.

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iamleppert
Probably because a lot of people use jquery and other frontend libraries
hosted by google, and those (of course) have been blocked by some moron in
China. And most sites don't properly handle cases when third party assets fail
to load.

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ddxv
VPNs are sometimes unreliable too, they seem to be getting blocked/shut down
quite often, so lately I pay for two VPNs to try and get around these
problems. >.<

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robomartin
Human beings... We think we are so evolved culturally and intellectually. Just
take a look at what's going on around the world. We are but a step away from
cavemen. Sad.

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bostan
sites using google fonts are basically unable to load or takes too much time
to load too.

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illumen
Spy on the Chinese and this is what you get.

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be5invis
The large-magnitude international relationship structure is changing. The new
cold war is approaching.

Therefore the internet -- built in 1990s -- will be splitted. Again.

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fidotron
There's a tiny bit of substance here, but what's amusing is how out of touch
with reality they are on some comparisons. For example:

“You’ve got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead
of getting their work done.”

This happens in every company with an internet connection.

"That has led to the rise of a number of locally run application stores, which
analysts say will sometimes market pirated copies of software or charge extra
to promote a new application."

So the piracy problem doesn't happen so much in the west, but the objection
here is that simply advertising on Facebook or Google isn't going to get you a
global audience because someone has split off part of the market. This is like
saying how terribly inconvenient it is that not everyone in the world watches
US based TV channels.

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oevi
I live in China (I'm from Europe) and the article is a really good
representation of the daily work life here. Without a good VPN service the
internet feels like half of the stuff is missing. Ironically the NY Times is
also blocked in China.

\- "This happens in every company with an internet connection." Yes, that's
right. Now multiply this by 100. As described in the article, the internet is
not only censored but also unreliable. Some sites work only sometimes, others
break silently. If you work for an international company, the websites and
services your western colleagues use, will not work for you (dropbox, fb,
google, xing, etc).

\- "This is like saying how terribly inconvenient it is that not everyone in
the world watches US based TV channels" No, the whole point of the internet is
to be accesible from everywhere. Advertisers on US based TV channels target an
US audience. If I release an Android app on the Play Store, I expect it to be
downloadable by everyone with internet access.

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esturk
NY Times has been blocked in China ever since the former released information
about the ex-premier Wen Jiabao's family fortune.

