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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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_.... 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.
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.
An excellent point, and one seldom recognized by those who implement 'tracking' students. The result is only as good as how scientific the test is. Most such tests have high levels of cultural and socio-economic bias that perpetuate the status quo.
So yes, they are great filters to keep creatives out ... and what they don't catch, the gatekeepers in colleges will. Leaders fear creativity only slightly less than compassion.
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.
As someone that has lived in a communist country (and not just as a visitor), I have to say that that thinking about "just use Tor" does not really make sense. Yes you can use proxies, but the government can find out you are using proxies. It is easy to encrypt the information, so the government may not know what you are accessing, but they do know that you are encrypting your communications.
The thing is that if you are using proxies then you can get into a lot of trouble. Then you cannot claim innocence, you cannot say that you were led astray, or you were just curious, etc., because you took active and complex steps to avoid a government security measure. And if you were stupid enough to use very strong encryption, then you are in even more trouble because the police will not know what you did, so they will assume the worst.
So no, "just use Tor" is not an answer.
Regarding about how you think China is run, well I have not been to China, but in my experience with the other communist country that is not the case. That is probably the ideal a communist country strives for, and they often believe they are ran that way, but what usually happens is that there is some kind of test used as a gatekeeper, and after that the people that are just good at politics win out. It is the same as any large organisation, such as most corporations. The corporation likes to think they only promote the smartest and most able people, but really the people that are best at office politics usually climb to the top (although there usually is a minimum intelligence they must possess).
I think that is one of the most terrible ways I've ever heard of to run a society. Leaving aside the question of intelligence types, test accuracy, corruption, and all that, some of the most "test-intelligent" people I know are too dumb to pour piss out of a boot.
The thought of one of them controlling people's lives on any kind of scale is terrifying.
> "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.
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.
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.
