I wish you could go into more detail on how to get around Internet censorship in China. I'm there not infrequently, and I never can get this site or any of the other progressive blogs I frequent here - very frustrating.
GoBlue
· 6 months ago
I remember when Newt Gingrich said that the fall of communism in eastern Europe proved the importance of the right to bear arms. Like most of what comes out of Newt's mouth, this is asinine. Lech Walesa and his fellow Solidarity members didn't have guns. All they had were ideas.
Similarly, the NRA likes to say that when dictators seize power, the first thing they do is confiscate the weapons of civilians. This is also asinine, since there are so few other countries where civilians even own weapons. If you look at news stories of coups throughout the Cold War years, again and again they say that troops loyal to the junta marched into the capital and immediately took over the radio and TV stations, imposing a news blackout and press censorship.
In other words, tyrants are less afraid of firearms than they are of information. The Chinese government has been led by one tyrant after another since Mao in 1949, but eventually the Internet or some other source of information will bring them down.
kfoster
· 6 months ago
The internet is designed as a generic wide area LAN. You can push and pull data around as you please. Of course, with a system like that, censorship is all but impossible except in the very short term -- minutes to hours.
vkobaya
· 6 months ago
OT: Wish it had been ex-president Bush who had committed suicide by jumping off a mountain but he lacks the character, integrity, honor and courage to something like that. Probably suffers more alive, but that is true of all cowards.
HeartlandLiberal
· 6 months ago
China is caught in their own Catch-22 re: the Internet.
They are leading the pack in educating and deploying highly skilled technically trained young people who are at the forefront of cyberwarfare, being suspected in the past couple of years of being responsible for everything from the recently revealed subtle hack of the Dalai Lama's email servers and the computers at over 100 and more political sites around the world including embassies and key sensitive government sites. It seems pretty clear they have been behind many of the reported (and there are probably many more UNreported) hacks of United States governmental agencies computers, including civilian and military; and they were probably involved in the recent massive intrusions doing recon in our power infrastructure, checking out and discovering just how easy it would be to bring this nation to its knees because of the absolutely pathetic lack of security on Internet connected computers nation and industries-wide in this country.
Plus China has long had a reputation of willingly harboring servers acting as home bases for the massive spam infrastructure, and ignoring any and all requests from the rest of the Internet to do something about it.
It takes some really sophisticated knowledge to do these things.
And of course that same knowledge lends itself to easily working around attempts by the government to censor access to the rest of the Internet. Anonymous proxies and IP masquerading and a host of other techniques are your friend if you want to evade detection on the Internet. And the Chinese have trained their own cadres in how to do it.
Weltallica
· 6 months ago
Pity Australia's joining in on Internet censorship.
All Comments
Meanwhile, back in the States... Political Whores Decry Imaginary Pimps.
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Similarly, the NRA likes to say that when dictators seize power, the first thing they do is confiscate the weapons of civilians. This is also asinine, since there are so few other countries where civilians even own weapons. If you look at news stories of coups throughout the Cold War years, again and again they say that troops loyal to the junta marched into the capital and immediately took over the radio and TV stations, imposing a news blackout and press censorship.
In other words, tyrants are less afraid of firearms than they are of information. The Chinese government has been led by one tyrant after another since Mao in 1949, but eventually the Internet or some other source of information will bring them down.
Wish it had been ex-president Bush who had committed suicide by jumping off a mountain but he lacks the character, integrity, honor and courage to something like that. Probably suffers more alive, but that is true of all cowards.
They are leading the pack in educating and deploying highly skilled technically trained young people who are at the forefront of cyberwarfare, being suspected in the past couple of years of being responsible for everything from the recently revealed subtle hack of the Dalai Lama's email servers and the computers at over 100 and more political sites around the world including embassies and key sensitive government sites. It seems pretty clear they have been behind many of the reported (and there are probably many more UNreported) hacks of United States governmental agencies computers, including civilian and military; and they were probably involved in the recent massive intrusions doing recon in our power infrastructure, checking out and discovering just how easy it would be to bring this nation to its knees because of the absolutely pathetic lack of security on Internet connected computers nation and industries-wide in this country.
Plus China has long had a reputation of willingly harboring servers acting as home bases for the massive spam infrastructure, and ignoring any and all requests from the rest of the Internet to do something about it.
It takes some really sophisticated knowledge to do these things.
And of course that same knowledge lends itself to easily working around attempts by the government to censor access to the rest of the Internet. Anonymous proxies and IP masquerading and a host of other techniques are your friend if you want to evade detection on the Internet. And the Chinese have trained their own cadres in how to do it.