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Comment by kercker | Hacker News Reader

Most of my friends here in China just do good without the open internet. Like the article says, for every major blocked application or website, there is a home-grown substitute. People can get the information or the service they need from these substitutes.

I personally find that that the Chinese version of Wikipedia is blocked is annoying.

If the Great Firewall must exist, I'd like it to be more advanced. This way, it can block in a finer granularity. Instead of blocking a whole website, it can block an individual webpage that annoys it.

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So where does your friend go to get information about

1.) a list of corrupt officials and what activities they're involved in

2.) the richest 70 members of China’s NPC have a larger combined wealth ($89.8bn in 2011) than that of all 535 members of the US congress?

3.) Tiananmen square

4.) Great Famine

5.) China is insolvent?

1, from their friends, as it has always been the case there. Search for "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away".

2, There was a short period in time, involving 2 World Wars when the super-rich was not that super rich. Before and after, this was always like this in history, everywhere.

3, 4, 5, China is suppressing information, yes; otherwise there were civil wars, and that is not necessarily better. See current Middle East.

Yes, free information is good, but totally free information would first require solving all the other issues; otherwise it leads to fights and wars which nearly never results in any good. History has plenty to tell on that.

People in my village get corrupt information from watching TV, browsing the web, and most importantly from chatting with others, from rumors. They talked about rumors about 100+ billion yuan involved in Zhou Yongkang's corruption. They talked the affairs between previous President Jiang Zemin and singer Song Zuying. They talked about the former propaganda head Li Changchun directed the murder of a policewoman. You see, we can get many knowlege from chattng with each other.

From the daily newspapers,we can get the impression that people in NPC are super riches. But members of NPC are puppet, we don't care that much of their wealth than the wealth of the officials of real powers.

People also get information from blogs and BBS.

Our grandparents went through the great famine, the cultural revolution. If we are curious, they have many stories to tell us. I get many information about that period from grandpa.

"Instead of blocking a whole website, it can block an individual webpage that annoys it."

In order to get enough coverage, the government would need to MITM HTTPS connections by spoofing certificates. They probably control a trust root CA, in which case they could achieve this except for sites that use certificate pinning.

But, would you really put up with your HTTPS traffic being monitored, just to get slightly more internet access?

Except for the 1984 implications, I have to wonder about the trade agreement implications with copying business plans and keeping the users inside the firewall.

There really ought to be lots of clauses about illegal support of national companies over international competition which are applicable? China ought to be really sensitive about trade wars.

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