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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

The article makes a lot of PRC censors trying to subdue news about the match. How much of this is a real tendency or cultural fear? How much of it is just an attempt to kneecap Google/Alphabet?

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A little bit of both, I think, here is what was apparently send around:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-covera...

and in Chinese:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C...

"Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a live stream. If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it. Please convey the gist of this to sports channels. Again, we stress: this match may not be broadcast live in any form and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams, self-media accounts and so on. No website (including sports and technology channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push notifications about the course or result of the match."

Sounds pretty harsh... will be interesting to see how the rest of the event goes.

Gee, even with Trump as president this makes me so happy I live in the United States

I am not sure, but it's floating around.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8CA...

Sites like Sina and Sogou are able to report, and those aren't small sites. They got millions of views every day.

That site you quoted is anti-PRC news site. Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't.

> Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't.

That's the lowest bar in the world. It's a damn board game. The stream was six hours of two men sitting across a table from each other placing black and white stones. Optionally, some of the streams had commentators talking about how good the moves were as they were played. That such a thing could be subjected to censorship is absurd.

As for the result not being censored, well, it's literally a single bit of information. That was only censored because it's not practical to do so.

Agreed, that's why I mentioned "apparently", though it is what the NYTimes is referring to (although I guess they also have a bone to pick with the PRC).

That sounds absolutely absurd. Say what we may about the state of affairs in the United States, but if the media was over forbidden from broadcasting an AI competition, which is effectively educational research in nature, I think there'd be a lot of uproar.

When I worked in China nearly a decade ago, the general mindset among my Party friends was "there's no way this will last." Most of them had sent their kids off to get Canadian citizenship because they weren't sure there would even be a PRC in the long term.

I haven't been back in a while but my guess is things have sort of "settled in" more. The Chinese Firewall is absurdly effective - last I heard it was difficult to even get a VPN through.

That mindset comes from generational memory of high-risk political instability. In the PRC, there has yet to emerge a population without a cohort that personally experienced first-hand, or was passed by oral history with strong impressions like second-hand recitations, political upheavals that involved substantial loss of life, on the order of thousands or more. Get caught, even if incidentally, on the wrong side, and there are dire consequences. What will be interesting to monitor is whether or not the children of your Party friends (the ones who were sent off to obtain Canadian citizenship) do the same with their children. If they all do, then that's not a good signal. If there is abatement of the trend, then that's encouraging.

That's what they said about the current state of affairs twenty years ago. Uproar follows sudden changes. Slow and steady makes the totalitarian state.

They're probably afraid some guy will jump up and shout anti CCP 'propaganda'. It also means they'll lose face if they then proceed to put this guy in the prison.

I doubt the authenticity of the source, it's an anti-PRC site so it might be biased, and the source the article referenced was from a forum instead of some Chinese government's official website. Actually, the contest was widely discussed on some of China's major websites like Weibo and Zhihu so I don't think it was totally banned.

I mentioned some of this censorship in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14403809. A tieba (your random big BBS site; https://archive.fo/0mh1t#selection-4961.0-4961.16 reply #10) link from http://archive.is/tTgsx (solidot, Chinese version of slashdot) points to a ban on mentioning Google by name & doing commentary on AI, and suggests doing a indirect livestream by showing a separate board instead. Someone's YouTube livestream mirror on Bilibili was supposedly taken down after the B site made it too public by putting it on the front page.

According to the tieba page, the ban was first noticed as CCTV5 deleted their Weibo (a microblogging service) post on the livestream.

Welcome to the 4th part of confidence doctrine -- cultural confidence.

Google's been blocked since ~2010, due to Google's refusal to block and censor search results that Chinese government considers 'inharmonic'.

I admit I don't know much about the situation there. So, in mainland China, for approxmiately 7 years, nobody could use Google's search engine, or gmail, for anything? (Barring extreme technical measures like tor / vpn and so forth)?

Is this true? Could you talk about what the most common search engines in actual use are there?

Obviously I am asking about this as a total outsider. I've never even been to China.

It isn't just a search engine; there is an entire for-China-by-Chinese ecosystem [1]. To answer your direct question, yes, every Google online property is inaccessible within the PRC to non-registered commercial entities, and has been for the past 7 years. If you are a appropriately-registered commercial entity that can afford it, my understanding is dedicated lines (assumed monitored by the PRC) may be purchased with access to the outside world.

[1] http://www.mandarinzone.com/top-10-popular-chinese-websites/

Edit: my apologies, bad wording. Kudos to xiaoma for catching my mistake, thank you 小马 (my guess at your name in 中文）。Today, all Google properties I'm aware of are blocked. The blocking was implemented gradually across Google properties over the past 7 years. The search engine has been blocked for the past 7 years, since the beginning of the block.

Thanks for answering my direct question and for that link, which is exactly what I was curious about.

Gmail wasn't blocked until later.

谢谢！ Correction added to my post.

Even conventional VPN is not enough. The Great Firewall of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall) is a mix of DNS poisoning, deep packet inspection, and traffic and usage analysis based on real time ML. It is very smart and adaptive, and will block most mainstream VPN services, including IPSEC, standard OpenVPN, SSH tunnels, (of course) SOCKS and http proxies.

Besides blocking entire sections of the net outright (like Google address blocks), poisoning controversial domains, etc, even if it can't directly inspect the traffic due to good encryption (say in the instance of OpenVPN or IPSEC), it will slowly degrade and eventually null-route your traffic over the course of minutes, depending on its judgement of the likelihood (based on packet structure and history) that your activity isn't "normal" usage.

Currently the only functional ways of getting around the GFW is VPN through stunnel (TCP OpenVPN traffic re-wrapped in TLS, thus pretending to be https traffic, and incurring triple TCP performance penalties), similar convoluted protocols like Shadowsocks, obfsproxy, and other China specific tools.

It started with the search engine and followed by all Google's services, including but certainly not limited to Blogger, Adwords, Play store, Gmail and so on. So Chinese students who were applying to foreign universities with a Gmail account would wake up one day and find they had difficulty accessing their own mailboxes. (Don't ask me how I knew it.)

Last time I checked the only Google service available now seems to be the Google Translate.

One project monitors how many popluar sites are blocked in China:

https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer

Tor is also blocked so it takes a considerable amount of effort to make it work. VPNs and other measures (socket proxy, etc.) work but they're also sinfully slow, and it breaks all the time.

The most common search engine there is Baidu: https://baidu.com. Bing has some market share as well.

my wife, who's chinese, says its because china wanted to protected its own market. i'm sure censorship was a part of it, but think of 1 billion viewers and how much money that'd generate. the government decided that money should stay and circulate in china instead of going outside to google

Maybe it was an unholy synergy of both.

What was the point of hosting this in China?

There is plenty of news coverage of this in China, both in English and in Chinese -

http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-24/258802.shtml

http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-18/258072.shtml

http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0523/c90000-9219327.html

I see claims everywhere that "China is censoring coverage of the match", but anyone can just click on those links and see that it is untrue.

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