China Bans Livestreaming
mashable.com
mashable.com
Censorship requirements for live streaming in China have been in effect since 2008, and were tightened up in November 2016, with new regulations issued.[2] Now, apparently, three sites not in compliance have been told to shut down streaming. Sites are supposed to have licenses and in-house censorship staffs.
Over at People's Daily, we can read the party line.[3] "A documentary program promoted by the Finance Channel of CCTV has recently attracted public attention for encouraging ordinary people to plan and produce their own films. Amateur filmmakers can choose from a wide range of topics related to China’s achievements in recent years - for instance, the 4G telecommunications tower installed on a cliff, the Shanghai-Kunming high speed rail that has shortened travel time between the two cities to 10 hours, and artificial intelligence. Once the videos are shot and selected, they will be played on a number of TV programs, and will also be promoted by a dozen online video platforms." So that's what good Chinese citizens are supposed to be doing.
China's approach to censorship is not leakproof, but is effective. There's a combination of subtle pressure and explicit control. Once something becomes big enough to get attention, something is done about it.
[1] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/209... [2] http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/204... [3] http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0623/c90000-9232613.html
The title of this gets so wrong - China did not ban livestreaming. Yes, the regulation of livestreaming services gets very very tight recently, we have been fined due to inappropriate content.
The website mentioned in the article like Weibo, AcFun are not about livestreaming, they're YouTube-like video sites. You need special license to run YouTube-like video sites, just the license is almost impossible to apply for non state-run company. There are only 500 something licenses ever issued, you need to acquire a company that have the license, surely the price is extremely high due to scarcity.
The article says:
> On Thursday, the government ordered Weibo, iFeng and ACFUN to stop all its video and audio streaming services, according to an FT report.
So what's video and audio programme? It has a definition, but in practice it has to be interpreted some way. That's why regulation can GET tight sometimes. China is complicated.
[1] http://www.sapprft.gov.cn/sapprft/contents/6588/338032.shtml
Are Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN popular sites in China for livestreaming or sharing videos? I know if a western government ordered YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook to "stop their video and audio program service" in their country that could most definitely be interpreted as a ban on livestreaming (or even on all forms of streaming in general), even if the ban didn't include smaller sites like Vimeo or Periscope.
Now, as btw0 notes, these licenses are scarce, and so this amounts to a _de facto_ ban of a sort for people who only know about these popular sites, but it is not a ban in the strict sense.
Second of all, live streaming is definitely censored in the same way. But the sites mentioned, Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN, have no live streaming service, only (what is the word for not live?) streaming service.
doesn't matter if live or not.
companies are forbidden to have user generated content at all?
even gcc -O0 would optimize that out as unreachable code :D
I'm curious as to whether you were fined for political content or something else.
The difference here being that the CCP don't only dream themselves the masters of the Chinese people.
China simply does not have the consistent history of far-reaching imperialism that other historic empires like Britain or America have. There is also an absence of an enlightened ideology of imperialism, which the aforementioned British and American empires used to justify mass conquest and genocide.
Compared to British/American conquests and subversion in East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and so on, the far out (from the rich coast/interior) Chinese provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang are practically in China's back yard.
China invaded its neighbors on multiple occasions. It was the failure of its imperial ambitions that resulted in it turning inward. Or does the likes of Korea and such simply not count in your mind?
China also became "China" after invading neighboring kingdoms.
China simply was never in a position to expand substantially beyond its current borders due to technological limitations and the superiority of its neighbors' military. Pretending it is some virtuous position is categorically false and you can see that in the way they look the other way when working with African dictators, etc. and making all the "moral compromises" the American Empire has.
More like what has always been considered "China" got taken over by the Kidan, then the Monguls, then the Manchus, each time forcefully, but then slowly emerging as a "More Unified China", rinse and repeat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_period
> The Warring States period (Chinese: 戰國時代; pinyin: Zhànguó shídài) was an era in ancient Chinese history following the Spring and Autumn period and concluding with the Qin wars of conquest that saw the annexation of all other contender states, which ultimately led to the Qin state's victory in 221 BC as the first unified Chinese empire known as the Qin dynasty.
What historical event created the first unified Chinese empire in your alternate view of world history?
If you believe the analysis in https://www.amazon.com/Early-Chinese-Empires-History-Imperia... , the Qin dynasty immediately flamed out because its institutions just didn't work in peacetime, and the Han dynasty had to develop practices more suited to a stable empire.
We share a more-or-less unified culture with Canada. Do you feel the US invading them isn't a quest to take control of foreigners?
I'm asking these questions because its genuinely a foreign concept to me that these things are not imperialistic quests of conquest. I understand people have different point of views and so I'm trying to understand what the justification is.
Due to rate limiting, I'll edit:
> If communications technology broke down and the United States fractured into 5 different states, would you be surprised if most military efforts went into taking over other regions of the former US rather than Canada or Mexico?
That isn't the same as the warring states since that was the first proper unification of China as an empire. Up until that point in history, it wasn't unified in the sense the US is. I also would consider attempting to recover those regions an act of imperial aggression.
> If they were eventually reunified after hundreds of years of fighting each other while having displayed no urge to invade Mexico, and subsequently spent several more centuries not invading Mexico while denigrating militarism and soldiers generally, why would you start worrying for Mexico?
China invaded Korea (China's Mexico). So I'm not sure where you are going with that given that is a historical falsehood when it comes to analogies.
Similarly, when you are refusing to acknowledge the territorial claims of your neighbors like China is in the South China Sea to the point you are taking military actions
If they were eventually reunified after hundreds of years of fighting each other while having displayed no urge to invade Mexico, and subsequently spent several more centuries not invading Mexico while denigrating militarism and soldiers generally, why would you start worrying for Mexico?
What would that have to do with it?
Just because they share an ethnicity you can't claim that the hundreds of years of expansion of the Zhou, which involved nonzero amounts of military conquest, or the Warring States period weren't imperialistic. Even outside of the unification attempts, there was plenty of conquest of tribes that had never been a part of any state.
In recent history, the PLC invaded Tibet in 1950, 37 years after Tibet gained independent via treaty.
There's no rate limiting. You can always reply to a post on that post's own page.
> China invaded Korea (China's Mexico)
Korea is more like China's Canada. It's tiny (Canada has one tenth the population of the US; Mexico is more like one half) and culturally, though not linguistically, similar.
So your argument now is that makes it non-imperialistic?
1. China, ruled by the Chinese, has been incredibly uninterested in expansion compared to pretty much anywhere else in the world.
2. In fact, they have a many-centuries-long tradition of applying social stigma to military careers.
3. They have been especially uninterested in attacking regions that are not already highly Sinicized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Sino-Korean_relatio... doesn't really suggest that the Chinese have been interested in invading Korea at any time in the last 1500 years. Communist China specifically wanted North Korea to be independent as a buffer state between itself and the US.
Tibet, and Xinjiang, were invaded by the Manchus (who ruled China as the Qing dynasty at the same time they ruled several other jurisdictions under different names. Everything was later relabeled "China" as essentially an accounting gimmick).
Japan was invaded by the Mongols (who, similarly, ruled China as the Yuan dynasty).
Han aggression has been pretty much limited to Vietnam (and ineffective there). Blaming China for the invasion of Tibet is slightly less ridiculous than blaming Nazi-occupied France for the invasion of Poland.
Re Tibet - you think Mao was a foreigner, or just someone who was too strange to be counted as Chinese either?
More important is the enlightened citizens. You can name all sorts of intelligent ways to be the only safeguard against tyranny. In the end of day, if you are less intelligent and knowledgeable than the privileged few, no matter what you do, you'll be managed.
the only way to become intelligent and knowledgeable is to have free and easy access to information.
As we've learned recently, politicized or partisan info ("fake news") can flood and disrupt our decision-making.
The implications of such seem to be in conflict with how most people wish to live.
I don't know if I would even try to frame having such a foundation as needing hope.
I think that the means to have information accessible easily are increasingly upon us if not here already (commodification of hardware/software, incentives for orgs/people to collect/sample/leverage data from such, with all the messy details that come into existence because of such), whether the few or masses like it or not (or choose to become distracted by some forms of it instead of using it to pursue some greater means), its only becoming more pervasive. Not going to really comment on accurate or not, since the value of such is dependent on what it can be use for (which is not always in a known state of <good| or |bad>, or rather often in the superposition of such where we only can see some magnitude of the combination: <good|bad>); Even "accurate" information could be relatively meaningless for achieving some ends.
All of this is undeniably changing the power dynamics everywhere. Government's and entrenched orgs will do all that they can to mask/veil what is going on (if they cannot adapt), but ultimately it will be futile. Many of us may die in the meantime (as has always been the case). But as relatively technical individual (and US pseudo-expat), its kind of freeing to being able to pit n number of different nations/transnational organizations polices/diktats agaisnt each other and exploit/live in the loopholes without resorting to overt technical subversion. Though plenty of media content on what the latter could look like ;)
Complex system is a nice model to think about all this. Ordinary individual's effect can vary in different state of the system. Hence, their feelings are different.
E,
and if we could some how define "can do/does with information" as Hamiltonian,
SH,
in nature and governed by some set of initial conditions,
IC,
(which will vary depending on the society), then I suppose every society has a ground state that could be calculated approximated (via the ritz method) from such:
E0 <= (<IC|SH|IC>)/(<IC|IC>),
and it could be proven that some societies have a higher or lower ground state as far is it comes to utilization of information.
However at the point we are, I wouldn't be surprised if on normalized spectrum of information utilization ground states across societies from 0 to 100 were all clustered together near 0. I know, pessimistic :P
I believe it's not a question of chicken and egg. It's all about part of the system starts to be able to have the environment to support the iteration of new generations better prepared for that (Not sure it has to be democracy, I don't believe it's foundation for many good things, but at least some system people are more fairly treated.).
However, given rulers are fully aware of this and how the system is currently structured, there is no way to have this kind of thing even in just a tiny part of the system. The best chance is after the collapse of it, but people would suffer and there is no guarantee it would emerge, spread and prevail. And my life span is too short. So there is no real hope for this.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/police-get-broad-phone-and-comp...
Highly cynical view-point, but hey, if it hurts, why not use it?
The main reason I'm asking is that while I think the FT article is substantially better, it is behind a paywall, while the Mashable article isn't, so neither are ideal.
Article: https://www.ft.com/content/8a06dd5e-5752-11e7-9fed-c19e27000...
The whole "live streaming plus tips" model turns my stomach and I was disgusted to see Apple give its imprimatur the other week.
For anyone that isn't familiar with what happens on these platforms (Snapchat Facebook and FaceTime iMessage once apple institutes payments): a streamer broadcasts herself, and People from the Internet "tip" her when she does something they like. It's beyond terrifying to find out someone you love stumbled onto this system.
This is just more direct way without any social norms attached.
A few hundred years ago, most shops did not display their goods. It would have been considered crass to keep wares in sight when customers didn't ask for it, and outright crazy to let customers look and touch at items without supervision.
The department store was a 19th century innovation that let people (women, mostly) browse and shop without pressure. It was widely considered immoral at the time. Emile Zola wrote a great novel about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_Bonheur_des_Dames
Getting tips from Internet viewers is shocking in the same way as a woman visiting a department store on her own.
Livestreamers aren't the same thing as cam girls.
The vast majority of them are just people playing video games, and viewers tipping to play a funny text to speech message to the streamer.