Major Chinese-made web browsers are reportedly blocking 996ICU's GitHub repo
translate.google.com
translate.google.com
This looks more like an industry behavior, which is not uncommon in China, for example Tencent blocked on its WeChat self-media platform(a little like Facebook's Instant Articles but much more low-brow and dominant) unflattering articles about PinDuoDuo when it was goinf public in the US, which they invested in.
Cellphone reviewers has long been under control of the brands, they give out guidlines about how to write the review along with test units, manage them in their work groups.
The 360 Chrome brower queries these URLs every time you start the browser or open a URL, namely to give the url a safety and info badge.
site.browser.360.cn
cdata.browser.360.cn
cdn.weather.hao.360.cn
Is it common for them to filter at the browser level?
But if true, that also means those web browsers are querying a online database when user is trying to access a URL.
Not a good news no matter how you hold it.
Sadly not surprising.
It's 2019, and people still keep forgetting stripping debug symbols.
Good for them I guess!
The block isn't very smart if it can be circumvented by adding random query parameters with a question mark.
If you don't know much about the page and get a 404, maybe you just roll on.
If you know to circumvent it, then you probabbly know a bit more about the page anyway, maybe not the person they're trying to filter it from.
At least from UI testing we know that a thing not working, or just working slowly is enough to turn away a lot of people.
But it is a github repo. Only a small number of interested people are going to be headed there
https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E0&s=stars&type=Reposi... (There was the freeCodeCamp repo with 300k stars, but I don't see it in the list anymore.)
I am surprised that this protest does not get more media coverage. Also, Alibaba and Huawei are in the list of companies...
Not sure they always reach for a solution like " reeducation camp, or elimitated" in such cases... I don't think it says anything about censorship or the autocracy in China that some folks who don't like working long hours aren't in prison, or are still alive.
https://www.voanews.com/a/chinese-migrant-workers-protest-un...
ref: http://www.npc.gov.cn/wxzl/gongbao/1989-10/31/content_148121... (Chapter 2 Article 7, Chinese)
Sometimes, municipalities still try to block protests because of politics/people they don't like participating, under the guise of some more neutral explanation (usually noise or safety). But judges generally take a dim view on such shenanigans, and they rarely pass scrutiny in the courtroom, since the government is then expected to explain the exact grounds for denial, and prove that it is relevant and narrowly tailored.
So I'm a little curious that if a protest is related to complaints about the government, will it get accepted (at most cases)?
But then again startups founders work those hours or more
To make matters even more scary, they'll put great emphasis on promoting their own browsers in foreign countries, force hardware vendors to preinstall their browsers on devices sold outside China. Forget about the Chinese Firewall, this will take censorship and rewritten history to a whole new level that will affect people all over the world, and make it much much easier to affect foreign policies and elections.
Now for the sad part, even after they've showed their cards, companies and governments will still continue to invest in China, continue to bend over and do whatever they ask for.
Publicly-traded companies are completely enslaved to profit-seeking because of their overriding need to appease shareholders, lest shareholders fire them and install someone more willing to do whatever it takes to seek profit.
This is why regulation is necessary -- not because businesses are amoral, but because shareholders are, and businesses have to be whatever shareholders want them to be.
If we want businesses to act a certain way toward political and social freedoms abroad, we have to either tie the hands of employees through prohibitions or incentivize shareholders toward other avenues of seeking profit.
This will also help them monitor people's communications to acquire kompromat. See also the Chinese ownership of Grindr.
There is nothing really all that new in what you’ve suggested. I would be surprised if those things didn’t happen.
And most citizens won't make a peep about it if it's painted as "fighting (or preventing) terrorism". Case in point: the door-to-door searches in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombing, which were a violation of the 4th Amendment.
From today we know they are already able to do whatever they please (as long as they can get people to use their browser).. abuse other organizations reputation to spread lies and misinformation. If governments don't act then it won't be long until all these Huawei, Lenovo, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, etc devices come with their browsers preinstalled (and likely default back to their browser to open links from other apps even if you tried to change the browser).
If you continue to break the site guidelines by using HN primarily for political battle, we're going to ban you, as I explained yesterday. That's not because we support dystopian surveillance, evil dictatorships, or whatnot. It's because we need to protect the commons here as a place for intellectual curiosity, rather than a scorched-earth battlefield.
It always irks me that we (I and my non-tech friends) now communicate using media controlled by corporations, e.g. WhatsApp or FB Messenger, or Google Chat. At least email is still open. On FB Messenger you can't share PirateBay URLs because they "may be harmful to your computer".
It'd be wonderfully dystopian if desperate Mark agreed to China's requirements so he could gain a few more million advertising targets in "the growing market", and after that point you'd no longer be able to talk about Taiwan because, let's see, how about the error message "this topic may be harmful to the national security of China"?