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Comment by drunkenmasta | Hacker News Reader

I guess that, unlike Google, there is not $$$$$$$ at stake in refusing to comply.

More so that non Chinese people can act against China with out risk of arrest, extradition or rendition. China is an easy target.

It is very easy to take a stand against China, and get props for it, when what one is doing is risk free and frankly irrelevant. I cant see the Chinese government crying at night that they cant get wikipedia. I cant see the Chinese rising in revolt because they cant easily get wikipedia. There is no consequence for Wales and co.

I say big deal. Try being Snowden. Try publishing information that breaks US law. Try circumventing US internet security.

Frankly Im tired of China being a whipping boy for westerners who want to show how right on and freedom loving they are they are. It is as useless as signing an online petition.

Don't get me wrong, think wikipedia is one of the best resources on the internet, I use the site a hell of a lot. I would like the Chinese people to have access to it. I fully appreciated the stand against SOPA. I very much respect the guys who set wikipedia up and all the contributors to it. But really, this "stand" amounts to not a lot, except some easy publicity.

Oh, and he has complied with censorship. He had a choice: censor, or withdraw everything. Both from a Chinese POV, both achieve the exact same thing. The info they don't want their people accessing is not officially available. The Chinese people still lose out.

Lastly, I understand that the Chinese people can get round the firewall in various ways and still get wikipedia in full, and that people out side China help greatly in that. Now, imagine that this was the US we were talking about. Imagine that some one helped Americans get information the US government didn't want Americans to see. Can we speculate on how far the American government might go to stop it and deal with the people involved?

China is an easy, risk free target.

Yeah yeah, I know I know. China "evil", m'kay? So, fine to abuse their laws and customs. But just one thing, its hardly going to speed them up in to the arms of the oh so free west. Attacking them just makes them more defensive, and it slows up their journey towards us.

Wikipedia works just fine, it's not blocked by the GFW, even the Chinese version. Wikemedia is blocked on some networks (like CMCC), so you might not get images, and of course, some pages are blocked. Https may or may not be blocked depending in the ISP, and if it isn't blocked you can access any page you want.

China is 100 times worse than the USA on freedom and censorship, whatever you guys are complaining about over there, don't get the wrong impression that it is even close to what we get here. I'm neither for attacking or appeasing china on censorship. Frankly, there is enough internal pressure that change is inevitable, they'll deal.

> Wikipedia works just fine, it's not blocked by the GFW

This is not true. It varies on time and place, but it is usually blocked in at least some regions. It's currently blocked [1] in Beijing and Inner Mongolia. It was blocked when I was in Jilin Province two weeks ago. During that visit, it was hit-or-miss whether my Digital Ocean mail server was reachable.

[1] http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php?siteurl=zh.wik... (same for en.wikipedia.org)

It is not blocked fully in Beijing by any ISP I use. I'm using it right now in bed and VPN is completely disabled.

The other link you gave me is blocked, though. So is Wikipedia https. Zh.wikipedia is blocked also (not any other Lang though). Zh does work on my phone though (china Unicom).

It's complicated, even beijing doesn't have a single GFW.

I just checked on CMCC. zh.wikipedia.com works well enough, with the caveat that https and wikimedia are blocked (so no secure page access, and no pictures). At home, which I think is China Telecom, zh is blocked, but not wikimedia (so I can see pictures).

"Attacking them just makes them more defensive, and it slows up their journey towards us."

Although this is true for mindless, nationalistic attacks, we need to attack, or any other country, where the ad-hoc censorship and manipulation of news is larger than a threshold (note that I'm not saying where they exist, since they exist in some form in all countries). Viewed in this sense your assertion is clearly wrong. As a single counterexample, consider the case of Tombstone (and related books about the Great Chinese Famine). In the NYTBR review (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/china-w...) it says

"But just as China is undergoing a spiritual revival today, its people are also beginning to revive history. Xinyang is now home to two tiny memorials to the famine.6 More striking, earlier this year a national newspaper ran a multipage supplement on the famine—an unprecedented recognition of this disaster.7 When I asked an editor at a leading Party newspaper why this was, he had a one-word answer: “Tombstone.” "

Conclusion: Well-intentioned and -placed and continuous push can bring about change of attitude. Even in China.

Great, so let's talk about the NSA for a moment for the sake of "well-intentioned" attack.

So what do you think about it? How shall we (if we can at all) change anything?

While I agree with you in principle, that sites often use China to score easy Freedom Points, I disagree that we're dealing with an instance of such behaviour here.

Wikipedia has long had a principled policy of opposition to censorship. For some examples, see the Virgin Killer article, which touched a nerve in Western society, a petition to remove depictions of the prophet Muhammed that was signed hundreds of thousands of times, and the very recent attempts by French intelligence services to have an article on the French Wikipedia deleted.

I do not see this latest public stance as deviating from their previous ones.

Bashing China may be easy but that does not make complying with them a good thing.

I'm all with you on this anti China bashing rant, it's too easy and sometime even get the smells of the yellow peril. But there is another x in the equation: seeing foreign companies or institutions go firm against governments, including China's, and taking the risk of losing market shares and money, is very instructive for the Chinese youth, it shows them, and everyone in fact, that the world is not all about money.

"the world is not at all about money"...Seriously?!

Do you really think that Google, MSFT, FB etc. went "against" the government in the public because they are "not at all about money"? I like the wishful thinking, but unfortunately, if I were running one of those companies I would do the same thing so that I get to keep my customer and user base, because their confidence in my company and product is the driving force of my continued revenue. How much money is / can the government going to give me anyway? They are not MSFT or GOOG or FB's customer!

It is up to you to be so pessimistic, but why would you try to convince others? I see everyday some proofs that the world is not all about money: I just need to hang out with friends to be convinced.

The US doesn't have "Internet security" to speak of...

*Attacking them just makes them more defensive, and it slows up their journey towards us"

Who specifically is attacking who specifically?

I lived in China when Google announced that they were refusing to comply with government censorship. Shortly after the announcement Google was blocked by the great firewall. When big sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google are blocked, it drives the general population to alternatives like Tor and VPNs, making censorship less effective.

http://gizmodo.com/5446712/google-refuses-to-continue-censor...

Are those sites really that big in China? I'd think Baidu and Sina Weibo are far more relevant to the general population.

Before it was censored, Google had about 1/3 of the browser market. People with education always used it for english or foreign searches but generally prefered Baido for Chinese.

I lived in Shenzhen which borders Hong Kong. Facebook is huge in HK, so there was a demand for access in SZ. Surprisingly many people asked me for my facebook and I saw many coworkers using it too. When I was in Beijing and Shanghai, I didn't see it used as much except with the young, wealthy international crowd.

For wikipedia, the engineers loved to use it. I even introduced a few of them to Tor when they asked me how they could use it outside of the office.

Weibo and Weixin are incredibly popular. But middle class intellectuals who want to prove their western credentials will generally have a facebook account. VPNs and proxies are fairly common, so access isn't really a problem, its just a hassle.

That was before they started their vicious attacks on VPNs. We've been through 3 paid ones this year, and still can't find one that works.

I have a free Amazon EC2 VPN that's also acting as a Tor Bridge. Over the past 4 years, between Tor and my personal VPN, I've never once been blocked in China.

Setting up the bridge takes about 5 min: https://cloud.torproject.org/#get_started

Setting up the PPTP server another 5 min: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PPTPServer

If you want facebook on your phone, you'll need to setup a L2TP VPN, since China Unicom blocks PPTP. Instructions can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/L2TPServer

NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Exit notes attract attention from authorities, not bridges. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.

Amazon ec2 is blocked on my home ISP.

You can always use Tor to set it up from home. I was in China when I setup mine. Since I returned, I never had an issue accessing it from any ISP in the states.

I was using VPN ninja without problems earlier in the year. Haven't been to the mainland since march though.

So my friends working at Google said that Google decided to go out of China because of Tibet, i.e. Google supports Tibet's independence from China as separate country, and that the whole thing about content censorship was something that Google was able to put up with and wasn't the reason for its leaving.

Not sure if this were actually the case, but my friends were pretty firm about this. If it were actually true, lol, the whole world is fooled. Let's go figure out how to make Tibet free so that Google can go back to China. =P

Google and Wikipedia have been blocked but not very often, and they've been pretty reliable for the last couple of years (no longer get penalty boxed on google).

The general population of China do not use Google, gmail, wikipedia, or facebook.

Surprisingly, google maps is doing ok.

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