Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites | Hacker News Reader

Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites

techcrunch.com

6 pointsluccastera10 comments

So much for ratting out dissidents to get on their good side.

Amen! That was my very first thought as well :) You would think history provides sufficient demonstrations that private deals with tyrants usually backfire in the end.

The Dalai Lama is an amazing person; always has a smile and kind words, even in response to threats and anger from the Chinese govt. I loved his responses after meeting Bush: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/10/17/dalai.lama.ap/index.htm...

If you investigate this story a little you find that the same thing is happening in Southern Africa right now. This 'trade war' can be attributed to African network engineers who do not know how to properly manage their machines.

CHECK -> http://www.digital-m.co.za/seo-blog/2007/10/yahoo-hijacked-b...

Please people . . . 'Fact checking'.

A little less alarmist tone in our posts would go a long way. China has so many things that we could legitimately complain about that I see little reason to concoct stories.

We could complain about their government. The hypocrites who profess to believe in the communist ideal of all men being equal, and at the same time deny all men an equal say in the selection of their leaders. Oh I forgot, it's not communism . . . it's 'communism with Chinese characteristics'.

We could complain about their business leaders. Who profess to believe in fair trade, and at the same time manipulate their market to prop up domestic companies at the expense of foreign competitors. Which, if this story were true, would almost certainly be the reason for it.

But MOST of all we could complain about the people. I imagine many people on this board have been to China. So you are already aware that even if one were allowed to shout about democracy and human rights from every classroom at Fudan, the students would ignore it. Why? Because they are all greedy little snots only interested in getting rich. . . . There I said it. We in the West are too concerned with hurting the feelings of the Chinese people to state the obvious.

And speaking of the Chinese . . . right now Yu Yen is looking at me with that smug Chinese smile and chuckling . . . I have to decide between smacking her around, or going for a run.

I am reminded of a scene in the Bruce Willis film 'Hudson Hawk', where the security guards are chasing Bruce through a museum and two of them end up splayed out on the floor. The third one runs by, still chasing Bruce and yells back at the other two . . . "Get up! You're embarrassing me."

Get it?

I am dissapointed that TechCrunch is once again reporting stories without decent fact checking. The fact that some people in some parts of China couldnt access Google and Yahoo does not mean the chinese government is involved. Unless baidu was state owned there is little motivation for the to do something like this. Google has already agreed to implement filtering in China to please the Chinese government. This smells like Baidu or someone else in China was poisoning some DNS servers to get some attention.

Wake up people!

Don't understimate the extent of Chinese Govt. anger over the Dalai Lama photo-op with Bush. The Chinese govt. effectively controls every company and person in China (if they want to), including Baidu. It would be fully unsurprising that they would shut down American search engines to "teach us a lesson" about not heeding their demands. It could, however, prove untrue as well - we'll see.

It has proven untrue, several people have reported being able to access all of these sites (read the comments on TechCrunch). I haven't yet called my friends in China to confirm but I'm sure if this was indeed true they would have called me to let me know.

As far as how bad China really is, I recommend more people travel there and judge for themselves. It might be a communist government and they might oppose certain groups that pose a threat to them but saying that they control every company and every person is a bit extreme. There wouldn't be so many US companies setting up shop in China if they didn't trust the Chinese government.

This anger about the Dalai Lama is just a bunch of posturing on their part, absolutely nothing will come of it.

Well, looks like they are redirecting searches to Baidu, which is a very funny way of doing nothing.

The Chinese government is always messing with the internet here. I can't even see photos in Flickr or articles in Wikipedia without using a proxy. They are unpredictable and annoying. Government involvement in this would not surprise me at all.

Indeed, Wikipedia managed to get banned in China. A bit annoying but nothing a tech savvy person can't figure out how to bypass.

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