China Clamps Down on Web, Pinching Companies Like Google
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The Chinese government already has a vice-like grip on the internet and has no qualms about locking up dissidents. We know from the Harvard social network study that they really only care about activism and not criticism. Most of the population has been through the Chinese education system and they are generally speaking apathetic and passive when it comes to politics or the possibility of change. And, don't forget, just like most Western netizens, users are mostly interested in non-political aspects of the web - chatting to friends, getting work done, watching movies online....
The only sense for this blanket ban/slowdown/disruption of big foreign online services seems to be to shelter Chinese companies from foreign competition.
But I had no problem opening the zh.wikipedia.org (the Wikipedia in Chinese), which has content that the Party decidedly would not like to see, such as the account of the Tiananmen events. And I could do that with HTTP or HTTPS, without VPN or Tor. I'm guessing they don't block Wikipedia because nobody in the population really cares anymore, and Baidu is not making enough money out of Baidu Baike (Baidu's online encyclopedia) for it to matter.
It's not like chinese don't know that tiananmen square happened. They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong.
Also studying the event, it's pretty grey in general. The west's portrayal of it is not without bias.
That's not exactly true. The deeper issue is that the Party wants the people to forget the incidence or make it look trivial and insignificant, so that any discussion about right or wrong does not even surface.
In fact, there isn't much that the Party needs to do about it nowadays. The population is literally drowned in entertainment, amusing themselves to death, which is part of the reason the government can start to repurpose the GFW towards protectionism.
The controls aren't for the government.
Believe it or not, network filtering is a huge business in China, especially selling products to gov.
Sometimes I use a VPN not because I'm trying to get to a banned site, but because of general flakiness when using unblocked sites they'd have no reason to screw with. Seems to be some combination of innocuous reasons (CDN/peering issues, bad routers, unusual race conditions in client-side code caused by my weird network) and deliberate throttling. Under VPN, these issues go away.
It seems many people I know (even non non-expats) use VPNs and have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, etc. However, it's a tad inconvenient. Even though I have a VPN one click away, often times I'll opt for a Chinese site/tool to save hassle. Exactly the intended result of these policies!
And about the reason why these sites are blocked: just BECAUSE THEY CAN! (They even blocked github for mysterious purpose once!) There is no public rule/law/principle to tell us why a foreign site is blocked. The just kill sites silently and pretend nobody cares.
Fortunately enough, HackNews has not been blocked, yet.
(Sorry for my bad English)
Does there seem to be a pattern to the blocks? Or is it just completely random?
Problem is VPNs require money, not just skills and tor can be dead slow.
To access real Internet inChina, it is not only about encryption, nor anonymity. you have to hide the fact that you are accessing a foreign server. GFW has this feature: if a node inside GFW access a foreign address too long/frequently, the foreign address will be temporary blocked. This is a very rude but powerful feature.
Add Obama to the list.
Lest we forget what Amazon/Paypal/Visa/Mastercard did to Wikileaks on US government request.
When you're big enough, the laws don't apply to you.
Therefore the internet -- built in 1990s -- will be splitted. Again.
“You’ve got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done.”
This happens in every company with an internet connection.
"That has led to the rise of a number of locally run application stores, which analysts say will sometimes market pirated copies of software or charge extra to promote a new application."
So the piracy problem doesn't happen so much in the west, but the objection here is that simply advertising on Facebook or Google isn't going to get you a global audience because someone has split off part of the market. This is like saying how terribly inconvenient it is that not everyone in the world watches US based TV channels.
- "This happens in every company with an internet connection." Yes, that's right. Now multiply this by 100. As described in the article, the internet is not only censored but also unreliable. Some sites work only sometimes, others break silently. If you work for an international company, the websites and services your western colleagues use, will not work for you (dropbox, fb, google, xing, etc).
- "This is like saying how terribly inconvenient it is that not everyone in the world watches US based TV channels" No, the whole point of the internet is to be accesible from everywhere. Advertisers on US based TV channels target an US audience. If I release an Android app on the Play Store, I expect it to be downloadable by everyone with internet access.