July 2, 2007
Freedom of Information
I was walking on the treadmill at the Grand Hyatt today, watching Bloomberg TV as usual. A promo spot came on for an interview with Taiwan’s president. He said about five words before the screen went blank for around 30 seconds and then came back. Some censor is watching the real-time satellite television feed and is blanking out “objectionable” bits. How absurd it that?
I knew this kind of thing existed, but I’d never been a victim of it before. This experience combined with my office’s installation of web-blocking software, effectively killing Bloglines and delicious and all proxies and most blogs, just drove home the ridiculousness of “authorities” trying to block people from getting information. (The Great Firewall has always been a pain but there are ways to work around it, unlike this WebSense Enterprise product which I can’t beat.)
It makes me question (briefly, since I don’t like to think too hard) the places where I “work” and live.
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Oh, no… Spamming blocks..
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:25 pm
uh yeah. i find your reports about china interesting and informative but i could never live there. i read an interesting article in a recent new yorker about the great wall of china(the other one). it seems barely anyone in china has ever done any research about it. an american is doing all the work. weird.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:43 pm
I have never liked big brother, though I have never experienced something as drastic as a blackout censorship. Very interesting…
It is not too hard to get around websense, depending on what other network activity you are allowed to do… I use Hamachi and FreeProxy to route some of my web browsing or email through my home computer.
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Odd, I was able to post by removing some of my comment… not sure what the offending text was, but feel free to email me if you care… maybe something with a wordpress plugin or an older version.
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:40 pm
@Markus: I”m not sure how that one snuck through, but it has been killed. ;-)
@scoot: They’ve probably done research on it but it isn’t published in English.
@Jason: Can you email me about the hamachi solution?
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:52 pm
here’s the abstract
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:00 pm
For a country with so much history I wonder how well China has learnt from it?
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
@scoot: Thanks.
@Andrew: I think they’ve learned a lot from their long history of autocratic, bureaucratic governments.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Funnily enough, pretty much all countries have the facility to do this - eg I know in Australia they have a standard 7 second delay even for ‘real time’ newsfeeds. Most of the time it’s used harmlessly to block like expletives and crap like that.
China cops a lot of crap for heavy hand tactics in controlling its people - but do think about this: if you were running it, how the hell would you manage those 1.2 billion people? What if a few thousand of these have the capacity to destabilise the entire country - which is obviously heading for good times as economic growth picks up etc?
July 3rd, 2007 at 3:43 am
how is the uproar following one Miss Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction different than censoring the dude from Taiwan?
Affiliates paid millions of dollars in fines. NFL adopted self-censorship and the SuperBowl half-time shows have been on 7 second delay since.
Also, many harmless GoDaddy commercials have been banned from the SuperBowl.
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:52 am
sure it varies but i have no trouble getting around websense enterprise at my work with transparent proxies.
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:03 am
I’m in China at the moment. finance.yahoo.com was strangely unavailable for a few days last week, and a interview with someone about the Hong Kong transition to China 10 years ago on CCTV had an odd gap to it. Hard to tell if there is really censorship looking from the inside.
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:37 am
@ken: What’s a transparent proxy?
@BG Murphy: Many people have been having problems with Yahoo, but my access has been fine (though Flickr is definitely now blocked for everyone in China).
July 4th, 2007 at 2:50 am
>>harmless GoDaddy commercials - GoDaddy commercials aren’t exactly something a 5 year old should be watching. Besides, the ones that do get through are lame. There is more to life (and domains) than big melons.
@Mao - this might help - http://www.wagerank.com/2007/how-i-set-up-a-private-anonymous-proxy/
July 4th, 2007 at 4:46 am
proves my point… you censor big melons, they censor political adversaries… what’s the difference?
it is all relative… each believes their censorship is the right thing to do.
July 4th, 2007 at 7:35 am
>>>proves my point - to a degree you are correct. However, there must be at least some distinction between editing content based on cultural or moral values and editing content based on political ideology. All advertising is propaganda yet we are accustomed to it and accept it. The Chinese aren’t (as far as I know) so worried about big melons as they are about ideas they perceived may take root in the coppertop crops that could disrupt the power to the machine.
July 4th, 2007 at 8:12 am
@Donk: Thanks for the proxy link.
@Born2 & Donk: They block both Tits and Tiananmen massacre references (and anything else they find objectionable).
July 30th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Chairman Mao,
I was reading Business 2.0’s Hottest 31 Startups, and it mentioned this Web Browser… Maxthon
“… has found a way around the Chinese government’s controls on what information is available through sites and search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Baidu.com…”
I immediately thought of this post (though it took me a while to find it.)
I haven’t tried it yet, and since I’m in the States, I don’t know if I will see/feel the difference. I hope it works for you.
CDt
July 31st, 2007 at 7:38 am
Closet DT: Thanks for taking the trouble to find the relevant post … I’ve used Maxthon and it doesn’t beat the Great Firewall any better than the next browser as far as I could tell.