Ok... I am officially shutting this blog down!
Understand that in China, you can get ten years at hard labor for reading the wrong website, and Google's decided they don't mind helping catch people, so long as the money's good.
Therefore I am pulling my stuff off of here and going elsewhere. You can still find my stuff at: http://fredsitelive.com/
From a Jonathan Watts story in The Guardian, today:
Google will actively assist the government of China to limit content!
The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything the company has done before. According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party. But this list is frequently updated.
In a statement, Google said it had little choice:
It acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China.
Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. "What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues," said one of the country's most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer. "That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards."
Forbidden searches
Words or phrases that can trigger pages to be blocked or removed from search results in China:
Tiananmen Square massacre The killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians by the People's Liberation Army in 1989
Dalai Lama The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who is denounced as a splittist by the government in Beijing.
Taiwanese independence The nightmare of the Communist party, which has vowed to use force to prevent a breakaway.
Falun Gong:
A banned spiritual movement, thousands of whose members have been imprisoned and in many cases tortured.
Dongzhou:
The village where paramilitary police shot and killed at least 100 protesters last month.
Therefore I am pulling my stuff off of here and going elsewhere. You can still find my stuff at: http://fredsitelive.com/
From a Jonathan Watts story in The Guardian, today:
Google will actively assist the government of China to limit content!
The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything the company has done before. According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party. But this list is frequently updated.
In a statement, Google said it had little choice:
It acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China.
Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. "What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues," said one of the country's most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer. "That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards."
Forbidden searches
Words or phrases that can trigger pages to be blocked or removed from search results in China:
Tiananmen Square massacre The killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians by the People's Liberation Army in 1989
Dalai Lama The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, who is denounced as a splittist by the government in Beijing.
Taiwanese independence The nightmare of the Communist party, which has vowed to use force to prevent a breakaway.
Falun Gong:
A banned spiritual movement, thousands of whose members have been imprisoned and in many cases tortured.
Dongzhou:
The village where paramilitary police shot and killed at least 100 protesters last month.
posted by Fred | 7:07 PM
3 Comments:
Okay what would you like, not give the Chinese access to Google? The Chinese government won't care and the people won't know. At least access to Google in some form (note that Google will mention when results are censored) will promote a more open society than what it's now.
Also this restriction of the Chinese government only applies to the Google server run in CHina. So the Chinese people can still get past the restriction by accessing the Google.com server in the US.
"Okay what would you like, not give the Chinese access to Google? The Chinese government won't care and the people won't know."
Thank you for asking! I'll tell you what I would like, but first let me ask you this:
What's the magic figure for you? Think carefully now, I mean you're dealing with something with tremendous potential here:
$1,000.00 a head?
$50.00 a head?
Think man! I mean, even at $1.00 a head, you could probably make a quick $30-40 million sending people to jail for reading!
After all, like you said, "the people won't know." (Unless the Chinese govt. gives you a medal, I suppose.)
"So the Chinese people can still get past the restriction by accessing the Google.com server in the US."
He-heh... sure they can.
A man named Li Zhu is now serving 8 years in prison for calling a local coorupt official a "local corrupt official". No, that doesn't mean 4 years because everyone gets "good time" in prison. It means, if he's 32, he'll be making toys for Wal-Mart 16-18 hours a day until he's 40.
Dongzhou;
The night of the massacre, while the local party leader rode through the streets, proclaiming on a loudspeaker, "I am a friend of Dongzhou, this sort of thing isn't necessary", the people lucky enough to sneak out, find the bodies of their relatives before the soldiers did, were hiding them in their houses, or burying them in the backyard.
The government claims 3 dead. The number is 100 at least. No one will ever know. If one of them was a relative of yours, you could get 10 years for trying to find out whether they're alive on the Internet.
Shi Tao, 37, a reporter for a business daily, a year ago, was sentenced by Beijing to 10 years in prison for "divulging state secrets abroad." Gee, sound familiar? (Dick Cheney, you're missing the boat!)
His offense? E-mailing to non-Chinese Web sites the warning that the Beijing government told his newspaper and others not to cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
It was Yahoo! Hong Kong that enabled Chinese investigators to track the posting on a foreign Web site to Shi's yahoo.com.cn e-mail account and to the IP address of his computer. Oh the joys of "free trade".
Now, as to what I'd like:
What I'd like is for the people of this nation to show some backbone, to excercise some due diligence. To see to it that our foreign policy at least remotely resembles our stated principles.
Why are we doint 10 cents worth of business with China, in the first place? 40 years of so-called "Democratization" has yielded exactly what? Richer chinese people who can still lose it all in a second, merely for saying the wrong thing? Would you settle for your children living like that?
As long as we're on what I'd like, it's this:
Strip the CEO's of Yahoo, Google, Micro$not, and a few others, of their US citizenship. Place them in a very sturdy rubber raft and give it a firm push towards Cuba.
A bit heavy handed, I admit. So after giving my emotions vent, let me say I'd settle for giving them 60 deays to cease operations there, and another 60 days to recover what assets they can, before getting nasty.
A Supreme Court justice once wrote in an opinion, regarding free speech, that blatanly giving away military secrets was not covered under "free speech" because, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
Wouldn't it be a fiar question then to ask, "If that can be said of free speech, isn't it also a fair question to ask about free trade?"
Fred
I posted the above at 7:20 AM Feb. 16, 2006.
I moved my blog because of Google's policies, and because I intended to speak out like this, and didn't know if my comments would remain online here.
We'll see, won't we ?
Fred
Post a Comment
<< Home