Old Maxim Blocked By The Great Firewall of China

from the so-it-goes dept

Michael Geist's latest column summarizes his difficulties using the internet in China, noting that the well-known "Great Firewall of China" is at least somewhat effective in blocking many sites (especially news sites). That realization has him worried that increased internet censorship will start coming to other countries, such as his own, Canada -- and that the old saying about how the internet "routes around censorship" may no longer be true.
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  1. identicon
    dorpus, 2 May 2005 @ 2:45pm

    Language Barrier

    Firewall or not, there remains a vast obstacle known as the language barrier. News in different languages give completely different accounts of the same world events -- we still live in a scary world of disinformation, including English. I've deduced that English language news often does not tell the whole story, because there are facts that English-speaking audiences don't like to hear.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    VonSkippy, 2 May 2005 @ 7:10pm

    Re: Language Barrier

    Dorpus: List references or examples (tabloids and basement run internet servers don't count) that support your "theory" or crawl back under your tin-foil hat.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 2 May 2005 @ 7:36pm

    Mesh Routing + WiMAX + pringles can + border house

    I fear the same kind of censorship from my own government, especially since it's regularly browbeatn by the giant next door in the Land of the Free Biggy-sizing.

    However, I am marginally confident that hackers and gadgets will do wonders to limit the effectiveness of this kind of law, or, like the war on drugs, bankrupt their governments from enforcement.

    I'm wondering what the range of a decent WiMax unit would be, and it that range can be extended in a point-to-point manner. With mesh routing, can we then work around any firewalls our governments set up? How to get inter-continental is a bigger question, but I'm not entirely unconvinced we can't figure it out.

    Yeah, because we're smart guys, and we'd be awfully motivated. that's the mother of invention right there, I think.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    blorpus, 2 May 2005 @ 8:27pm

    Re: Language Barrier

    VonSkippy: I gather Dorpus is extrapolating to terrestrial languages from Dorpish, which does not appear to have the concept of linear reasoning. I base this on the number of off-topic postings here from various inhabitants of the Dorpoid galaxy.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    dorpus, 3 May 2005 @ 6:34am

    Re: Language Barrier

    There are hundreds of examples every day, but if I post them on here, then people will get upset that I'm "posting off topic trolls", so I won't do that. :-P

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Ann, 3 May 2005 @ 9:20am

    Re: Language Barrier

    It's not just different languages - CNN's coverage of the same story is very different, based on US vs. non-US audience. News outlets selectively report only certain details, both to fit their own biases and to attract a particular audience.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Trent, 5 May 2005 @ 1:31am

    Wait a second...

    Hey, i live in China, but we sometimes get the news faster than the US. For example, the abuse cases in Iraq were all over the news here long before the stories were picked up in the US. China is not nearly as closed as people think.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Ally, 8 May 2005 @ 12:40am

    Re: Language Barrier

    I agree with Ann.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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