China Tries To Scrub The Internet Of All Information About Nobel Peace Prize Winner

from the god's-gift-to-china dept

Fri, Oct 8th 2010 5:27pm — Mike Masnick

The EFF points out that with Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Chinese censors have sprung into action trying to block all mentions of or research on either Liu Xiaobo or the Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently doing searches on either term gives you no results -- because I'm sure that's convincing. Separately, it's worth noting that Liu Xiaobo once declared "the internet is God's gift to China." And it's ability to censor the internet is...?

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Filed Under: censorship, china, liu xiaobo, nobel prize

29 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 5:42pm

The devils work. Is what their leadership does.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 5:42pm

And it's ability to censor the internet is...?

America's "big media's" wet dream.
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- Nina Paley (profile), 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:03pm
  
  Re:
  China's gift to God.
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Matt Jones (profile), 8 Oct 2010 @ 5:48pm

This is awesome
I admit, I don't know much about him or even the Nobel Peace Prize, but anything that causes oppressive governments to spend more effort censoring media (thereby calling attention to themselves) has to be a good thing. Hopefully this will draw more negative attention.
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- Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 9 Oct 2010 @ 2:06am
  
  Re: This is awesome
  Matt Jones wrote:
  
  ... anything that causes oppressive governments to spend more effort censoring media (thereby calling attention to themselves) has to be a good thing.
  
  You mean, like the US Government trying to censor WikiLeaks?
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  - Matt Jones (profile), 9 Oct 2010 @ 7:36am
    
    Re: Re: This is awesome
    That's the point. By going all out to censor the internet, they called attention to the censorship as well as the censored info itself.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:05pm

Anybody noticed that with all that infra-structure in place they still couldn't stop the information from getting out and that there were people finding those news still.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:10pm

I read someone commenting that he tried to search for it on his phone and his phone was disabled.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/10/08/china.internet/index.html?hpt=C1

Eve n China can't beat the interwebz.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:23pm

"And it's ability to censor the internet is...?"

Proof that God need to do some debugging on human.c. Those long hours of late night coding really made a mess of the code (that's what you get when you start copy-pasting code from monkey.c and then just change a few variables).
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- Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2010 @ 7:32pm
  
  Re:
  http://microcontroller.com/Computerized_Genesis_-_Jokes.htm
  
  http://www.askstudent.com/funny/if-go d-was-a-programmer-genesis-part-two/
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- Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2010 @ 11:03am
  
  Re:
  No such thing as 'god'.... that is the reason why humanity is so messed up in some respects, because the CHAOTIC AND IMPERFECT UNIVERSE is what created humanity, not 'god'.
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  - harbingerofdoom (profile), 9 Oct 2010 @ 3:32pm
    
    Re: Re:
    and your proof is.............?
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    - taoareyou (profile), 10 Oct 2010 @ 1:16pm
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Generally, the way proof works, is you have to prove that something IS not prove that something ISN'T. Giant purple dancing unicorn-bears are not accepted to exist until someone provides evidence they do not. The argument that God exists, you can't prove that he doesn't is just as flawed.
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      - Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 11 Oct 2010 @ 7:13am
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re:
        "Generally, the way proof works, is you have to prove that something IS not prove that something ISN'T. Giant purple dancing unicorn-bears are not accepted to exist until someone provides evidence they do not."
        
        Generally speaking, that is correct. However, there are certain pieces of evidence that highly suggest there is no god or gods. One of the most convincing is that the average energy density of the universe is zero; in essence the universe started from nothing.
        
        Additionally, you can take individual properties of a god and show that those properties are either logically impossible or do not match up with our observations of the universe.
        
        About the only type of god you cannot definitively rule out is a 'Cartesian demon' - one that can control everything you can perceive (think being plugged into the Matrix without Neo to unplug you). But no one I know who believes in any form of god would accept a Cartesian demon as the god they believe in.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 10 Oct 2010 @ 5:12pm
    
    Re: Re:
    God would have made the Universe a little better you see, but his project managers cut his deadline and budget by half. And when there was only one week left until the deadline, the whole scope of the project changed, so God just slapped something together so they could ship it: a lighting engine, a skybox, some landscapes and some actors.
    
    He had to sacrifice half of his weekend, but eventually he called it "good" and told them to ship it. He certainly wasn't going to waste his Sunday working on _that_ doomed project.
    
    If anything went wrong, they could just restart the whole thing with the "Deluge" or "Flood" command. The "Miracle" commands could also be used to to perform some "local" changes (like the "Miracle revive [actorname], that revives actors).
    
    Finally, they could drop the debug actor (called JC, because that's the name of God's cat) into the world to perform changes or tests from within the engine. Of course god warned them not to let JC wander around unsupervised. is AI was a little retarded you see: he would just start walking around, attracting a crowd and spurting out nonsense (mostly logs and debug messages...like anybody withing the simulation would care) and he would eventually find a way to get himself killed. A bug in the JC death code would revive him momentarily after a while, before the engine realized he has dead and proceeded to free it's resources.
    
    So, moral of the story: if you want software done right, don't piss off your programmers and don't go messing with the deadlines and feature requests one month before the project is due.
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    - athe, 10 Oct 2010 @ 8:07pm
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Sounds like he really could have done a lot more if he had Unreal Engine 3.0.
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Palmyra (profile), 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:42pm

Remind me
of why we have shipped so much of our industry to China?
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- out_of_the_blue, 8 Oct 2010 @ 6:59pm
  
  Re: Remind me: -- I can field this one!
  GREED. Why would The Rich foster domestic industry when they can exploit Chinese slaves and get a far larger income from the wage differential?
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Allen (profile), 8 Oct 2010 @ 7:26pm

I lost all respect for the peace prize when they gave it to Obama before he'd had a chance to actually do something. The award has become a bitch to European politics. And right now the Europeans are terrified that cheap Chinese labour is going to effect their standard of living.

So they give the price to a Chinese activist/dissident. And China reacts predictably.
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- Radjin, 8 Oct 2010 @ 8:43pm
  
  Re:
  I totally agree. It used to really be something to see someone who had worked so hard finally receives a very big thanks. Giving the prize to Obama for something he might do cheapened the whole thing for everyone who has ever or will ever receive it.
  
  It might have a good effect as suggested above, get more people in china to work around the sensors and demand better.
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- abc gum, 9 Oct 2010 @ 7:28am
  
  Re:
  Where have you been, freeze dried or on Mars? It's not like that has not happened in the past ... why are you so enraged about the latest occurrence ?
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  - Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2010 @ 12:28pm
    
    Re: Re:
    Because it is still fresh in the mind, and Obama is a corporate whore?
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- Rainbird, 10 Oct 2010 @ 2:25am
  
  Re:
  Europeans are terrified that cheap chinese labour is going to effect their standard of living
  Europe is not interested in cheap chinese labour because we no longer manufacture much. That would be more of a concern for the US. The biggest issue here is that the US have little or no influence in these prizes and that really grates doesn't it?
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Sachin, 9 Oct 2010 @ 10:14am

China's like this only
China is like this only from the very beginning.....
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NullOp, 9 Oct 2010 @ 12:08pm

Censorship
There is not a company in America that wouldn't like the capability to censor the net. Ditto in triplicate for our government!!!
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Chris Blaskey (profile), 10 Oct 2010 @ 9:54am

Net design solves this
That's the beauty of the internet. It routes around problems very naturally... including when those problems are people rather than hardware.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Oct 2010 @ 3:19pm

The Nobel Peace Prize is a farce. There's a long list of riduculous honorees if you really value the ideal of peace.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Oct 2010 @ 6:06am

China needs to be banned. It's human rights abuses are mounting and to even be associated with them is disgusting. Let them have their factories and their crap products. I want a choice and don't want to buy Chinese products.

American retailers don't give you a choice and that pisses me off. You hear me Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target: NO MORE Chinese goods. I even saw packaged food recently from China. They will poison everything.

China is only interested in one thing. Dominance. If you don't think they are the enemy you are an idiot.

Even Nostradamus warned of the Yellow horde conquering Europe from one direction and Islam conquering Europe from the other. Both of them enemies of freedom.
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- abc gum, 12 Oct 2010 @ 5:03am
  
  Re:
  Prepare for the upcoming invasion, after Iran of course.
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