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China to require PCs with software to block sites (opens in new tab)

reuters.com

14 pointsnickb16y ago10 comments

10 comments

"And the truth is: there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting submission."

1 more reply

brfox16y ago

Does this mean Windows is the only approved OS?

jganetsk16y ago

Is the Great Firewall of China not effective enough?

dfranke16y ago

I suspect this is motivated by performance concerns. The overhead of the centralized filtering they do is massive, and a friend living in China tells me that it hurts net responsiveness badly. Since the Chinese government already seems to have decided a while ago that it's only interested in preventing casual access to subversive material and doesn't care about anyone determined enough to bother connecting through a proxy server, it makes sense to decentralize the load by moving the filtering logic onto the client.

If I'm right, though, this presents an enticing opportunity for some vigilante freedom fighting: write a worm that disables the filtering software.

graemep16y ago

So how long till the rest of the world adopts the same approach. Australia is having problems with proposed filtering because of performance concerns, so this would be a solution from their point of view as well.

netsp16y ago

I hope you're right. Requiring censoring software to be installed on people's PC's may get people's attention. Currently awareness here is very low. The performance issues have been getting a big portion of the attention, if is to be had. This has been ammunition for the opposition to the plan on with hand but a mask on the issue with the other.

The ISPs and other opposition press the performance issues because it's easy & doesn't require value judgements. But we should be talking about (I hate to sound like an American Libertarian) the liberty issues.

stan_rogers16y ago

It's already got a name -- hacktivism -- and it's happening in places like the Citizen Lab (U of T) already. If you're not familiar with the Open Net Initiative, it's worth a visit to http://opennet.net to find out what's being done today.

dfranke16y ago

To anyone still paying attention to this thread: I'm taking back any implication that encouraging this is a good idea or that it would turn out well, after observation of all the idiotic ham-handed DDoS attacks presently being perpetrated upon Iran.

3pt1415916y ago

Question: Would VMing Ubuntu get you around this problem, or does the software block reach into it?

JVeinbergs16y ago

Maybe you can just uninstall that sofware? If it is not programmed into NIC...

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