Continued in “Google Pulls Out Of China Part 1”

After 100 years of British control Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.  However, it still operates under different rules than the mainland with almost complete press freedom and unfettered access to the Internet as well as multiparty elections.  As material enters China’s domestic Web network, Internet companies in Hong Kong are treated like foreign companies that are subject to filtering and blocking by the “Great Firewall” of China.

Business as usual

To be sure, most of China’s 384 million Internet users log on for mundane reasons that don’t challenge the limits of free speech. A lot of Chinese citizens also accept the notion that stability and continued economic growth depend on government controls, including censorship.

And Beijing has been largely successful at keeping a lid on sensitive information while using the Internet to fuel economic development.

“Lack of free information will catch up with China in the end, hobbling the spirit of free inquiry at the heart of science and of innovation,” said Kaiser Kuo, an American writer and independent tech consultant in Beijing. “The indirect effects, and the long-term impact, are profound, but I think it’s only fair to point out that the direct effect is relatively small.”

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Blog madness

Even with censorship, the free-wheeling Internet— especially user-generated content — is a dramatic departure from tradition inside China, where the state has controlled news and information with an iron grip for decades. Under that system, the central government disseminated the party line to state-owned newspapers, radio and television, which reported accordingly. Circulation of foreign papers in China was restricted.

As the Internet became available to the public in the early 2000s, at first through cybercafé’s that proliferated in cities, and then through widely available in-home and office connections, the government’s ability to control the flow of information began to unravel. When Web 2.0 arrived, allowing ordinary citizens to publish independently, Chinese people jumped at the opportunity.

The first blogs in the country appeared in 2004, and there were 47 million Chinese bloggers just three years later, according to official statistics.

The way blogs are handled suggests that the blog-hosting sites have broad discretion over censorship, apparently by using various combinations of keyword flagging and human monitoring, according to MacKinnon, the Princeton fellow and former journalist.

On some blogs, politically sensitive posts are blocked at the publication stage, she said, while others are delayed for “moderation” and then posted — or not. Some are posted only in private view, so only the author can view them.

In 2005, in one display of “self-discipline,” the staff of Microsoft Live Spaces in China deleted the entire blog written by Zhao Jing, under the pseudonym Michael Anti, sparking an international outcry over the move.

More commonly, single blog entries disappear 24 hours or so after they are posted. That has created a tendency among knowledgeable Chinese Web surfers to quickly squirrel away potentially sensitive information that they encounter.

“People who have been around Internet in China will quickly save an item offline, because the link might disappear,” said MacKinnon. “The same goes for photos and so on.”

In some cases, Beijing turns from the high-tech to the blunt old-fashioned instruments of censorship — arrest and intimidation, as it did in the case of writer Liu Xiaobo.

In 2008, Liu co-authored a manifesto calling for democracy in China, which was signed by 303 prominent Chinese intellectuals. Police arrested Liu at his Beijing home just as the document was released on the Internet. Censors quickly went to work expunging material about Liu and the document from the Internet, but not before the manifesto circulated widely and garnered some 10,000 signatures of support.

In December, after Liu had spent a year in prison, a Chinese court convicted him of subversion and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.

The digerati fight back

Free speech advocates, human rights activists and liberal intellectuals in China have developed a bevy of ways of getting around Internet controls.

In posting comments and blogs, they alter spellings, substitute acronyms for sensitive words, or substitute Chinese characters that sound the same but are written differently than the sensitive term they are trying to use. As the censors catch on, they move on to new strategies.

Using VPNs (virtual private networks) and proxy servers, tech-savvy Chinese users also can access materials that are otherwise blocked by the Great Firewall.

Despite being barred in China, Twitter is growing fast among people who can circumvent the firewall. According to Zhao Jing, the journalist and former blogger, he had 3,000 followers on Twitter before Twitter was officially blocked in July. Now, he said, he has 17,000. Throughout China, he said, there are 50,000 Twitter users, including many activists, liberal lawyers, professors and journalists.

Meanwhile, he said, even the domestic micro-blog services, though subject to controls, are delivering unvarnished news so quickly that it is difficult to censor. What’s more, news from remote parts of the country that once could have been easily suppressed now finds its way into the state-run press, he said.

“In 2009, we saw that many local events, protests, complaints were conveyed by cell phones and text messages and email from ordinary people, from non-profit organizations …  to friends, and then Tweeted and reTweeted,” and sometimes picked up by reporters in the state press, said Zhou. “A local protest can easily become a national issue.”

“The Internet was the Gods’ first gift to China,” he said. “Twitter is the second.”

In the hands of a few Chinese, Zell believes it Web 2.0 may pave the way for the birth of a free press and democracy in China.

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My Take: Just because they get democracy doesn’t mean they get a free press to go with it.  The Chinese government has had control of the press for too long and may be reluctant to let go.  However, I do agree that it is wrong that businesses can search the Internet for promotional products like poly bags and the average citizen is restricted in what they can search, read or post on the Internet.

The Internet has so much to offer people, even the Chinese.  I wonder if the Chinese can even avail themselves the services of a remote backup service that is not within their own country, probably not.  I just cannot understand how a government can restrict people from getting personalized shopping bags on the Internet.  Maybe that is because I live in America.

We Americans take for granted what we have!  That is true!  We have the ability to get hard drive recovery were ever we want, even if it is in China.  But the opposite is not true; the Chinese cannot get data recovery wherever they want.  They must go to government approved businesses where such things.  I bet they even have their new and used copy machines rigged so that they can tell where the copies were made and by whom.  One thing is for sure, if they need Canon copier accessories, they do have to search the Internet and will probably have to go outside China to get them.

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The conflict between Beijing and Google may have struck a blow for the freedom of speech.  It may have also encouraged some Chinese Netizens by its sheer chutzpah.  Unfortunately, it does not do anything for the Internet users in China.  It just gives Beijing back the job of blocking objectionable content.

Its more lasting impact may lie in the global exposure it has given to the Chinese government’s complex system of censorship – an ever-shifting hodgepodge of restrictions on what information users can access, which Web tools they can use and what ideas they can post.

“You can only guess what the rules are,” said Zhao Jing, a Chinese free-speech activist whose popular blog was deleted by censors from its host server in 2005. “It means you should self-censor, limit your mind and be cautious, because you have no idea where the line is.”

Censorship in China is unpredictable in part because it employs an array of tools — combining cutting-edge filtering algorithms and software that detects taboo keywords with the blunt instruments of the government’s old propaganda machine. It takes place at different levels, involving government agencies and the private sector.

“The point of confusion is who is doing what,” says Nart Villeneuve, a cyber security professional and research fellow at the University of Toronto who has done detailed analysis of Chinese Internet censorship. Frequently, what observers assume is blocked by Beijing, is actually taken out of the public arena by Internet companies trying to read the government’s will, he said.

One tool in the toolbox

The so-called “Great Firewall,” as China’s censorship system is known, filters out politically sensitive material, as well as gambling sites and pornography originating outside China. It reportedly blocks thousands of sites, including those of human rights groups, organizations that promote Tibet or Taiwan independence and Chinese dissident groups.  The firewall also censors by keywords, causing infuriating interruptions in service.

For example, if an Internet surfer in China searches for the term “Falun Gong” —a banned and harshly suppressed religious group — the firewall responds by sending a reset packet to his or her computer that results in the display of a default error page. It also causes a gap in service preventing subsequent searches — even on innocuous topics.

“If you try to look for a URL path with a banned word or phrase, it will halt your connection, even if the site is not blocked,” said Villaneuve, who runs tests to determine at what point censorship occurs in China. “Then you can’t do a normal query for a little while.”

Making surfing even more complicated, the taboos are always changing, depending on the political winds.

After bloody ethnic clashes erupted last summer in China’s predominantly Muslim territory of Xinjiang, the news spread quickly the Internet. Beijing blamed the rioting on ethnic Uyghur separatists organizing through the Web, and shut down Internet access throughout the region, along with text messaging and international calling in some areas.

For the vast majority of people in Xinjiang, access to the Internet is still severely restricted. The general public can view only a few sites hand-picked by authorities, including the state-run Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily — and two Chinese portals, according to the China Daily. Elsewhere in China, despite censorship, Internet users have access to tens of thousands of foreign and domestic sites.

Occasionally, China also unexpectedly unblocks Web sites.  When the capital was flooded with athletes and tourists for the Beijing Olympics in August, for instance, the BBC and Voice of America, which usually are blocked, were suddenly available.

Within the wall, “self-discipline”

Arguably, the most stringent censorship in China is conducted by the private sector. The government puts the responsibility for monitoring and censoring material originating inside China on companies that provide Internet service — search engines, portals, social networking sites, chat rooms or photo and video-sharing sites.

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Every search engine or blogging site in China reportedly has a department dedicated to filtering, reviewing and deleting material that the censors know — or guess — the government does not want the public to see. If they get it wrong, these companies risk losing their operating licenses.

A number of video-sharing sites have suffered this fate, as well as the Chinese blog site, Bullog.cn, known for edgy political commentary and counter-culture fare. When the government shut the site in January 2009, amid an anti-porn it crackdown, it accused the site of hosting “low and vulgar” content.

Two popular micro-blogging services similar to Twitter were suspended last July, about the same time that the foreign social networking sites were blocked, for refusing to edit or delete content. The larger of the two, Fanfou, boasted more than a million users before it ran afoul of authorities.

“Either the Web site censors sensitive feeds or the Web site will be censored,” Fanfou founder Wang Xing wrote in one of his last posts on the site, according to a report in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. “This uncomfortable, but necessary decision has to be made.”

Self-discipline is portrayed as a patriotic duty by the government, which confers annual “Internet Self-Discipline Awards” to industry executives for effectively censoring themselves.

But the way “self-discipline” is carried out varies widely among the companies because the government provides only broad guidance, not detailed instructions. While there are topics that are universally understood to be taboo — anything supportive of Falun Gong, for instance — interpretation of the rules varies widely.

For that reason, it is easy to mistake unexpected content for an intentional policy shift, when it may indicate only that censorship is very patchy in China. On March 16, for example, we reported on this site that Google appeared to have stopped censoring its Chinese site, because searches on the site produced surprisingly sensitive content, including the famous “Tank Man” image from the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. That conclusion was incorrect, censorship researcher Villeneuve concluded after running some tests, which showed the same content showing up on other search engines in China.

Google’s China initiative

In general, however, Google’s experience in China is a good example of how differently censorship is handled from one company to the next.

“When Google first arrived in China in 2006, it consistently blocked less material than Baidu (a Chinese search engine that dominates the domestic market),” said Rebecca MacKinnon, visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology and a former China journalist.

Its search engine, Google.cn, also tried to remain transparent to users. When material was removed from its search results, the company posted a message at the bottom of its results pages: “Pursuant to local laws, regulations and policies, a portion of the search results are not displayed,” in effect alerting users to the censorship.

“This is how Google executives justified the ethics of their presence in China,” said MacKinnon. “Chinese users, they argued, were still better off with Google.cn than without it.”

But over the last 12 to 14 months, MacKinnon and other experts say, as Beijing started blocking more sites, pressure also grew on Internet providers, including Google, to censor more stringently.

Google’s final response was to stop censoring information and instead reroutes users in China to Google.HK, it’s Hong Kong search engine.  Customers in mainland China however will not gain full access to the Internet like those in Hong Kong.

Continued in “Google Pulls Out Of China Part 2”

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My Take: I don’t think China is going to become a democracy anytime soon.  However, I do worry about a Chinese revolution, considering that they are a nuclear power.  A Chinese revolution could end up being World War III.  What I am a little confused about is why they would worry about someone who wants to download new movies off the Internet.

Playing the devil’s advocate here, I understand they don’t want people getting certain information that would put their government and lifestyle at risk.  On the other hand, they are going to find that people will find a way to get what they want, even if it is against the law.  Just like certain movies download are considered illegal because it is piracy.

I am sure that they have something similar to NYC computer networking in China.  But, I do not think they will be looking for computer help New York.  In fact, they would probably be arrested if they tried.  Then again, if they have any good hackers in China, which I am sure they do, they would be able to get help from anywhere in the world.

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Did you know that over 270 million Americans talk on a cell phone several times every day? Did you also know that yourself on emits low levels of radiofrequency radiation each time you make or receive a call? This is caused many heeded and ongoing debates in the scientific community concerning the health risks of using a mobile phone.

The Week In Green: Climate Change Week in New York, cell phone radiation in your hand, and teaching scientists how not to talk like scientists

On Sept. 9, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public-health advocacy, released a lengthy review of past research linking long-term or frequent cell-phone use with increased rates of brain tumors, migraines and kids’ behavioral problems. For their part, the phone industry and the Federal Government say cell phones are safe. The “majority of studies published have failed to show an association between exposure to radio-frequency from a cell phone and health problems,” states the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on its website. But concerns are high enough that the Senate on Sept. 14 held hearings — led by Democratic Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a brain-cancer survivor — to examine the subject. The outcome: inconclusive. “The current [industry] safety standards are not sufficiently supported,” says Dariusz Leszczynski, a Finnish radiation researcher who spoke at the hearing, “because of the very limited research on human volunteers, children and on the effects of long-term exposure in humans.”

For those were interested in other areas that humans may be exposed to radiation . . . The Secure 1000 is a nonintrusive personnel screening system designed to detect metallic and nonmetallic objects concealed under a person’s clothing similar to a walk through metal detector. The turnkey system offers numerous advantages over metal detectors and “pat down” searches for personnel using hand held metal detection devices for screening in correctional facilities for visitors and inmates, asset protection in industrial facilities such as precious metals and computer component companies and high security installations such as nuclear facilities, embassies and border crossing check-points. When it comes to air cargo, a transmission x-ray system can produce an image that shows everything inside, regardless of where the item is in the container and whether or not it is shielded by other objects. A good air cargo handling system uses a transmission-based solution to screen cargo and containers results in a complete picture of the content, enabling inspectors to readily find contraband items such as weapons, drugs, people and explosives.

Despite the government’s view that cell phones pose no danger, some researchers note that most of us have been using them for less than a decade. If there is indeed a cumulative risk to using a mobile phone, it’s possible that users won’t be aware of it until it’s too late — just as it took doctors decades to connect cigarette-smoking with lung cancer. “We all wish we’d heeded the early warnings about cigarettes,” says Olga Naidenko, a senior scientist at EWG and the author of the recent report on cell phones. “We think cell phones are similar.”

That theory is far from certain. While it’s clear that humans absorb weak radiation through handsets (the EWG report noted the particular vulnerability of children, whose skulls, according to a French study, absorb twice as much cell-phone radiation as those of adults), what’s not clear is whether that radiation causes harm. Scientists are waiting for the publication of a $30 million, 14,000-person international study called Interphone, which is meant to nail down the answer once and for all. But the study ended in 2006 and its authors are still squabbling over the interpretation of their data. To date, the “peer-reviewed scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices do not pose a public health risk,” says John Walls, a spokesperson for CTIA, the international wireless-industry association.

It seems that better long-term research is needed by an outside source than from the cell phone industry. In fact scientists have even suggested surtax on cell phones to fund such studies. The best scientists can do right now is to suggest that you use your cell phone less to reduce the amount of radiation that bombards your skull. Even better use a low radiation cell phone. You can search the EWG’s online database that ranks the radiation levels of more than 1200 models. (Sorry, Apple fans, your iPhone ranks pretty high.) Of course, you could convert to texting everything like teenagers do. Just remember not to text while driving!

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My Take: Since I do not use a cell phone that much, I’m not worried about the radiation. However, if there is a possibility of that type of radiation causing harm, they should make sure one way or the other. Especially now since children are using cell phones just as much as adults.

If children are more susceptible to low radiation of a cell phone, then they should not be allowed to use a cell phone until they are certain age. The problem is, only the research into this low radiation and cell phones will be able to determine what that age should be. In the meantime, I think parents should restrict cell phone use until there has been a determination.

I remember years ago, the same information was put out about color televisions. It was stated that the radiation that color TVs put out was dangerous to children and the children should be kept a certain number of feet away from the TV. Do you remember we are mom telling you not to sit close to the TV because it would hurt your eyes? I wonder if this was part of the radiation scare that came with color TVs.

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