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China drops Dropbox

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Re: China drops Dropbox

#51

Post by liuliu »

seattle wrote: post #28
Jun8 wrote: post #6

When I read the comment about how "it was an honor" to be banned by the GFWoC, this poem cam to mind. "When the regime ordered Books with dangerous knowledge To be burned in public and everywhere Oxen were forced to pull, carts with books to the bonfires, one of the persecuted poets discovered one of the best studying the list of the burned disconcerted, that his books were forgotten. He rushed to his desk, flying on…

Chinese government ban sites for the information on it what might threat the stability of the country, it has nothing to do with a company big enough or not. Tons of innocent sites are banned because they are hosted on the same IP address that also hosted some anti-China sites. This event means nothing to Dropbox, it only means someone was using Dropbox to pass through information that is not considered legal in Chin…

Think it in this way: in this age, good IT companies make profit/benefit from promoting free-flow of information (e.g. Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia). The Chinese gov is trying to ban the unconstrained flow of information (the whole idea of free-flow of information is considered harmful to the current regime). Thus, the website is banned by Chinese gov must be particularly good at promoting the flow of information, which makes them good candidates of successful IT companies.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#52

Post by jhancock »

est wrote: post #47
radicaldreamer wrote: post #17

It's sad how the Chinese government don't seem to realize that they're impeding their own people's progress and global competitiveness, especially for business that requires innovation and speed, with such moves.

Chinese government don't give a fuck to innovation. They just want profit. If innovation harms the stabilization, they just drop it.

Can you name any large government that consistently promotes innovation/change over stability/status quo? Not making excuses...but isn't this the nature of the beast?

Re: China drops Dropbox

#53

Post by zellux »

kaptain wrote: post #2

I live in China as an expat (from the US). It's not really clear to me what the political/social motivations are for blocking Dropbox. Maybe Dropbox is going to merge with Facetwit; that's blocked here too but dropping Dropbox is something new.

I guess it is blocked because Dropbox was used to share software like GAppProxy/MyEntunnel/Puff, which can be used to surf across the GFW.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#54

Post by sean12345 »

b-man wrote: post #49
barmstrong wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What services do people use to proxy around it? Just curious.

Tor[1]. [1] http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en

When I was over there we often used a simple proxy server, like pimpmyip or zend2. Occasionally we were not able to access these and had to look around for something else.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#55

Post by vorg »

nandemo wrote: post #34
potatolicious wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "why don't Chinese netizens protest loudly against such policies??" Here in the West we take the right to protest quite for granted, as this post demonstrates :) Not ragging on you at all, really, but who exactly would the Chinese protest to? How would they do so? And what would prevent them from being jailed or worse for their efforts?

What is puzzling to me is that although there are literally millions of Chinese people living abroad, apparently there's hardly any human-rights activism done by Chinese expats. I'd love to hear of counterexamples.

Unfortunately, the United States discredited itself in the minds of many young Chinese over here when Bush Jnr took the US, UK, and Australia into Iraq after "creating" evidence of WMD's.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#56

Post by rarrrrrr »

dhouston wrote: post #32

we're bummed about this. it's probably a fruitless exercise, but does anyone have any insight into how to get unblocked?

You have the advantage of shipping a desktop client, which affords you a variety of interesting methods beyond what purely web based apps and browsers can do.

The desktop client could even serve as a local proxy server for web/forum access.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#57

Post by adbge »

DilipJ wrote: post #35
slug wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once upon a time, they did: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/

I always hoped that poor fellow ended up ok after that. My gut tells me that no one ever heard from him again. I don't think any other photograph defines courage as much as that one. As for the business restrictions, what can you do? I do admire companies like Google that can take a moral stand against Beijing's censorship.

I gather that what happened to him has grown into something of an "urban legend" of sorts, with some saying he was summarily executed and others claiming that he lives peacefully in Tibet, etc.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#58

Post by potatolicious »

nandemo wrote: post #34
potatolicious wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "why don't Chinese netizens protest loudly against such policies??" Here in the West we take the right to protest quite for granted, as this post demonstrates :) Not ragging on you at all, really, but who exactly would the Chinese protest to? How would they do so? And what would prevent them from being jailed or worse for their efforts?

What is puzzling to me is that although there are literally millions of Chinese people living abroad, apparently there's hardly any human-rights activism done by Chinese expats. I'd love to hear of counterexamples.

The West rails on China pretty relentlessly, sometimes with little provocation or justification. Nowadays China is like the boogeyman the government likes to pull out of their pocket on-demand - a lot like the Soviets back in the Cold War.

I know expats who are uncomfortable protesting openly against China because of this - to protest against China is to side with the West, and thereby tacitly support this sort of boogeyman tactic.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#59

Post by baby »

kmavm wrote: post #46
thechangelog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to doubt you, but was it really just a one word post that elicited that reaction? Did the message come from Facebook or someone else? Is this a common occurrence? That level of censorship boggles the mind...

I'd like to point out that it wasn't Facebook, but "the Chinese Facebook." Facebook is behind the great firewall; there's a local clone.

kaixin001.com or renren.com (ex xiaonei.com)

Re: China drops Dropbox

#60

Post by nicolas_t »

joshwa wrote: post #30
zaidf wrote: post #8

Chinese gov is ridiculous. My girlfriend made a one word posting on the Chinese clone of facebook that read "freedom". The post disappeared in minutes and she received a private message warning her that her account may be deleted if she continues making such posts. One upside is that Chinese people seem to be a little more tech savvy. ie. many of them are forced to learn about proxy servers so they can go around the…

One common misconception is that all censorship is done automatically based on keywords. While it's true that internet searches in particular, and visits to banned websites are greeted with a connection reset, the censorship of message boards is done by hordes of low-paid individual workers (the "50-cent party" [1]) that are local to each district. Your girlfriend's post (which was a one-word post, and an inflammator…

I'm in the middle of setting up a website in China. The way things go is that you have to get the icp license. To get it, you have to agree that you will censor any user generated content that should be harmonized (guidelines are not very precise, but the chinese government regularly provide a list of topics that are not allowed for the season). We actually outsource our censoring to a chinese company for 500RMB/month as it'd be a hassle to hire someone only for this.

On the other hand, our website is bilingual, and we don't really need to monitor the english part since the government doesn't care...

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