Live data from Hacker News

China drops Dropbox

forums.dropbox.com

71–80 of 108 posts

Re: China drops Dropbox

#71
post #64

If all non-Chinese servers rejected any requests from China, would this be counter-productive? Basically if everyone else banded together and said "You can have all of it or none of it, but you can't pick and choose." would this force open China's hand or would it just make things miserable for people that actually care. The number of people that actually care is a very very small percentage; most of my Chinese frien…

It is actually pretty hard to single out China like that. many countries (including for example, Australia) have great firewalls. They can honestly point around and say half the world censors, why you picking on us?

Re: China drops Dropbox

#72
post #15

just one thought on this situation: why don't Chinese netizens protest loudly against such policies??

You must be young. A few years ago, a bunch of students did. In a central square in Beijing called Tienanmen square. The government ran them over with tanks. China is not the West.

Yet looking back to what happened during Vietnam demonstrations, it seems to me that it is quite clear that the same would also happen in the west.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#73
post #49

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

Tor and almost any website mentioning or hosting it is blocked, on top of that my experience with Tor is that it is no longer usable.

First users were forced to use a relay, then relay IP's started getting banned, and now I think that the government has found some method to prevent connections to the Tor network completely (I'm not sure how).

Slowly but surely the screws are being tightened, more and more of the western net is becoming unavailable. I guess already 30-35% of all sites linked to on HN are blocked.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#74
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/mont…

Who do you outsource to? Any problems with them?

Re: China drops Dropbox

#75

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

I just setup a VPN for a guy in china, and dropbox works fine then. Setup servers with different ip addresses?

Re: China drops Dropbox

#76

I hope dropbox will refund the payment to all the users who are now unable to use their service.

It would be a very nice thing to do, especially for people who made a yearly subscription payment less than 6 months ago.

That being said, if I were a dropbox subscriber and my ISP (or government... ::shudder::) blocked dropbox, I would know exactly where to place the blame. Thus, I wouldn't expect dropbox to give me a refund.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#77
As a paying user in China (just paid for my 1-year plan), I'll just continue to use Dropbox over my VPN. Such insane censorship will fall. Freedom will prevail. But I wish the Chinese government gets sued to hell over WTO violations.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#79
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/mont…

There's a whole industry build up around this? How bizarre.

Re: China drops Dropbox

#80

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

I just setup a VPN for a guy in china, and dropbox works fine then. Setup servers with different ip addresses?

Actually, it does not work, it's incredibly slow - 2kb/sec
Post reply on HN