Steam has been banned in China • Hacker News Board

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#261

Post by foepys » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:40 PM UTC

oreally wrote: post #243

ChemSpider wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It matches exactly my experience while being in China.

Because china is the rising power to US dominance, and both sides will discredit each other from time to time. Also western journalist orgs have an incentive to paint an unflavourable picture while getting non of the blowback. Also, keep in mind yours is but one experience out of many.

China has no free press. Literally none. Hongkong's free press was obliterated shortly after China broke the treaties they had with the UK about keeping Hongkong independent. Try traveling to the areas where Uigurs are being detained to look for yourself if China is lying. You can't and so can't journalists or independent observers. Why is that?

Saying that both are bad and so nobody can be blamed is a bad faith argument.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#262

Post by baybal2 » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:41 PM UTC

newhouseb wrote: post #225

baybal2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no such exemptions, and I don't know from where did this idea came

I worked in Beijing at Microsoft Research in 2008 and at the time they had a fiber link to Japan that was completely uncensored and the fastest internet I had ever used at the time. Perhaps this is no longer allowed but it certainly used to exist.

We were buying exactly same "direct physical link" to HK. It came not to be such.

We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored.

Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#263

Post by tacocataco » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

steelstraw wrote: post #115

ganzuul wrote: post #3

In my eyes, the attack on 'effeminate men' is the nail in the coffin for the government of China. They are as dead to me and my actions will reflect it. Down with Emperor Pooh!

Quoted post unavailable.

I can pull a trigger just as good as any straight man.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#264

Post by systemvoltage » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

someotherperson wrote: post #166

nothis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read about countries banning sites, people post "just use a VPN, lol". But I wonder: If China really wants to, couldn't they just block VPNs? At the worst, just whitelist a bunch of sites and services and literally block everything else?

They do. They fingerprint for OpenVPN in real time and block it. In 2018 I was cycling through multiple VPNs at a time. The only thing that worked was Shadowsocks.

Can confirm. I setup a Shadowsocks VPN using Streisand on a DO instance at the Singapore data center. That was the only way to get through the firewall.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#265

Post by dragonelite » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

jfoster wrote: post #154

dragonelite wrote: post #134

Wouldn't be surprised if tencent and others are going to launch their own app store. Tencent already partially did with the epic game store. Pull some string in China to block steams global edition to even out the fight for epic game store. Tencent owns like 40~48% of epic.

I didn't know until now that Tencent owned such a large stake in Epic. Makes me wonder a little about the disputes with Google & Apple. Whilst Epic seems to be fighting the good fight, I've thought it was very odd that they were putting so much on the line in their Google & Apple battles. Now I have to wonder if Tencent endorsed those legal battles with some more ambitious goal in mind.

Behind every big battle or war there is always a motivation to gain market access. This was true for ww1 and ww2 and I wouldn't be surprised it is true in these legal battles.

Wouldnt be surprised that tencent actually was the key player that pushed epic to open source their unreal engine so that the US can't block the unreal engine code base from being exported to China.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#266

Post by MomoXenosaga » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #217

imbnwa wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a lower frequency, this similar to why I'm not interested in tourism as "self-discovery", "new experience", or some shit, like the rest of the world is just stage and props for my existential theatre. I'm not gonna change as a human unless I actually move there to live permanently. Even worse, the middle-class trend to make the number of distinct places you've visited some form of social currency ("how many stamps…

Do you really think you can't learn anything as a tourist?

Most people can't learn anything and they don't want to. It is impossible to explain what living in a slum is like to a middle class woke guy.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#267

Post by tombh » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

robbedpeter wrote: post #139

tombh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must offer another data point. I'm British, and often find myself in these threads criticising criticism of China. Not because I'm being paid by the CCP, but because I believe that mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment tells us more about the West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

Neville Chamberlain had similar thoughts about Germany. Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.

In Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust[1] it is argued that the Holocaust was not merely a tragic aberration of the ideals of modern Western civilisation but rather a logical realisation of it. Hitler himself, in both Mein Kampf, and Zweites Buch, wrote of how he was inspired by British concentration camps in South Africa. Maybe I haven't studied history enough, but I simply do not understand how dismissing the terrors of WW2 as merely a German problem is not also appeasing, condoning and enabling the terrors of the British. The Holocaust lies at the feet of Europeans, not merely the Nazis.

The problem isn't about who did what, the problem is the idea that horrors can only possibly happen outside the borders of the nation to which I belong.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#268

Post by topspin » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #159

topspin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amusing. They could have gone on filling the oceans with plastic and using banned CFCs and gamifying life on Earth through Social Credit all while enjoying near total deference from the prevailing virtuegeist of the West. But instead they chose to mess with LGBTQ and all of the sudden they're evil incarnate.

This is easy to understand. All the things you mention are issues that affect everybody. A better understanding of what it means to be man affects a very small percentage, so when when a govt looks past everything it should care about in order to mess with natural roles then it is really obvious that they are in the wrong.

What gymnastics would you have performed if the systemic oppression of Uyghurs had been in my list? Another sin largely ignored by the echo chamber, yet one that certainly does single out a minority. Shall we speculate on the relative population sizes of 'effeminate' Chinese men vs Uyghurs while further regressing into this rationalization of selective outrage?

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#269

Post by 4gotunameagain » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

steelstraw wrote: post #115

ganzuul wrote: post #3

In my eyes, the attack on 'effeminate men' is the nail in the coffin for the government of China. They are as dead to me and my actions will reflect it. Down with Emperor Pooh!

Quoted post unavailable.

Unpopular opinion: Hard times will come again, and masculine men will again become sexy.

There is a constant battle between dominator/partnership societal subgroups (a distinction by Riane Eisler in Chalice and the Blade) which one naively could distinguish as patriarchal-masculine / matriarchal-feminine. The abundance of resources the past decades has rendered the traditional, masculine and competitive men obsolete, and women have shifted their focus in more feminised versions.

But as history has repeatedly shown, periods of prosperity always come to an end, and the wheel keeps turning.

Re: Steam has been banned in China

#270

Post by dragonelite » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

chunghuaming wrote: post #222

dragonelite wrote: post #134

Wouldn't be surprised if tencent and others are going to launch their own app store. Tencent already partially did with the epic game store. Pull some string in China to block steams global edition to even out the fight for epic game store. Tencent owns like 40~48% of epic.

Doubtful, Xi Jing Ping is hellbent on destroying the Chinese tech industry right now

In what way has the Chinese government destroyed Chinese tech. The big tech companies are still there just more regulated. They are also still innovating.

The Chinese government does actually know the difference between real productive forces and the stock market. It would be really weird for a socialist government to not know the theoretic works of Marx, lenin and stalin.