[UPDATE: I wrote the below before seeing an update on Danwei noting that the fine was canceled. This only underlines the power of online controversy, especially considering that the cancelation notice says the man was still guilty: they are merely using discretion in this case.]
Police officers who said they were investigating the distribution of "harmful information" from a new business' IP address found a 30-minute adult video on a hard drive and fined the owner 1,900 RMB ($277 USD), according to a reported translated by ESWN.
The crux of the legal claim appears to be the distribution function of BitTorrent, which was how the man accused, Ren Chaoqi, said he obtained the video.
The fine, no small amount for a newlywed with a new small business like Ren Chaoqi, has apparently ignited a controversy on some Chinese-language websites.
According to the article, online opinion is firmly on Ren's side:
According to an Internet survey conducted by Sina.com: 55,259 persons voted and 96.52 (53,251 persons) thought that "this person did not illegal distribute and exhibit pornographic videos and that the negligible impact should not have incurred such as heavy fine." At the Nanyang bar at Baidu, a similar survey showed that 99% were bothered by the police action.
The report isn't clear on what law was used to fine Ren. At first it was under a law designed to punish someone for obtaining illegal revenue. Ren, however, told media that the video was purely for personal viewing.
Later, the citation said the offense was copying illegal material. This is where BitTorrent comes in. Indeed, unless settings are specifcally set up for someone to be a "leech" only, downloading from BitTorrent also includes transmitting.
Ren told a reporter he is waiting for an administrative review that he hopes will lead to a lower fine--or no fine at all.
This curious case, while quirky, exposes interesting workings of internet society, passing of information, and China's legal system. Check out the full article.
Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.
As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:
The last sentence gave me an idea. What are the odds that, literally, somewhere, someone used their finger to, say, remove a fly who was sitting atop one of the routers or switches that make up the Chinese internet blocking infrastructure. And what if that caused a defect in stored data, erased some buffer, anyway just sort of fudged things up in the right way to let loose TypePad for the masses.I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.
Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.
Just a thought.
The iTunes Store was blocked in China two weeks after an album released by Tibet activists appeared, but after the Olympics Games concluded, it was available once again.
Silicon Hutong has written a concise summary of what happened:
- The album was featured on the front page of the site - a choice I would wager was made by Apple, not by the activist organization that produced the album;
- The album went live in the days leading up to the Olympics;
- Pro-Tibetan activists have been attempting to leverage Beijing's hosting of the Olympics to draw attention to their cause;
- The activists told the Associated Press that they had contacted athletes directly and provided free downloads to the athletes and urged them to play it in Beijing as an act of solidarity.
- The activists then issued a press release telling the world that this was, in effect, a protest, and that at least 40 athletes in the village had downloaded the tunes.
- The site was then blocked, fifteen days after the album went up.
- The Games ended, the athletes went home, and the site was unblocked.
- The album is available for purchase here in Beijing under the same conditions as everything else on iTunes - got a foreign credit card that bills to a foreign address, and the songs are yours.
The post goes on to examine at great length the ups and downs of Apple's apparent decision to feature this content. It also opines that "the content itself was not a problem - what set the Chinese government off was the concern over a potential protest in the Olympic Village. Apple was a target only to the extent that it was seen by the Chinese authorities as aiding that protest."
I tend to think this particular episode, in contrast to Yahoo China, Google China, and MSN's complicated dealings with Chinese censorship, is really not such a big deal. I also think this degree of examination of possible motivations on the part of the censors is a stretch.
It's very possible that rather than concerns specifically about a protest, the album (and whole store) was blocked after the activists' press release merely because that was the first the censors heard of it. Unblocking the store after the sensitive political period of the main Games is pretty standard behavior, just as many sites were restored after the actual unrest in Tibet earlier this year.
GoDaddy, the world's leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners' names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.
If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.
Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:
The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China's sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country's Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China's Olympic team prior to the Games' opening on August 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names anymore; they were forced to give it to the medalist "as a gift".
Tests at the main Olympic press center and on other connections around Beijing have shown that both journalists and regular Beijing Internet users are getting less restricted access than usual.
That's according to the OpenNet Initiative's assessment of online censorship after the first week of the Games.
After journalists spent a lot of energy complaining about their inability to reach many Web sites without the use of a proxy, the international and Beijing Olympic committees both seemed to respond, and many restrictions disappeared.
ONI notes that the bulk of the opening occurred for foreign-hosted Chinese-language Web sites, while "the majority of advocacy sites and politically 'sensitive' organizations remain blocked."
It may be nice that these sites have come available, but content is still filtered by keyword, if not encrypted during transmission, and there's no way to know whether this increased availability of Chinese Web sites will outlast the Olympic pageantry.
The International Olympic Committee has acknowledged that it acceded to Chinese government demands that some Internet censorship be kept in place during the Olympics, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Nevermind that IOC promised journalists could "report freely" from the games. Still, is this really a problem for reporters?
Long story short: this isn't much of a problem. Journalists arriving in Beijing without regularly being stationed there have already spent however much money to get to China and stay in hotels. They can afford a VPN service, which will completely circumvent the government restrictions--that is, if their newsroom doesn't have one already. Journalists will just have to learn how to use the Internet under less-than-ideal circumstances.
The long story: for the unaccustomed, the restrictions will be a pain in the neck. Certain things will be blocked in certain places. You'll never know exactly why something was stopped. Not-so-savvy reporters or those with old computers may have trouble using proxies and VPN.
But this doesn't really stop reporters from "reporting freely."
What would stop that is denial of access, denial of free travel, and threats or actual detainment or deportation after publishing something the government doesn't like.
I can say from personal experience that certain towns in the northwestern province of Xinjiang were being treated as off-limits to foreigners and some Chinese from out of town as recently as 10 days ago. We've already seen Beijing police acting violently against reporters from Hong Kong and breaking camera equipment at an Olympics news event.
Reporting freedom will not be complete in Beijing, but Internet censorship is not the reason. When foreign journalists are the target of restrictions, that's not much of a civil liberties problem for Chinese people, who face a restricted internet whether or not a bunch of reporters get a free pass this summer.
Perhaps reporters should get over their own selves and write more about Chinese people.
UPDATE July 31, 2008 17:23 GMT: The AP reports that an official who guaranteed free access to journalists was surprised by the shift:
Gosper said he first learned of China's backtracking on Internet access when Beijing organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide announced Tuesday that journalists would have only "sufficient" -- not unrestricted -- access to the Internet.
Since then, Gosper said he has felt "a bit isolated" within the IOC and was surprised at being left out of the loop.
Some people whose posts may otherwise have been deleted by censors in China have taken to writing backwards in an effort to defeat keyword-searching authorities.
"Bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally," write Juliet Ye and Geoffrey Fowler in The Wall Street Journal.
This is a particularly clever solution in Chinese, which, because of its ideographic writing system, is probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages. One way to imagine this is to remember the English phrase "bass ackwards," a well-understood inversion. Because Chinese splits words into meaning-based units rendered in characters, reading reverse text is more akin to "bass ackwards" than to "sdrawkcab ssa." At least, I think so. We'd have to ask serious linguists to confirm my hunch.
Another circumvention method that has been in action for many years is to write the text and take a screenshot of it. Censors aren't very good at parsing text in a JPEG file.
I don't know whether this is the first time this tactic has been used, but it's one indication of the determination of some people in China to exchange information despite state efforts to control online communications.
Sinobyte commenters have raised two good questions about Internet freedom during the Olympics, set for August 8 to 28 in Beijing. I'm going to give the best kind of answer available for each: an educated guess.
I had written about "free Wi-Fi," which hasn't yet really started working, but is slated to be available during the games in some key areas of the city.
Commenter DangerousOffender asks: How "free" will the access be? Will users be able to access the entire internet, or will it be censored?
I was referring, of course, to "free of charge," but this is a good question. In recent years, no public internet connection has been completely unfiltered. Censorship works in a few different ways: some Web sites are simply blocked at the IP level, making it impossible to access them without a proxy; certain sensitive terms in pages, if detected by filters, can cause the connection to be disrupted; and sensitive terms that appear as part of a URL can trigger a similar disruption.
In the lead up to the Olympics, many online limitations have been relaxed. Access to BBC News was restored. Blogspot has been unblocked, blocked again, and is presently available from this connection in Beijing. English Wikipedia is available, but Chinese Wikipedia is still blocked. After pressure from the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing committee has promised fewer restrictions, but since some ISPs do the censorship themselves to avoid trouble with authorities, any "opening" may not trickle down to every connection.
Rumor has it, anyway, that top hotels full of foreigners and journalists will have unfettered access. I doubt this will be a citywide phenomenon, let alone a national loosening.
JeffW42 asks: How monitored will it be? Will your e-mails be reviewed for "offensive" material, and username and password stored for later reference?
While we have some guesswork to do on censorship, there's even more to do on surveillance. Let's focus on capability and relevance.
Capability: Chinese authorities are viewed by many around the world in governments and other fields as highly capable in infiltrating computer systems. While the Chinese government denies it every time, U.S. authorities say attacks of various kinds have come from China. What's more important is this: We know the government has access to the gateways between China and the rest of the Internet. It should be assumed that, just as any traffic can be filtered for keywords, any traffic can be more closely monitored.
Relevance: The fact that authorities could capture your traffic does not necessarily mean your passwords could be captured. A properly configured SSL-based password system, standard on most websites, should make password capture very difficult if not impossible. Though I am not a security expert, my sense is that this sort of surveillance would be a very low priority for Chinese authorities.
On the question of reviewing e-mail for content, it seems highly unlikely that e-mail would be blocked. If you're planning a big protest or something, however, expect that you and your buddies are on some kind of list for closer monitoring. Simple measures can make all communication much more smooth and quick during high-filtering periods. Users of Gmail, for instance, found that while a normal HTTP connection was extremely slow during the recent unrest in Tibet, using SSL by typing in https://mail.google.com/ (the added "s" is the key) made the connection faster, and e-mails containing sensitive terms were delivered more consistently.
A little perspective
Much is made of China's Internet restrictions. A few things of note, before one seizes on this as unique. I'm not trying to argue that the restrictions are good, but I think a lot of people take this phenomenon and turn it into an anti-Chinese trope without placing it in a bit of a context.
- A study found that most Chinese approved of government controls over the Internet.
- Several students at elite universities I have met in Beijing had no idea there was any censorship.
- The U.S. government, for example, is not exactly free of programs to monitor its citizens' communications.
- China has a lot of surveillance cameras, but so does Britain.
Now, if you can get a visa to China, come on over and enjoy the games. I hear lots of the hotels are wide open.
Members of a hepatitis B support group in China, numbering about 300,000, lost their online forum in a Chinese crackdown on civil society. Now some say they may be forced into taking drastic measures, even during the Olympics.
In an unusually prominent threat of collective action in China, Lu Jun, who ran a recently blocked site for carriers of hepatitis B, said some disgruntled members may be planning protests during the Olympics, according to the Financial Times:
Mr. Lu, who heads a rights group that has helped carriers sue companies such as IBM and Foxconn for discrimination, said the Web site was a gathering place for sufferers who had little other opportunity to vent their frustrations, or find support from doctors and fellow patients. By shutting it down, the Chinese government risked pushing patients to take drastic actions, Mr. Lu said.
"A common refrain in the messages we have received from members since the Web site was shut down is: 'I love my country, but my country doesn't love me,'" Mr. Lu said.
(The site) "In the Hepatitis B Camp" was first shut down by the government last November. On Tuesday, Mr. Lu said an official had told him at the time that the closure was due to the upcoming Olympic Games. Mr. Lu managed to reopen the Web site by moving it to an overseas server, but Beijing last month began blocking access to the Web site within China, just 10 days after government officials participated in an event for World Hepatitis Day at the Great Wall.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in an interview with The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, said he never anticipated router-level information restrictions and said he's concerned.
"I had never appreciated that governments would see the internet as so important that they would begin to block it at the router level, so I worry about that," Schmidt said.
Schmidt did not name specific countries, but the type of blocking, including that of Google's YouTube, applies directly to China. He also said that Google talks to governments about what they're blocking and tries to convince them that offending content is not representative of the whole that's being obscured by the block.
Since this post is essentially a tiny extraction from a long interview, I wanted to give you the full context at least of this particular question. I don't have time to type the whole interview:
Auletta: Do you worry about government?
Schmidt: Only in the sense that they ultimately have the power to-- Governments can affect the internet in some remarkable ways.
People have talked-- For example, there are a number of governments that ban various forms of Google. YouTube is periodically banned by this country or-- I can never remember which countries are banning YouTube at any given time for whatever reason. And then we go and then we talk to them and we explain that yes that video, you know you didn't like that video and you know it's not legal here but that's one video and there's how many other videos and so on, and then people pressure them and they unblock it. So that's an example.
I had never appreciated that governments would see the internet as so important that they would begin to block it at the router level, so I worry about that.
I think the issues of privacy and competition that we're talking about now, at least the western governments that we deal with understand the balance pretty well. We've been able to navigate that, as have other internet companies.
Check out the full interview at The New Yorker's site.
