Monthly Archives: September 2014

USA Governments Use Alarming Fees For Censorship And To Garnish Wages - 214
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USA Governments Use Alarming Fees For Censorship And To Garnish Wages - 214 - Video

In recent weeks, China has tightened its censorship of the Internet, mainly directed at Google, frustrating users and causing some international companies to leave the country.

Following a series of terrorist attacks, China has tightened its Internet censorship, often called the "Great Firewall of China," which is making it difficult for Google customers to use the services. The crackdown has made Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Play almost unusable, according to The New York Times.

Its a frustrating and annoying drain on productivity, Jeffrey Phillips, an American energy executive who has lived in China for 14 years, told The New York Times. Youve got people spending their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done.

This is the latest battle in the Google-China saga. In 2010, Google shutdown its Chinese servers to avoid Chinese censorship. Instead, Google directed users to use its Hong Kong services to avoid filtered results. That led the Chinese authorities to block the Hong Kong site by making users wait 90 seconds for banned results.

Earlier this year, Google beganencryptingsearches, which made it difficult for Chinese authorities to track users searching for banned topics. In response, all Google services were blocked on May 29.The ban has hurt Google's business in China. In 2009, one-third of of all searches in China were on Google. Now Google only has one-fifth of all searches.

Rising fears of terrorist attacks and a rising nationalism focused at Japan and the US is causing Chinese officials to take a harder stance on censorship. Head of the Chinese Communist Party, President XiJinping, said he is placing moreimportanceon Internet security and istaking the top position in the partys to cybersecurity group.

Internet security is being raised to a much higher degree, Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese Internet censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, told the Times. It overrides the other priorities, including commerce or scientific research.

Google isn't the only company Chinese authorities have censored.Facebook and Twitter are already banned in China, and in July, anti-monopoly investigators raided four Microsoft offices, interrogating managers and copying large amounts of data onto hard drives.

Businesses aren't the only ones effected by the crackdown, reports the Times. Many academics are saying censorship is hurting their ability to conduct research.Jin Hetian, an archaeologist in Beijing, said he had a hard time conducting research using the available search engines, such as the Chinese search engineBaidu.

I know some foreign scientists are studying the rings of ancient trees to learn about the climate, for example, but I cant find their work using Baidu, Ms. Jin told the Times. When in China, Im almost never able to access Google Scholar, so Im left badly informed of the latest findings.

Link:
China tightens censorship on Google

Students from Evergreen High School meet with Jefferson County Schools officials over their concerns about advanced placement history curriculum, Monday, September 22, 2014. (Jesse A. Paul. The Denver Post)

GOLDEN Dozens of Evergreen High School students walked out of their morning classes on Monday and car pooled to the Jefferson County School Administration Building to protest what they see as the school board's attempt to censor advanced history curriculum.

"I want honesty in my classroom," the students said in a letter presented to Superintendent Dan McMinimee, who spoke with four student representatives, and the board. "Teachers want honesty in the classroom."

The protest followed a teacher sick out that closed two schools last week. Schools were back open on Monday despite rumors that educators might not show again. Students said similar protests are planned for the rest of the week.

"We came in as a preventative measure," said Mali Holmes, a senior at Evergreen.

The group of 100 to 200 students protested for about 45 minutes before returning back to school, specifically asking that civil disobedience topics not be removed from the AP U.S. History course. Student leaders told The Denver Post that the gathering was planned on Facebook late Sunday night.

Monday's protest meant the second day in a week students missed school because of mounting controversy in the district. McMinimee said he asks students and educators to let him come to them instead of having kids miss school driving to the administration building.

"I think you just keep trying to communicate and maybe over communicate," McMinimee said of efforts to stabilize the tumult.

The curriculum controversy stems from a board member's proposal to form a review panel to promote patriotic material, respect for authority and the free-market system. In turn, the panel would avoid material about "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law."

Several parents also attended the protest to support their children, including David Temple, who, along with his son, met with McMinimee.

Continue reading here:
Jeffco students protest proposed "censorship" of history curriculum

China's continuing block on the majority of Google Inc.s Internet traffic, which started in May, is taking a heavy toll on key sectors, according to a report Sunday by the New York Times. The countrys censorship efforts, known as the Great Firewall of China, affect virtually all of Googles services, and have slowed some down to the point where they are unusable.

The crackdown involved a recent cyberattack by authorities on research universities, according to a report from GreatFire.org, an Internet watchdog that keeps track of Chinas censorship efforts; and executives at startups say the crackdown has impeded their progress as well, with employees spending time figuring out how to send files instead of doing real work.

Internet security is being raised to a much higher degree, Xiao Qiang, a specialist in Chinese censorship from the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times. It overrides the other priorities, including commerce or scientific research.

Experts say that Beijing is amping up its Great Firewall due to increased concerns about domestic terrorism following a series of deadly attacks, as well as a recent rise in nationalism, directed primarily at Japan as well as the U.S., the report says. The crackdown has affected Internet users within academia as well as business, with one professor saying he wasn't able to file a recommendation letter for a student applying at an American university because the site was blocked.The Great Firewall reportedly blocks Google's email service, Gmail, as well as its mobile app store, Google Play.

While some Chinese Web companies are cruising along fine -- the initial public offering Friday for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. valued the company higher than Amazon and Facebook--new startups are eschewing Chinas Internet censorship and air pollution and opening nearby offices in countries, such as Singapore.

One chief technology officer for a Chinese startup, who requested anonymity to prevent retaliation from the government, told the New York Times that employees were having trouble collaborating on documents and other files due to the crackdowns impact on the Google Drive cloud storage service. The company is now forced to host its own files locally, which he said was slowing employees down.

We have our own closed server in the office and host things there, he said. Thats not going to the cloud; its like going back to the early 2000s.

The cat-and-mouse game between Beijing and Google began when the company shut down its Chinese servers in 2010 over censorship concerns, pointing users to its servers in Hong Kong to avoid restrictions. China initially responded by sporadically blocking its Hong Kong servers, barring Web users from visiting the site for 90 seconds if they attempted a banned search term, but now has a blanket ban on all Google services.

Earlier this year, Google began employing encrypted search results following the NSA spying scandal, which made it more difficult for Chinese censors to track Web users. Beijing responded in May by blocking all access to Googles family of sites, which experts at the time saw as a pre-emptive measure to hinder searches related to in advance of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June. Reuters reported in July that the ban was briefly lifted, but it has remained in effect shortly thereafter.

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Google Inc. Gets Caught Up In Chinas Internet Crackdown