Danwei reports that Blogspot and Blog City have been unblocked in Beijing. (Reader Andy Yates reports that they are also accessible from Xiamen.)
This follows the unblocking of Google.com that occured about two months back.
Archive for the 'Internet governance' Category
Hong Kong leads the way again in their latest anti-piracy effort: the Youth Ambassador Against Internet Piracy Scheme, "under which 200,000 youngsters aged between nine and 25 would become ‘gold fingers’ on the lookout for potential BitTorrent seeds of copyright works, including movies and music." (SCMP)
Catching a thief is a contribution to society. Yet the words “teenage internet spies” (SCMP) still sends chills down my spine.
For more details, see ESWN.
While preparing for a seminar on the future of China’s Internet hosted by IFTF colleague, Lyn Jeffery leader of IFTF’s Virtual China project, I took a closer look at the details of China’s decision to set up new Chinese character domain names. Although the new domains cannot be acurately described as a separate Internet, that in fact is what is developing. One engineer after looking closely said, "If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck."
This was not a sudden move. Chinese internet authorities have been planning this for years, and had a market plan in place the day the new domains were announced. The new domains will be offered by the Chinese Government through an exclusive arrangement with a company called I-DNS, operated by the National University of Singpore, with funding from Verisign, the US monopoly operator of the .com domains. One observer at the Virtual China workshop observed that the new China domains are not a sinister attempt to assert independence or control, rather a carefully calculated commercial move to ignite a marketplace for chinese character domain names.
Meanwhile some Internet engineers have articulated some serious concerns about the new Chinese domains in new report called the ICANN SSAC report on Alternative Roots [pdf] submitted to ICANN on 4/28/06. In a recent interview in Australian IT news Report co-author and Melbourne IT chief technology officer Bruce Tonkin said China’s attempts to use the domain name system to restrict access to content was a serious threat.
"In China they are manipulating some of the traffic," Mr Tonkin said. "It’s to do with controlling access, to restricting people to going where they can control."
Repressive governments could use the domain systems to completely redirect users. For example, a user typing in www.yahoo.com could be redirected to a government-approved search engine.
"In China the government can control most of the ISPs, so they could set up an alternate root," Dr Tonkin said. "Within that they could allow only certain websites."
The Chinese Internet may ultimately become the first separate Internetwork, that while sharing some genes with one parent, the first Internet, also has a separate and different genetic code designed by its national administrators.
Date: 3/29/06
Place: Law School of Renmin University
Event: The official ceremony for the establishment of Creative Commons in China.
Guest of Honor: Lawrence Lessig
Question: Will someone tell me why there is an iPod ad on the screen?
To celebrate this event, iMagine, a record label in Hong Kong, has released China’s first ever Commons album by a group called Mong So, (Under CC Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.5 Mainland China License).
Via PostShow.
CDT points to an International Herald Tribune article on recent comments by Chinese government official Hu Qiheng, chair of the Internet Society of China, a government-sanctioned public-private
group founded five years ago to promote the Internet in China. According to the article:
Fighting Internet crime, which Hu defined broadly to include acts
counter to the interests of the Chinese government, requires a more
certain way of identifying people online, she said. The IPv6 standard offered the best mechanism for establishing the identity of users online.
China is a leader in IPv6 infrastructures, which create trillions of new URLs that will allow more people, as well as things, to have an online presence–the so-called Internet of Things.
Julian Bleecker explores the general edges of surveillance in the Internet of Things (with cool pix as well) more thoroughly here.
Yesterday, Danwei reported that three of China’s popular fringe blogs (Massage Milk, Milk Pig & Pro State in Flames) had mysteriously disappeared bearing mysterious messages such as:
Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.
Yet today, amidst cries of censorship, Massage Milk returns to reveal that it was all a joke:
I like to play pranks…so it’s not what you think, or what the foreign press thinks.
Hats off to Massage Milk for a wonderful April Fools-esque joke.
Milk Pig, hosted on the same server as Massage Milk, has similarly returned. However the third blog, Pro State in Flames remains out of action with a technical error message - will it return like the others?
UPDATE:
- Danwei reports on the joke, and their sources say that Pro State in Flames will return shortly as well.
- The BBC complains about censorship.
- EastSouthNorthWest mentions one blog, 连岳的第八大洲, that is irate about Massage Milk being so self-important.
From China Tech News:
In response to foreign media reports that China might
create its own top-level domain names to create its own intranet, a
spokesperson from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC)
clarifies that China will not create its own root servers.
The representative says the misunderstanding was caused by the ambiguous English in local English media which seems to tell readers that China will use the .cn domain extension to replace .com and .net.
According to ICANN and CNNIC, though China has its own Chinese domain name system, the only change that China has made in the past four years was to add a Chinese language .mil domain name, but even that was done under .cn.
(You can also read the official albeit slightly cryptic press statement from the CNNIC website.)
The miscommunication continues: here, CNNIC is referring to the .cn domain, while the "foreign press" was concerned about new root servers under the new Chinese domains .公司,.网络 and .中国.
Rebecca MacKinnon points to a detailed exploration by Steven Murdoch (Researcher in the Security Group
of the University of Cambridge) of how the new Chinese TLDs (top level domain names) are being activated. Murdoch finds that while this may not technically be an attempt to establish an alternate Internet since there is no new root server,
what China appears to have done is externally almost indistinguishable
from splitting the root and carries the same consequences. The primary
problem is that a link using one of the new TLDs will work in China but
not outside (without a user installing the plugin, or their ISP making
a configuration change). This breaks the universality of the Internet…
MacKinnon calls it a "Chinese sub-internet adjacent to the global one run by ICANN."
What we might be seeing are the beginnings of the development of Internet search practices that are different within China than without, and the development of large bodies of Chinese-language content with .公司,.网络, or .中国 that are practically inaccessible to folks outside of China.
3 of the 4 new domain names announced by China’s Ministry of Information Industry yesterday, going into effect as of tomorrow (March 1).
This could be a Big Deal — the beginning of an "alternate root" — the beginning of another Internet, according to some experts.
My colleague Mike Liebhold directed me to an analysis by Michael Geist, well known Canadian Internet scholar, who notes that:
The alternate root has always lurked in the background as a possibility that would force everyone to rethink their positions since it would enable a single country (or group of countries) to effectively pack up their bags and start a new game. The U.S. control would accordingly prove illusory since a new domain name system situated elsewhere would be subject to its own rules. While the two could theoretically co-exist by having ISPs simply recognize both roots, the system could "break" if both roots contained identical extensions. In other words, one root can have dot-com and other other can have dot-corp, but they can’t both have dot-com.
Recent Comments