RConversation

links for 2007-10-22

• YouMeiTI 有媒体: Notes from Talk at Leeds University about World of Warcraft (WoW)
  Tricia Wang:"The Stratified Global Informal Economy of Virtual Games: The Case of World of Warcraft’s Chinese Goldfarmers, highlights the emergence of the specialized labor of Chinese Goldfarmers."
  (tags: WoW china chineseinternetresearch internet gaming economics newmedia)

links for 2007-10-21

• What I Meant to Say Was Semantic Web - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
  "Amid the new Silicon Valley gold rush under way, a lot of entrepreneurs seem to believe that to define something is to own it. And Web 3.0 seems like a great thing to own."
  (tags: web3.0 semanticweb internet web2.0 innovation)
• New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills - Robin Good's Latest News
  "...media literacy education is central to 21st century civic education, while critical thinking and learning to use participatory media to speak and organize about issues might well be the most important citizenship skills..."
  (tags: education media internet web2.0 government politics freespeech citizenship)
• What Actually Happened in Last Thursday on Foreign Search Engines? : China Web2.0 Review
  "I personally guess the problem was cased by tweaking GFW. What is the real truth behind it? None of us can answer it. But all of us hope it will not happen again."
  (tags: search gfw censorship google yahoo microsoft china internet chineseinternetresearch)

Foreign search engines briefly redirected on some Chinese ISP's = mass confusion under heaven.

The more time you spend observing the Chinese internet, the more you learn (usually the hard way) not to jump to conclusions until you've triple-checked your facts with people on the ground in more than one location using more than one ISP, and - if possible - waited for a bit to see how things play out. 

I'm in London at the moment. On Thursday as I went from conference call to appointment to meeting to dinner to conference call, I kept getting e-mails from people about news reports and blog posts with headlines like "Chinese search engines hijacked" and "Cyberwar: China Declares War on Western Search Engines"  Then on Friday morning PC World reported: "China Not Redirecting Search-Engine Traffic to Baidu," and I even got an e-mail from somebody in Shanghai posting to a list-serv for people studying the Chinese Internet insisting that the whole hijacking story was a hoax.

The truth, it appears, lies in a murky grey area - as is often the case with China stories. But there is no doubt  that at certain points in time, on certain Internet Service Providers in at least some Chinese cities, real people were redirected to Baidu when they tried to access some foreign search engines. We know this happened because some Chinese bloggers documented it, and other people e-mailed screenshots around. We also know that the redirection must have been fairly short-lived, and may not have happened at all on some ISPs in some cities, because many people in China who I asked about it said all was normal when they tried accessing Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search engines (as long as they didn't try to search politically sensitive terms, which for China is the normal state of things).

But it definitely happened. In the wee hours of Thursday October 18th, "icebenny" provided these screenshot from Shanghai, showing how Google Blogsearch was first redirected to the government's official anti-pornography site... then after he refreshed a few times it redirected to Baidu:

I've received screenshots from others showing the same thing. Here is a screenshot I received from one blogger showing how Microsoft's Live.com search page was also redirected to the government anti-porn site:

Blogger "Ning" wrote later that morning Beijing time that every time he tried to search anything on live.com, he would be redirected to Baidu's search error page, and when he tried searching on yahoo.com, or blogsearch.google.cn, he would be directed to Baidu's home page.  In a blog post titled "Baidu raped yahoo?" "jifforever" posted a screen-capture animation demonstrating how his yahoo.com search got redirected to Baidu. "Awflasher" showed the results of his test when he pinged blogsearch.google.com. He expressed concern that such DNS hijacking behavior is bad for the development of China's internet. The comments sections on all of these blog posts showed that many people had observed similar things.

What actually happened??  One Chinese friend offered this theory: "Just guess: the DNS hijacking was done by the ISP like China Telecom or Netcom either deliberately or accidentally. In some circumstances it leads to the Baidu page because it was set up as the default search engine." Another wrote: "most of the geekers think it is [caused] by a upgrade of GFW." (What he means there is that the ISP's periodically "tweak" and "upgrade" the filtering mechanism that block various overseas websites. Sometimes when a tweak is in progress, strange things happen for brief periods of time.)  It would appear that Danny Sullivan's theory that the hijacking was a response to Bush's meeting with the Dalai Lama may have been a bit prematurely formulated. But he is right to be on the defensive against those who now claim his entire report was false.

Meanwhile, while I'm on the subject of confirming and debunking various things, it is definitely true based on many consistent reports that YouTube is blocked in China. One verbal report I received yesterday from somebody that YouTube was blocked in Hong Kong, however, is definitely not true.

links for 2007-10-19

• EastSouthWestNorth Blog: Hong Kong District Council Candidates
  Roland Soong translates four profiles published in Next Weekly of four district council candidates from different parts of Hong Kong.
  (tags: hongkong politics elections districtcouncil jmschku)

What did Yahoo! know and when did they know it?

In late July, the Dui Hua Foundation posted and translated the original 2004 Chinese police order asking Yahoo! Beijing for Shi Tao's e-mail account information, in what the police specified was part of a case of suspected "illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities." (They've taken the original PDF down for some reason, but I've uploaded it again here. UPDATE: It's working fine now from the original Dui Hua site here.)

This document (which Dui Hua said they had examined and found to be authentic) raises some serious questions about the statement made by Yahoo! General Counsel Michael Callahan in which he said: " When Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about the user, who we later learned was Shi Tao, we had no information about the nature of the investigation."

Clearly the police document proves that Callahan's statement is not 100% true. In August U.S. congressman Tom Lantos ordered an investigation of the situation. This week he concluded "Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006."  Callahan and Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang have now been summoned to a hearing on November 6th to explain themselves.

Yet Yahoo! is insisting they did not lie - or at least didn't mean to if you read the lines in their latest statement: "As the Committee well knows from repeated meetings and conversations, Yahoo representatives were truthful with the Committee. This issue revolves around a genuine disagreement with the Committee over the information provided." John Palfrey at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center has the full text of that statement here. JP then writes:

Unless there are facts that I’m missing, for the Congress to call Yahoo! back to Capitol Hill to correct the record, in public, is completely appropriate, if “no information” is not what we were meant to understand. It may well be that what the company knew was in fact so vague, as many legal terms are in China, as to be inclusive. It may well be that someone in the company knew, but the right people didn’t know — and that an internal process was flawed in this case. But those are very different discussions, ones we should have, than the straight-up problem that the company didn’t have context for the request.

One thing I don't understand is why Yahoo! isn't a bit more forthright in acknowledging that Callahan's statement and the Chinese police request don't completely add up, and that this inconsistency raises legitimate questions about what Yahoo! knew and when they knew it. Maybe their failure to address this has to do with the fact that they are also in the process of trying to get a lawsuit against them by Shi Tao's mother and others dismissed.

Talking about this case to people who have spent a while working in the Internet industry in China, many think it's quite possible that communications between the local Beijing office and Yahoo headquarters in 2004 were, shall we say, sub-optimal in detail going across languages and cultures, and/or that record-keeping was disorganized enough, that Yahoo!'s U.S. legal team preparing Callahan's testimony in 2006 didn't realize that the police orders for information on email accounts for Shi Tao, Wang Xiaoning and possibly others actually did include some information about the nature of the case. It would seem pretty unintelligent to write Callahan's testimony the way it was written if one knew about those police documents, and knowing that documents have a way of getting leaked by human rights organizations - especially given that the leaking of Shi Tao's sentencing document was the reason why anybody knows about Yahoo!'s complicity in Shi's case in the first place.

It's pretty rare for a company to say in public: "sorry, we messed up." And explain how. The legal risks of doing so are non-trivial. But maybe that's their best option at this point if they don't want to be accused of lying? Assuming they weren't?

links for 2007-10-18

• EastSouthWestNorth: Hong Kong District Council Elections: A Preview Based Upon Previous By-Elections
  "Many of the pan-democrats have now seen how strong their opponents (especially the DAB) are in their local district work and how poorly their own organizations have fared in the by-elections. As a result, some have lost confidence about their own chance
  (tags: districtcouncil elections hongkong politics jmschku)

links for 2007-10-17

• Yahoo summoned to Washington over Chinese arrests | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
  "The chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee is summoning Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to Washington to talk about "how the Internet company gave false information to Congress..."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch surveillance privacy humanrights freespeech internet)

links for 2007-10-16

• Global Voices Online » China: Tough blogging the Communist Congress
  Despite all kinds of censorship, Chinese bloggers are managing to talk about the 17th Party Congress anyway.
  (tags: globalvoices china internet blogging politics censorship media journalism web2.0)

links for 2007-10-15

• McClatchy Washington Bureau | 10/05/2007 | As Internet censorship tightens in China, private firms pitch in
  "China has refined a unique model of policing the Internet in which private business self-censors nearly as much as state censors themselves."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch censorship freespeech internet business CSR)
• The Associated Press: China Censors Ratchet Up Web Monitoring
  Associated Press quotes me on Chinese censorship.
  (tags: chineseinternetresearch internet china censorship surveillance freespeech business)

China's Censorship 2.0

On a recent trip to Beijing I visited Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer who is suing the Chinese web portal and blog-hosting service, Sohu, for censoring several of his blog posts. He wrote about our conversation here. The International Herald Tribune has an Associated Press article about him this week here. Liu argues that Sohu violated its own user contract by censoring his posts - since his posts discussing various legal issues did not violate any law, and did not fit the description of type of content that Sohu's user agreement says must not be published. Liu's case was thrown out by the Haidian district court in Beijing, but he is appealing to the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court. The odds on his appeal getting much of anywhere are considered rather long.

Liu's office is a dusty low-rent affair in a rabbit-warren of offices inside a hotel, inside a shopping center across from Beijing's West Train Station.  Liu is the classic pulblic-defender type who you can find in many countries: dogged, determined, believing fervently in everybody's right to legal defense and a their day in court. China has a constitution and a legal system and he takes them both seriously - along with the rights that they are supposed to grant China's citizens. He defends people accused of all kinds of crimes who don't have connections or resources to  hire fancy lawyers. He says a foreign journalist recently asked him why, as a Communist Party member, he was defending people accused of theft or murder. He says there is no conflict: after all he is serving the people, isn't he?

Liu is obsessed with the law, with justice, with the legal process. He is so obsessed, in fact, that he writes about these topics on over a dozen blog-hosting services - and says he posts to about six of his blogs nearly every day. All of his blogs, he says, have censored his postings at various times. But they all censor his writings differently: some censor much more heavily than others, some have their staff members review his posts before they appear publicly, some notify him that his content has been deleted and send it back to him, some just mask from public view it or delete it without explanation. The articles he is suing Sohu for blocking, he was able to post on Sina with no problem. When he logs into the administrative area of his blog, he can see the content of his post, marked by a message warning him that the post has been locked and unpublished. Here is a photo I took when he showed me the screen (click to enlarge):

It says: "Dear Blogger-friend, Hello! We are very sorry to inform you that due to certain reasons this blog post is not suitable to be publicly shown and has been locked down. You can see the original text and photos through this page. Thank you for your understanding and support of Sohu. [Then it gives the number of a 24 hour service hotline and service e-mail.]

Liu's experience is very consistent with the system of internal censorship carried out by Chinese blog-hosting companies as described by Reporters Without Borders' latest report, "Journey to the heart of Internet censorship."  The report describes how Chinese Internet companies, especially blog-hosting companies and others dealing with user generated content, are required to police and censor their users in order to keep their business licenses. It describes how all web companies have a section or department for monitoring and censoring user content, how executives of all Beijing-based web companies are required to attend weekly meetings with the Internet Information Administrative Bureau. It also describes - which is consistent with what I've heard - that the first line of control over web content is directed to a great extent by the city-level Internet authorities, which results in wide variation over the extent and methods of censorship by companies based in different cities and provinces. 

Chinese internet censorship has two parts, external and internal: a filtering system blocks external websites from being seen by people inside China unless they use circumvention technology like proxy servers; the internal system controls content published on websites hosted on computer servers inside China. That first part is what people call the "great firewall of China," (which researchers point out is not a real firewall) that controls access to external websites by people inside China. This filtering system is well documented by the Open Net Initiative and others. The system Liu experiences every day, whose internal workings Reporters Without Borders describes in its report, is part of the internal censorship system. This system of internal, company-level controls which began to take shape in 2005 is more thorough and irreversible than the externally-directed "great firewall" system. Content posted on websites hosted on servers overseas can't be taken down by Chinese authorities (unless they successfully pressure foreign companies to take it down), so generally if an Internet user knows how to use a proxy server, they can still access the content. Under the internal control system, authorities pressure web companies and service providers to keep certain kinds of content off the web altogether - to the greatest extent possible. The reason why thousands of Internet Data Centers (IDC's) were shut down beginning last month in the run-up for the politically sensitive 17th Party Congress was that the websites hosted on them were not adequately able to control their user generated content in the way that Sohu, Sina, and the other big Web2.0 companies do, under the "guidance" of various government and Party departments as the RWB report describes.

Just as China's filtering system of external websites is unparalleled in the world in terms of its success and complexity, so is China's internal web censorship system. In effect, the Chinese government co-opts the private sector into doing its censorship work. It is a model which I am sure many governments around the world will be eager to emulate if they aren't already doing so.