China's web biz bosses crank up gossip crackdown
Stoke the Great Firewall ... or else
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Chinese tech firms have agreed to add more bricks to the Great Firewall of China at the end of a summit hosted by the country's government.
The chiefs of 40 or so companies, including search behemoth Baidu and Yahoo! suitor Alibaba, as well as Sina (owner of microblogging site Weibo) and IM service Tencent, agreed to "strengthen self-control, self-restraint and strict self-discipline", the official news agency Xinhua said on Sunday.
Xinhua said that the tech firms had agreed to "resolutely curb" online rumours, pornography, fraud and other information deemed "harmful" to the state.
The agreement came after the bigwigs had been in three-day talks with the government's State Internet Information Office.
The confab was part of a more general crackdown on the net in China. Last month, the Communist Party's Central Committee held its annual meeting and issued a number of communiques on policy for the year, including one on the web.
The document said the government wanted to "strengthen guidance and administration of social internet services and instant communications tools and regulate the orderly dissemination of information" and "apply the law to sternly punish the dissemination of harmful information".
Phrases like "rumours" and "harmful information" are often taken by observers as code for any viewpoints that disagree with the ruling party's agenda.
Microblogging sites are proving challenging for the Chinese government's infamous Great Firewall of China because of the speed with which short messages can be resent and spread to huge numbers of people.
Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, has proved particularly irksome to Chinese officials. In July, the site provided news and updates on a bullet-train crash in Wenzhou that contradicted the official accounts, as well as expressing anger at how the authorities responded. ®
COMMENTS
Using the summit as an excuse
the government's State Internet Information Office met with the chiefs of 40 or so companies to see what was available in the way of fees, bribes and kickbacks.
Coming to the UK soon
BT being the cheapskates that they are have built a lot of their new backbone out of this cheap, Chinese government controlled company produced crap.
No no no, our code contain no backdoor they say.
I doubt very much whether every line of code was checked by BT (they are too lazy to do so) so in truth we won't know whether snooping code or a kill switch has been included until its too late, maybe web pages will start missing sensitive material and our gubberment will let it happen because we are in their pocket as we are in debt to them.
This is already happening, how elese do you explain Chinese State TV appearing on the Freeview and Freesat EPGs?
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