Jul 27
2009Internet Censorship: U.S. vs China
Filed Under: China Policies & Regulations, Google, Internet Security, Shanghai & China
2544 visits, 1 today
Today’s top Digg story is about AT&T blocking a website called 4chan.org. This article received 8737 diggs so far since submission 13 hours and 12 minutes ago! If you’re not familiar with Digg or never used Digg before, basically, Digg is a social networking site for people to submit and share links, including news, images, videos, stories, blog posts, etc… When you submit a link, you can write a short description about the linked content. If people like your submission, they will click the thumbs up digg button, as shown on the right. All the submissions are then ranked by the number of diggs so that people can see what the most popular news/stories on the Internet are.
On average, the top Digg story of the day has somewhere around 2000 diggs. The top Digg story of the week has about 5000-6000 diggs. This article about AT&T blocking a website I’ve never heard of receiving almost 9,000 diggs in a matter of hours is no small feat! Not long after the Digg submission, AT&T unblocked 4chan.org due to the increasing pressure from hundreds and thousands of outraged Internet users. This is the reason why censorship would never work in America!
The blog article added several updates since the initial posting:
UPDATED 7: This article is now no. 1 on Digg.com – and has received more than 120.000 visitors in less than 10 hours. For now, I guess 4chan and Anon is showing AT&T its strength in pure numbers. Help spread the word, we need to raise awareness of this issue and Net neutrality.
UPDATED 8: According to CentralGadget, 4chan is now UNBLOCKED by AT&T. AT&T says they were following the practices of their policy department», but that they have restored network-wide access to all areas of 4chan. Shitstorm averted? Also, according to CentralGadget, 4chan is currently down due to a large DDOS attack, affecting most of 4chan’s servers. This appears unrelated to the AT&T blockade, but may have been triggered by the high-profile attention that 4chan has received during the past 24 hours.
Just a few days ago, I wrote and complained that Google’s Picasa Web Album was blocked in China. Today, I find that my post generated three times more views than average. The traffic came from people searching “Picasa blocked China.”
My post shows up as #3 in the Google search results, after links from Google’s support forum. Considering that I’m an obscure blogger living in China, this goes to show that my writing about censorship in China garnered a little attention but not too much. Apparently, not too many people wrote or cared about this. I mean, who uses Google Picasa Web Album anyway? People care more about 4chan.org and AT&T. (Note the sarcasm in case you missed it).
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>This article about AT&T blocking a website I’ve never heard of receiving almost 9,000 diggs in a matter of hours is no small feat!
>I mean, who uses Google Picasa Web Album anyway? People care more about 4chan.org and AT&T. (Note the sarcasm in case you missed it).
Sorry, I don’t see the sarcasm at all.
Just because you never heard of something before today doesn’t mean it’s unpopular.
If you’re using digg as a reference, at least check the article match difference. It’s barely 30%.
I wasn’t even aware people took Picasa seriously before now.
Isn’t it just some low grade image editor and album uploader?
Like there weren’t already hundreds of other methods people were using to do this before it existed.
And once again, it NEVER fails with the incessant lying, as lying is a way of life for these hacker creeps. I salute AT&T for blocking viruses, trojans and nasty spider scripts, as that is what the REAL truth is as to WHY AT&T has flashed the middle finger [blocked] to 4 Chan. Why should AT&T waste time and energy in dealing with viruses, trojans and uncontrollable script programs emanating from the 4 Chan site?
I don’t condone censorship and I certainly don’t condone lies “in the name of lulz”. The only thing 4 Chan has proven again and again, is that they are infantile and violent. A bunch of two year olds who go on tirades. And just like an out of control two year old, they need some REAL hard slaps from the school of hard knocks.
Any consequences or denial of internet access to AT&T customers due to NAZI actions emanating from 4 Chan [or any other hacker creeps for that matter], I pray that they are caught, rounded up, prosecuted beyond the extent of the law, thrown in a windowless cell and locked up forever until the day they die.
I commend AT&T for taking the step forward and I sincerely hope that other ISP’S follow suit ASAP. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Hackers cause destruction, chaos, waste everyones time and energy. Normal people on the net are SICK AND TIRED of these two year old tantrum antics that 4 Chan displays on a daily basis. These hacker creeps really and truly need to GROW THE F*** UP.