Microsoft Violates Human Rights in China 642
gexen writes "According to this article in The Guardian, 'Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'. The article basically states that 'Gate's firm supplied technology used to trap Chinese dissidents'."
No Details (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Corporations... (Score:4, Interesting)
Open Source Equally Culpable (Score:2, Interesting)
As a coder, one of the things that makes me feel a little squeamish about the GPL is giving up the right to tell people they can't use my software for certain purposes. I'd rather my code not be used by the military to blow people up or by the KKK to serve racist webpages.
This just in! (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, did the conversation go like this or something?
China: Hello? We need OS package for five hundred government computer!
Microsoft: Alright, would you like Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional?
China: Whichever one better for trapping dissidents!
Yes, and IBM... (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither seems to have had any impression on the company over the long haul, unforutnately.
I wonder how specific . . . Open Source (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how specific the "Microsoft Human Rights Abuser 2003" software and the Cisco stuff mentioned really is. It doesn't really take esoteric tools to keyword search sites, monitor net usage, and filter them out with proxies and firewalls.
After all, companies have been doing this for years on their internal networks, is this just a scaled up version?
From the article:
Does this imply that a free OS, for example, must try to make sure their software can't be used to keep lists of people targeted for oppression?
From An earlier version of The Open Source Definition [perens.com]
Chinese-made alternative isn't any better... (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone here know about Red Flag Linux and the locally-developed Dragon RISC CPU? Given that both are sanctioned by the Chinese government, you have to really openly wonder does the Chinese government have access to back doors via software and/or hardware that will allow them to quickly track Internet usage with Red Flag Linux and the Dragon CPU-based hardware.
no, dipshit (Score:1, Interesting)
US CALEA law forces equipment vendors to do this (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that CALEA is about making the technology capable of snooping rather than authorizing that snooping to be done. In the US, it takes further bad legislation like the Patriot act to authorize the snooping. CALEA just makes it (too) easy.
Slashdotters (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is the only way our criticisms of Microsoft's stagnant software ever gets taken seriously... I think they do listen to us sortof...
Re:Misleading/slanderous headline (Score:2, Interesting)
And what the hell makes you think america is the only country with a god given right to own WMDs (not that Iraq actualy had any though). Saddam would have been quite justified in turning round and demanding to inspect American stock piles.
And remember all that fuss about those two captured pilots being shown on the TV being against the Geneva convetion?? Then America declares Saddam a POW under the geneva convention and shows yet MORE pictures of him having nits picked out on tv.
Re:Is Free Software Innocent? (Score:3, Interesting)
The "second order" effect is that when the US govt seeks to censor it's own people the tech will already be developed, by US corps...When spying tech gets good enough, the govt will have plug-n-play services available....don't you think that's WRONG!!!!
Re:Misleading/slanderous headline (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, the company doesn't always know how the user will use it, and can't control that, but if they know what will happen then the ethical thing would be to refuse services. It is really too bad that companies are more worried about the next quarter than how their actions will go into history books.
Would any software or network company think that history would treat them well if they sold software and equipment that was used to round up and massacre dissidents? Heck, many US companies dealt with Germany and in my opinion, openly abetted in human rights abuses, although I will grant, none of those companies caught sufficient hell for what they did, but now is a time to start.
Why would it be so wrong to scale that down to lesser crimes against humanity?
RTFA (Score:2, Interesting)
microsoft is tailoring their software to spy and track the location of any of its users so if they do anything "bad" (like saying "freedom is great, go democracy!") they'd be jailed tortured, then killed, and microsoft's doing this knowing the reprocussions it will have on its users.
at least if they make a linux system, it can be hacked to be invisible to the chinese govt.
Re:IBM and the Holocaust (Score:2, Interesting)
I've read the book mentioned by the grandparent poster, but unfortunately I don't have it to hand.
The Germans had a large number of punch-card machines installed all over the 3rd Reich. Dehomag (the German subsidiary of IBM) kept records of each machine and its location - naturally, they wanted to know how much to charge the various organisations using them. The census forms were processed at large government offices, but there were a number of machines based onsite at the concentration/work/death camps which were used for tracking the movements of prisonsers. Given the vast numbers involved (~10 million prisoners) it made sense to process the data locally.
PS. The book is well worth reading but it's, obviously, very depressing.
"International Law" is a fiction. (Score:4, Interesting)
Laws get passed by legislatures & monarchs. We don't have an international legislature or an international monarch, now do we? So, we can't really have international laws.
Maybe someday we'll have a world government but not now.
What we have in the real world are Treaties. A treaty is an agreement between two or more countries. In reality the treaties are almost NEVER symmetrical. As an example, the US/UK pass a tax treaty. Well at the negotiating table, the treaty said W, X & Y. Put when parliament passed it they didn't like W. So, the UK law passed by parliament says V, X & Y. Same type of silliness in the US Congress. They don't like what the negotiators did and pass the US law with W, X, & Z. So, now we have "treaty" but they don't match.
The most important thing to notice here, is that no international law was passed, only 2 national laws. One for the UK. One for the US. I can't go into a US court and sue over the fact that the UK law lets me have rights to V, X & Y, because this is the US and our law says you have rights to W, X, & Z. Vice versa for the UK. I can't go into NZ and sue on either the treaty, the US law, or the UK law. Why? Because the treaty was never a law, it was merely and agreement "in principle" made by bureaucrats. The US law is a US law and therefore unenforceable in NZ. Same with the UK law.
So, you see, the "international law" really isn't very international at all. It is merely a group of inconsistent laws cobbled together from a bunch of countries.
It gets worse, since this "international law" is merely a group of national laws that have no effect outside the jurisdictions of those nation states, any country that doesn't pass a similar law isn't bound by that "international law." And nothing stops a nation from changing its laws. So, if the UK doesn't find the tax treaty to its advantage, it can easily pass a new law revoking the old V, X & Y law. Laws based on treaties aren't any more important than laws NOT based on treaties. If the US doesn't like that the UK revoked the law it really only has two options: change the US law, or suck eggs.
There is no International body that forces a nation to have a particular law. We have a few administrative courts that can "suggest" the types on retaliatory laws passed by the offended country, but no real involuntary enforcement mechanism on an international scale. This is really why armed conflict (one nation imposing its will on another) is still a part of international relations.
So, if the US (or any other country) is "violating an international law," the quickest and LEGAL solution to the "problem" is to just repeal the US law enacting the treaty.
"International Law" is a nice short hand phrase, but so is "treaty." And treaty is closer to what actually happens in the real world. At least a document called a "treaty" was put tighter at some point. No one with any power ever actually wrote something entitled "international law." When someone talks to me of "international laws," I know they either (a) don't know what they are talking about, or (b) have an agenda and are selecting the phrase as part of a rhetorical device and not based on facts.
The road to DRM, or "Give me an f'ing break!" (Score:3, Interesting)
But this is just nuts. Let me think this through...
Now we WANT MS to track people, to investigate them and to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong with their products? And who should determine what is the right thing and what is the wrong thing? MS?
And if they add DRM to all their products, is it OK that you can't activate a product unless you certify that you won't kill anyone, spy on them or otherwise abuse their civil liberties?
Man, talk about a no-win scenario for a big corporation. We hate'em if they intrude on us too much, we hate them if they don't intrude ENOUGH apparantly.
Sorry, MS didn't do a damned thing wrong here, and saying otherwise in this one instance is just plain nuts.
Re:Microsoft Shouldn't Be Held Liable (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm from the US, and it pisses me off how many assholes there are like you here, people who say 'If they law doesn't explicitly forbid it, it must be ok'.
I call shennanigans. And bullshit.
I say it's high time that people asked themselves "is this right?" more often than "is this legal?"
Re:Misleading/slanderous headline (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure that at least someone at Microsoft is involved in discussions arranging customisation of their products to perform actions the Chinese government require. While it is a perfectly legitimate to help customise software for local conditions & legal requirements as a company you should be *very* careful performing actions that would be considered not only illegal but morally wrong back at home.
your selective .sig (Score:3, Interesting)
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The sentence is a little hard to understand, as it is not even grammatically correct - it's a runon sentence, which makes sense only if joined like:
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, requires that the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
But I'm not rewriting the Constitution, just trying to understand how Americans are to live under that protection from government control. As long as you're struggling to understand that sentence, you should accept that "regulated" means "supplied with material", its primary meaning when that article was written. And a "Militia" means an informal, self-organized local military unit, not a standing government army. Anyone without a selfserving agenda to be armed to the teeth along with anyone else who wants guns would read that sentence without confusion. It means that the US military is to be structured as local militias, who arm themselves, as protection of the state's liberty.
Well, we have, since the Revolution, instead created a half-trillion dollar a year standing (and fighting) military. We should either drop that military in favor of an 18th Century militia self-armed structure, in keeping with the Constitution, or drop that incoherent amendment. Either way, we should drop the pretense that anyone is entitled to any arms they want in this country.
Re:Misleading/slanderous headline - typical (Score:3, Interesting)
You make the typical gun advocate claim that all gun crimes are committed by "criminals", by which you mean habitual criminals. I don't know what the statistics are in the USA, but in Australia a lot of the murders committed with guns were by people who didn't previously have criminal records - basically, people who flipped out for one reason or another. The common thread in these was that self-loading rifles made it too easy for such people to kill a lot of people at once. We restricted their ownership to the few people who actually need them for professional reasons. Voila, no more spree killings since.
Re:Misleading/slanderous headline (Score:1, Interesting)