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Comment Just saw Avatar on the mainland... (Score 1) 344

I'm an American living in Chongqing, China and saw Avatar in 3D on the 18th. There were 3x as many showings of the film in 3D as anything else, including the 2D version, so I can see no reason yanking the 2D version would make any difference. The movie is hugely popular here with many of the showtimes sold out well in advance. Aside from that, bootleg copies are available on any street corner or DVD shop around here. Copies were also available on the streets of Shanghai before the theatrical release in the states. Useless and stupid for the government to yank 2D showings. Then again I never doubt the stupidity of the CPC.
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Comment God this is annoying (Score 1) 256

As an American expat in China I rely on Witopia to connect me back to the states and allow me to pretend I still live in a country that lets me access any site I want, facebook and hulu included. This isn't a rant against content providers nor the Chinese government, but COME ON! All I want to do is watch my favorite shows from the states... I'd even pay for the privilege. As there is no legal way for me to watch content from the states, I instead turn to pirated DVDs and the huge range of options I have for Chinese hosted videos. Yeah, the Chinese subtitles are annoying, but the trade off of being able to watch my favorite shows at all is worth it. Sorry content guys. Unless you provide me with a legal option to watch content available in the states I'm going to go the bootleg route.

Comment A reply to the "it's not a block" comments... (Score 2, Informative) 142

The Chinese governments approach to internet censorship is hardly random, but a heavy handed approach meant to blind just those citizens who aren't savvy enough to get around "The Great Firewall." Many of the other foreigners and even Chinese I know do not bother to employ VPN or proxy setups unless the government is currently blocking certain content or specific domains they are interested in (ie. youtube since March). Keyword based filtering, blocking entire netblocks, domain names, and messing with DNS are all within the usual bag of tricks the government employs. While I was able to get to the google.com main page via an IP address, most google owned sites outside of google.cn were blocked, unable to locate the domain via Chinese based DNS servers or incurring TCP resets at random. Forcing my DNS to my VPN provider's servers did solve the problem, but again, most people within the PRC don't bother to keep a list of proxies or have a paid VPN account, let alone know how to implement these solutions. Even forcing your DNS outside of the mainland, you're still at the mercy of the governments packet snooping, resets, and IP blocking. So while you're now able to connect to google.com via an IP address, you're still hoping the government hasn't begun blocking those IP addresses or started implementing random resets based on search content. The government filtering, censoring and blocking is very quick to adapt to methods of getting around whatever it is they're intending to accomplish.

I submitted the original story to inform rather than question the PRC governments right or ability to implement censorship. This is not a political matter for me, but rather an annoyance. I realized rather quickly just how much I depend on google (and how much I might need to change that). Google is the default search engine within my browser, my main email address of 7 years is handled through gmail, and I've become accustom to asking google to settle any fact based arguments that come up throughout my day. Whether or not I search for objectionable content via google is besides the point (I can get all of the same content out of China's dominant search engine, baidu.com), it was simply a shock not to be able to get to ANY google property.

On another note, this comes just days after the PRC government demanded that google give them more control over what is displayed on google.cn and/or remove all 'pornographic' content which appears within search results. If this was a move to point out how quickly the government can eliminate google's estimated 48M users within the PRC, it certainly worked on me.
Censorship

Submission + - China Appears to Block Google Sites (pcworld.com)

shekared writes: "http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167282/china_appears_to_block_google_sites.html I'm an American currently living and working in Chongqing, China. As of 9am (UTC +8) China began blocking google.com, gmail.com, google analytics and many if not most other google sites other than google.cn. Internet speed for connections outside the mainland, have in general have come to a crawl. Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press. Using an open proxy or VPN for connection to hosts outside of the mainland continues to allow access to google, as does connecting directly to a google.com IP address. As of 6pm (UTC +8) access to gmail and google.com have returned to normal."

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