Thursday, November 12, 2015

China Is Worst Place on Earth for Internet Users





 
 I  find it noteworthy that i never receive a search from China.  That is solely because i use the Blogspot system which is owned by Google. I do not particularly care simply because my site pretty well demands fluency in English and that cuts traffic accordingly.  Both Japan and Taiwan have a few readers at best but i see them.

What this causes is that Chinese participation in the global conversation is cut of from possibly the top third as a matter of course.  


Hardly satisfactory but i also think real changes are in the wind as well.  The mere fact that the one child program is now ending tells us that because it is likely the last true program out there that goes back to Mao.

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China Is Worst Place on Earth for Internet Users

By Jack Phillips, Epoch Times | October 28, 2015

Last Updated: October 29, 2015 1:07 am


A man using a laptop at an office of Sina Weibo, widely known as China's version of Twitter, in Beijing on April 16, 2014. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)


http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1886676-china-is-the-worst-place-on-earth-for-internet-users/

Internet freedom has declined around the world yet again, but in no place was it worse than China, which was ranked dead last, according to a new yearly report from nongovernmental organization Freedom House.

The organization said 2015 was the fifth year in a row that it documented a decline in Internet freedom, as more governments around the world have censored information. Additionally, there has been a pervasive expansion of surveillance programs and a crackdown on privacy tools.

In last year’s report, Iran and Syria were the only two countries ranked below China. In 2015, those two countries are tied at second-to-last and China is ranked at the very bottom. North Korea wasn’t mentioned in the survey, as there isn’t enough access to Internet in the country.

Freedom House listed several reasons why Internet freedom declined. In 42 of the 65 countries assessed, authorities told private Internet companies to delete content that dealt with religious, political, or social issues. That figure is up from 37 countries in the previous year.

In China, the regime has pushed for real-name registration online in an attempt to make it impossible to run an anonymous blog or leave content on an online forum without using your real identity. Also, the regime’s censorship apparatus has been used to carry out so-called Great Cannon attacks, which allow for the intercepting of Internet traffic toward one site and redirecting it to another one, which effectively crashes the victim site.

These efforts and others are “all in addition to the kinds of typical Chinese censorship shenanigans that anyone who has spent time in the country has gotten used to–the inability to access Facebook and Twitter, messaging apps that won’t send messages about politically sensitive subjects, viral videos that suddenly disappear, and the fact that essentially nothing associated with Google, from Maps to Translate, works at all,” Freedom House wrote.

In comparison, the five top-ranked countries listed in the report are Iceland, Estonia, Canada, Germany, and the United States, respectively. At the bottom after China, Syria, and Iran are Ethiopia, Cuba, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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