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china creates its own TLD /Internet !!

/pd [PersonRank 10]

Wednesday, March 1, 2006
18 years ago

the forking of the interoperable internet is begining!!

http://english.people.com.cn/200602/28/eng20060228_246712.html

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

"A more accurate Interfax story is here.

http://www.interfax.cn/showfeature.asp?aid=10411&slug=INTERNET-POLICY-MII-DOMAIN%20NAME-DNS

   So my understanding is this: China will administer the 4 top-level domains of: CN, 中国, 公司, AND 网络 – and all their sub-domains – independently of ICANN. China has not shut out the global internet, or created parallel evil twins of our well-loved and well-used top-level domains."

Support Freedom! [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Wow, I'm stunned.

March 1 is the END of the INTERnet for the Chinese, and an invitation to all other dictatorships and semi-free countries to dissolve the internet. It's happening faster than we might have suspected. The web that has helped tie humanity together is now being cut apart just to save a dictatorship from the wrath of it's people, were they to fully learn the truth.

In just a few short years, there may be only the totally free countries connected together by the internet. And diplomats will do no more than wring their hands and say "how sad". This is why the UN must never control the internet, and as proof, we won't hear more than mild protest from the UN.

This screws the Chinese people, and means they never will be able to reach a real .com or .net website ever again. All Chinese accounts at dot-com emails will cease to work. All Chinese blogs run from dot-coms will cease to work.

The American made Cisco (and other) hardware will now be used to totally shut out 100% of .com and .net domains. GONE. American technology used to enslave. Censorship the Nazis would have drooled to have. To have sold equipment to be used in this manner is criminal. To pretend "we didn't know how it would be used" is childish: dictatorships use any possible technology to crush, to oppress, to kill. Never to liberate, to free, to allow human beings to have rights. If something could be used for evil, trust the Chinese government to use it for the most evil possible use. Read history, Cisco.

The jaws of internet censorship just slammed shut much more.

Google.com will now be completely unreachable to anyone in China. Censored Google.cn, will still be there to serve up only the lies of the Communist Party propaganda department. Same with compliant Yahoo.

Remember the Iron Curtain? This is the Web Curtain. Or maybe the Cisco Curtain. It is evil.

Google: "do no evil", pull out of China now rather than be forced to do more evil as China descends into the dark ages. You vowed under oath at the Congressional hearing to never shut down the uncensored Chinese version of Google.com. On March 1, it's gone. What will you do?

A sane world, and a sane USA, would impose the worst kind of sanctions. A trade blockade just to start. Pull out of the 2008 Chinese Olympics immediately. Cancel all US-Chinese military cooperation. Nationwide boycotts of Chinese goods. THIS IS a Chinese trade blockade. ALL non-Chinese .com businesses will be totally cut off from any Chinese customers the moment the Cisco routers are re-programmed.

What effective actions will Congress do? Anything? What will the White House do? Nothing? What will the rest of the free world do? Absolutely nothing?

An effective action would be something which actually will get the Chinese to immediately abandon their inhumane plot. Diplomatic "objections" are meaningless insults to the Chinese people. Congressional resolutions of regret are meaningless. Action is what is needed. Foreign trade and the 2008 Olympics are the Chinese Achiles heel.

It's sad to see technology used to enslave. It will be sadder to see no-one do anything effective about it.

This IS the beginning of the end of the internet. It is an additional declaration of war on freedom of information by Beijing. We, as users of the internet, and fellow human beings, have a responsibility to keep it free. We can't trust or rely entirely on government to keep it free.

This website, being a "dot com" will no longer be available at all in China in just a few hours. You should start a .org mirror right away.

Ideas?

Support Freedom! [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

The second article is a bit unclear, but time will quickly let us test if it's the end of the internet, or just a test for the future.

It is already March 1 in China, can anyone check to see if real .com and ,net names work in China?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

For those who can't see the Chinese characters in the text, this Chinese font download helps:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DEB6731A-CA36-47A3-B4A0-2A1D19EEFA05&displaylang=en

This looks like another move of the Chinese gov't to take further control of the internet the Chinese users are seeing. They were successful with controlling MSN, Google and Yahoo – maybe this gives them incentive to try to roll this out further?

Will China one day shut down the rest of the domains they do not administer?

And is it possible to view these new domains outside China? When I enter www.china.公司 (.com) into Firefox, it resolves to "www.china.xn--55qx5d" which it tells me can't be found.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

from what I understand this it will look like

www.whatever.com.cn
www.whatever.mil.cn
www.whatever.edu.cn
www.whatever.gov.cn

These are the ccTLD that would be used for control purpose. So from inside china they would be seeing the .cn root servers now being prepended with the TLD

so chinanews.com would now be chinanews.com.cn

yes its march 1st-- in china. and this slipped right thru my rader today!!

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

via Steve [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/]

For users to access the new domain names, their ISP must be configured to use the new Chinese root server. Presumably Chinese ISPs will do so, but outside of China the vast majority of ISPs use the ICANN controlled network of root servers.

This means that outside China, the new domains will not be accessible without configuration changes. These could be made by the user, by configuring their computer to use the Chinese root server in addition to their ISP provided one. Alternatively the ISP could add the Chinese root server to their own DNS configuration file, which would allow all their customers to have access.

This assumes that China permits connection to their root server from outside of China, and in the case of user-side configuration changes, that the user's ISP doesn't block DNS (sometimes done for security reasons).

Travis Harris [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

We can't forget there is still IP... as long as they are connected abroad, we don't need DNS.... those outside china can provide DNS services for those in china... Lastly... Maybe DNS can be replaced by UNS (I just made that up... U=Universal) something that could work in a whole new way to prevent this junk from happening. possibly an idea where the actual content is securely stored on millions if not billions of distributed machines throughout the world like a HUGE distributed network. (bit torrent ish.. but far better) Making it so there is no way that China could black list! Hey... it could happen!
PS if anyone takes this idea and revolutionizes the world, at least give me some credit!

Support Freedom! [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I like your ideas, Travis!

If indeed .com, .net or others go dark in China, whether now or in a year or two, lists of the IP addresses of sites could be widely mirrored all around the world.

Search engines could list the IP addresses along with the domain names.

Simply adding IP address at the bottom of web pages will let people copy them for use in case this scenario is carried out.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

It's not so simple... Many services points to one ip...
For example:
This is http://blogoscoped.com ip: http://212.227.103.36/
And this is http://www.ludwik.trammer.pl ip: http://72.21.42.50/

rabbit [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

我来自中国,虽然不能很好的理解你们的话,但是今天是3.1,我还没有感觉到有什么变化。
i come from china,although i can not understand what you said very well,now it is 3.1,i did not feel any diffrerent when i on net

Billy [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

hey yo,
I am from China. Probably u guys misunderstand what is going on now in China.
The gov wont block any normal web sites from the world (except porn or "crap" sites). Now what they are doing is that they are gonna use new DNS for .cn sites. So that all chinese people going to visit .cn stie will not fetch the IP from the root server in US, they will just get the IP on the new DNS inside China instead. That will be more efficient of course.
Dont be soooooo squeamish guys!

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

" they will just get the IP on the new DNS inside China instead. That will be more efficient of course."

Efficient for what ??

Support Freedom! [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Ja, mein Herr, efficiency is most supreme! Efficiency made the trains to Auchwitz run perfectly on time, delivering their cargos of human beings for efficient and speedy slaughter.

If it is efficiency that makes mention of Tiananmen Square 1989 vanish from the Chinese internet, that censors talk about freedom, human rights and religion, then give me chaos! The chaos of freedom! The chaos of human rights! The chaos of religious freedom!

Colin Downes [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I think some people are blowing this out of proportion – non chinese sites aren't being blocked wholesale.

But it's a step in that direction.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Colin:Agreed-blown out of proportion. So what is the real deal ??

* China wants to be efficent ?
* China wants to control their internet and make it a national intranet ?
* China wants to build a "big cyber wall" ??

1) All of the above
2) some of the above
3) None of the above

So whats your pick ?? After all this is simple question 3 choice and 1 answer ((In advance, 'll conceed the point that my thoughts are convulated!!) – There go figure :)-

Lance in china [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I am american and Im currently living in China in GuangZhou. My internet seems to connect fine with a variety of american websites including google. My connection to american sites is generally a whole lot slower but they do connect. So thus far I don't think the government has implemented large scale censorship.

Han [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

No way... I can't go to google.com but only google.cn ... can't go to gmail.com but a shitty gmail.cn which I can't logon to. I don't know about other .com .net websites, but google and gmail are screwed already.

iZeitgeist [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Han, have you tried logging to the secured Gmail at https://gmail.google.com ?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Hmm, is Google.com inaccessible from China (for you)?

/pd [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

not sure. there's a sidebar report out there wrt to this topic

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20876,19213793-2703,00.html

Piggy [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I'm in China. As of this week, you can only access Google.cn (the local censored version of Google). All overseas Googles (including Googles in HK, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam are a few I've tried) are blocked.

But Gmail is still available! That took a bit of working out, it seems. Even as I watched last Friday, the Gmail service became inaccessible, then accessible, then inaccessible again. On Monday (5 June) it was accessible again and seems to be stable. The problem, of course, is that Gmail is mail.google.com.

This does not mean that China has shut out the rest of the world. But it does mean that the Chinese regime is denying its people the opportunity to read the point of view of its political enemies. And inconveniencing a lot of people in the process.

This is what is so disquieting about China. In many ways it is incredibly free in this country – much freer than people might think. But the regime has shown that behind all the freedom and prosperity, it is still in control where it matters. All Chinese are aware of this and have reached their accommodation with the situation. (One conversation I heard last Friday between two Chinese colleagues: "It's so annoying that I can't use Gmail!" "Yes, but the government has probably blocked it because people are using it to do illegal things". "You're right! That's probably the reason!" End of story.)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Thanks Piggy, I also posted your story.

Bernie Lei [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I am a Chinese, we do not use google very often, usually we access baidu.com.

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