Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/27/blanked-out-areas-of-baidu-map.html
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A lot of people and organizations and, apparently, countries do not seem to understand the global nature of the internet.
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It bums me out to realize that “never again” is an utterly meaningless concept.
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But, but, but, Great Firewall Of China!
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Or maybe that’s what they want you to think…
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Censoring the fake power plant while disguising the real one as a toilet factory is more the Soviet style, I think…
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Streissandism with Chinese characteristics.
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The Streisand effect is significant, but I wonder how much they’ve effectively hidden based on the sheer number of blacked-out sites? Who has time to look into literally millions of potential locations?
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I think this is a bit like saying “billions of hidden pixels”. There’s a lot to look at, but the literary flair belies the simplicity of analysis and the work is doable for a small team of journalists and coders.
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Someone in the Chinese intelligence apparatus is about to find himself a “guest” of one of these camps or prisons for this “brilliant” plan.
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China arguably has a better-than-average claim to “understands it; is working on fixing that” RE: global internet.
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Of course Western intelligence agencies already know the locations of these sites. I’d guess that at this point, they have a pretty good handle on what they look like and can program algorithms to look for new ones, so this will have zero effect on the ability of outsiders to know the locations and a lot of other things that can be gleaned from satellite surveillance. But with the great firewall of China this does serve to restrict access by Chinese to information about the layout and purpose of these sites. And like most authoritarian regimes, the CCP is at least as worried about internal enemies as external ones.
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Streissandism with Chinese characteristics.
Like Streisand with an active radar homing surface-to-air missile system in her backyard.
(And like the CCP, she’d probably use it.)
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I would go so far as to say nearly everything China does is to contain the people. There aren’t really credible external threats to them. The worlds needs their economy far too much and their foreign policy of quiet diplomacy is adequate to keep the world off their backs. By far the biggest threat to the regime is uprising or revolution. If and when the Chinese people ever reach a critical mass of being tired of being pushed around, it would be over for CCP fast. I’d wager the Party is terrified of the people. At least, they should be.
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Here’s a somewhat unrelated question. Why, on my portfolio website analytics, do I often see one view a day from a Baidu search (and it’s often, unfortunately, the only view)?
How long will it be before we see the WH give an executive order requiring Google, Apple, et. al to do same for USA…
Because its the Baidu spider?
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Well, yes - but it’s always only the Baidu spider. Never google, or any other search engine listed as viewing the page.
I guess analytics tends to ignore known spiders in reports, but the baidu one isn’t on the list.
