I have always wanted to ask such questions, as such projects come from a different kind of crowd, internet anarchists with a free world utopia in mind. Since these projects are also used by Chinese netizens, what do people think about this?

While Tor Project was DARPA made, many people benefit from it. Same goes for internet preservation projects, since internet is largely a creation of West.

I seek the perspective of native mainlanders and Chinese born here importantly, because I have not seen this being discussed anywhere.

Edit: I hate how armchair westerners have an issue with letting this topic be discussed calmly.

  • overflow
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    02 years ago

    You’re not going to find the perspective of mainlanders here and sites that are allowed in the great firewall such a sensitive question would be quickly deleted. To answer your question tho tor,archive.org and the eye are blocked by the great firewall of china since they’d allow citizens to get uncensored information about China and the world.

    • @ksynwa@lemmy.ml
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      12 years ago

      I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of their firewall. Plus using VPNs for accessing blocked sites is very common in China and carries no punishment.

      • overflow
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        -12 years ago

        I’m not misunderstanding anything and just because a law isn’t strictly enforced doesn’t make something legal yes they don’t really care if you use it to visit twitter/youtube/facebook etc but vpn websites are blocked in the country and they don’t allow app stores to have them so it’s not really not that far of a stretch to say they’re illegal

        • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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          12 years ago

          If you think using a VPN is illegal, here’s a challenge for you.

          Point to the law.

          That simple. The laws are all available online. Point to it.

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            -12 years ago

            If you think using a vpn is legal here’s a challenge for you please download an unauthorised vpn and report it to a police officer

            • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              12 years ago

              I use an unauthorized VPN and have done so in the presence of officials. They honestly don’t give a shit. (One of them asked me for the name of it so he could use it.)

              So, ball’s back in your court Sparks. Point to the law. You claim there is a law. Substantiate it.

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        02 years ago

        Still doesn’t change my point that mainlanders are not likely to use lemmy and that they would get in trouble for asking this on weibo and the like

        • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlOP
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          -22 years ago

          Dunning Kruger, fellowman. You should know reality instead of whatever Reddit told you this week. I know the Reddit talking points come from a place of ignorance, which is why I asked actually informed people here. If you do not know, just stop derailing this thread I made.

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            2 years ago

            it’s not dunning kruger to point out the truth just because it’s not what you wanted to hear doesn’t it make it reddit talking points if you really want to delude yourself to thinking the ccp would support tools like tor and archive.org then go ahead you’re welcome to go to mainland China and report back to me the result of you trying to use those tools and settle this once and for all

            • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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              12 years ago

              Or ask me. I live in China. I can tell you if a given site is blocked or not at this moment in time. (The list of blocked sites changes over time, naturally.)

              • overflow
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                2 years ago

                If they don’t believe me why not let them experience it firsthand just from a quick search one can find blogposts from the tor dev team about it being blocked and research papers on how exactly the great firewall does this and the workarounds they’ve come up for it.

  • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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    2 years ago

    While there isn’t a Chinese version of the Internet Archive (as far as I know), the Chinese government maintains freely accessible archive sites of important public documents, both historical, like from before the CPC, and modern.

    I do know that known Tor nodes are blocked in China. Not sure if it’s actually illegal to access them as long as you don’t use the Tor network to do anything else illegal (probably not). I’ve never heard of anyone being charged in China just for accessing Tor (or bypassing the firewall for that matter), the only arrests are if they committed a separate crime while doing so. It’s still relatively easy to access Tor in China using a bridge, either way.

    More adding to @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml’s comment: Officially, piracy and copyright infringement is illegal in China. But people there torrent media, even Western media that people outside China assume are banned in China, all the time. No VPN or anything to hide their traffic either, and I’ve never heard of anyone getting charged for it. There are also a lot of “free” Chinese streaming sites who probably don’t have the rights to the media they’re showing, especially since they have large libraries of Western media and why would Western media companies give them the streaming rights. So as far as I know it’s not really enforced all that much. You’d think if the government wanted to crack down on this, they could simply have Chinese ISPs block the BitTorrent protocol and/or go in and shut down those streaming sites.

  • Arthur Besse
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    02 years ago

    Do free-speech-loving western countries allow to flourish projects like libgen, Sci-Hub, or the numerous bittorrent sites that have been forcibly shut down (often with operators going to prison)?