Chinese Human Rights Action Plan

Posted on 14/04/2009 by Dyrathror

As the chinese news agency Xinhua reported, yesterday the chinese government published for the first time a human rights action plan for China. During the next 2 years human rights shall be protected and promoted with an focus on:

  • Civil and Political Rights
  • Rights and Interests of Ethnic Minorities
  • Education in Human Rights
  • Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
  • Performing International Human Rights Duties

As stated in Spiegel Online, specially the promise of better social benefits would be highly welcome from a vast majority of the population.

It is arguable how many of these good intentions can be realised and in which time frame because it takes a lot of time until a governmental policy in China becomes reality in local government decision making. But for the first time at all the chinese government approved that there might be a need for change in the human rights policies in China.

One of the first things which should be changed is the disparity between countryside and city citizens as explained in Lizhens article about the chinese Hukou. This disparity in my eyes is a shame for an communist country where all brothers should be seen as equal.

[Update]
The full text of the action plan can be found here: National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010) .

For me as computer scientist I am specially interested to see the implementation of II. Guarantee of Civil and Political Rights, (5) The right to be informed. Will this point cover a less strickt filtering of the internet as well?

As far as the chinese government does not exactly explain what they want to change and how they want to achieve these goals a slight suspiciousness about this program is indicated.

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My Living Room

Posted on 13/04/2009 by Dyrathror

For the first time I played a little bit with HDR photography and tried some programs like Photomatix, Dynamic Photo HDR and QtPfsGui. The results were not always as I expected but one of the results of my living room, made with QtPfsGui, looks quite interesting.

My Living Room

More to come …

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Guangzhou

Posted on 10/04/2009 by Dyrathror
Guangzhou

I just came back from Guangzhou where I had to go for a week. Guangzhou is a city with about 10.5 mio. habitants and when you arrive there coming from Haikou the impression is that of a very busy and dirty city. There is much more traffic and the air is simply not comparable to the fresh sea air in Haikou.

The pace in Guangzhou is much higher than in Haikou. You can see it when you have a look at the people who are hurring into the Metro or when you see the speed of the cars and busses in the streets. Even in the restaurants I have seen that during a normal lunch which took us about 30 min. on our neighbour table three groups of people have been serverd their lunch during the same time.

police guard in KFC

But luckily you can feel very safe when you are guarded even by the police during a coffee break at KFC 😉

One thing I really liked in Guangzhou are all the good restaurants. There are plenty of them and in all chinese and even many stranger country styles. Fortunately we didn’t have the time to visit more than two of them per day 😉 There were also some restaurants which offer specialties where I had to pass. For example one famous snake restaurant, … Therefore we found a very small but extremly good goose restaurant and got very big and yummy goose dishes for 25 RMB.

And Guangzhou is ideal for shopping. We have seen shopping malls which were bigger than half of the shopping malls of Haikou together.

shopping street

Wherever you go in Guangzhou, its crowded. I have been in several big chinese cities but I think Guangzhou is only comparable to Shanghai when it comes to the crowds walking through the streets and shops and if you try to find a table in a restaurant during normal lunch time be prepared that you might wait for some minutes until one becomes free. But as I stated already you don’t have to wait for long 😉

Transportation is always a subject in China. Guangzhou has a very modern and fast Metro which covers already the main directions and is continuously extended. The regions of the city you cannot reach by Metro are very good covered by many bus lines.

Even though the traffic is already full of trucks and small transporters with supply you can still find the more traditional chinese transport systems as well. I had the luck to see this bicycle transporter with empty boxes which even found a solution against the rainy weather.

chinese transportation solution

At last we found an old european quarter. The houses are still more or less in the old european style which I am used to from Germany and old houses are repaired in the same way to conserve the unique style of this little island. We spent a nice an quiet afternoon on the terrace of the Starbucks with a good coffee and many muffins.

old european quarter

On this little island you can find restaurants from Italy and Germany but be prepared for the more european prices as well.

shopping street
shopping street
an old quarter street
shopping street
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
old european quarter
police guard in KFC
chinese transportation solution
Guangzhou

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China is tightening the Net again

Posted on 04/04/2009 by Dyrathror
The Big Chinese Wall

I am living in China, a country very well known for its ability to build the biggest walls in this world. One remarkable example can even be seen from the moon. The other one is not that obvious and quite immaterial.

As computer scientist I am depending a lot on the informations I get over the internet. My whole daily work actually cannot be done without the actual documentations of tools and components I am using.

Living behind the biggest firewall in the world has a big disadvantage for my profession and I believe that this must also have an impact on the chinese software industry. There are many strictly professional sites which are unreachable without additional measures, like www.jruby.org. All blogs which are hosted at www.wordpress.com are unreachable even though I have access to the main page. These pages should be easily reachable for you if you are living in Europe or America.

The normal behaviour is a timeout of the network connection or that the address cannot be found at all. But also some websites are unnaturally slow, actually so slow that you cannot really navigate on them. Many sites can only be reached after several attempts.

Actually it is getting worse in China again. A friend of me even complained about rejected mails to me which were filtered out by there IP address.

On one hand I can understand the discomfort with which most governments see the internet as an anarchical, uncontrollable zone which they are trying to get under constitutional legality but the internet is nothing else than real life. When you want to find a way around the laws you will find it. You don’t need the internet for this. And when you want to get informations you will get them.

Think about the saying: The word is more powerful than the sword!

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Big Brother is watching you

Posted on 31/03/2009 by Dyrathror

It is quiet a while ago that I last read the novels “1984” from George Orwell or “Brave new World” from Aldous Huxley but it seems that todays reality outdistances these novels by far.

Nearly daily there are news like about the spybot net called “Ghostnet” (see ghostnet.pdf), also mentioned in an Heise article (Chinesische Spionage-Software infiltriert Rechner tibetischer Exil-Regierung) or about searching the house because of information gathered from an internet provider or trading or loosing personal data from an telco provider like in Datenskandal bei Kabel-Deutschland or from banking information or …

The internet and all our data in the internet are gaining a central role in our lives. Not only that they enable us to gather important information in a form never known in history before or to communicate with each other all around the world but the internet also exposes us in a form never known before. In my mind I tried to sum up all new technologies which are commodities today and their possible dangers and wanted to list some of them as example:

  • ISDN phone can be remote controlled and switched into an listening facility without drawing the attention of the people sitting in the same room.
  • mobile phone can be used to track your position, can be remotely switched into a listening facility and perhaps even used as remote web-cam.
  • eMail is normally uncryptified so that everyone with the right equipment can read what you wrote and track with whom you are communicating. Exposes your computer to possible break-ins.
  • Browser the websurfing is trackable with the right equipment and you are exposed to the owners of the websites your are visiting. (Think of Amazon or EBay evaluating your clicks). Enables break-ins on your computer when surfing on a malicious website.
  • Customer Cards give the shop owners a perfect possibility to track your buying habits.
  • Traffic control cameras specially with the right recognition software together enable to create a motion profile

This list is far from being complete and only thought to show in which way we are exposing ourselves to the overall information gathering machinery. When all these data about us could be correlated it would give an image about us which would be that precise that we would be surprised, I am sure.

The handling of all these data should be done in a much more responsible way as today!

I think that the data retention at service- and telco providers which discriminates us all as possible criminals and trying to filter and control the internet are the wrong approaches. It is not as if the internet is a lawless space, it is only that each country adopts its law differently when it comes to the internet. But instead of a common effort to coordinate the execution of laws on internet cases I see only technical approaches.

The big countries are much more forcing other countries into a common sense, like they did with Switzerland when it came to the interpretation of their local tax laws, when it comes to money. But it seems that the only idea which comes into the mind of politicians when the internet is involved is control.

Does anybody of them ask himself what kind of free world this is where you need control over your compatriots to ensure the law and safety?

[update]
When you really still believe that all these surveillance possibilities will not be used against you one day have a look at the news in Germany: After 9/11 the German Telekom gave millions of customer data without legal basis to the police for dragnet investigation as published on netzpolitik.org and Spiegel Online

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