On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 1:14 AM, Hal Roberts <hrobe...@cyber.law.harvard.edu> wrote: > I'd like to back this up. I haven't done any research on circumvention > usage for a couple of years, but it doesn't pass the sniff test to claim > that a majority of the 500 million Chinese Internet users are on VPNs. Such > widespread VPN usage would have large, obvious impacts on the basic > structure of the Internet.
All you are doing is pointing out obvious flaws in the Wired report. I can just the same present the obvious counter-argument that regular non-VPN users very rarely search for terms related to whatever revolutionary movements are currently considered sexy in the West. I have only quoted Wired and TechCrunch as two sources that did a bit more than rewriting GreatFire's blog post. This says nothing about user experiences. It is certainly possible that Google pulling out the censored words warning was due to something done by the Chinese in the days prior to that, where that something resulted in user experience being worse (e.g.: users being blocked despite using synonyms, or presented with unusable results that will get them blocked anyway). I don't see any reason to trust GreatFire's judgement on the matter, because it took them a month to notice the change, which goes contrary to claims about user experience getting worse. -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
