China making their own SL viewer?

[morgynn Hancroft]

This may be purely a rumor, but I heard that with all the new censorship in China, they are making their own viewer for SL? Is there any legitamcy to this claim and if not, are any China based users having trouble connecting (and staying connected)? 

Any advice or assitance would be great! 

Thanks,

Morg

[solstyse]

This is just a guess, but since sl is 90% chat, wouldn't it be incredibly difficult to censor it? They would need a ton of real time filters, and i couldn't imagine a large chinese population all going to their various different crowded areas in second life without overloading whatever machine is designed to do all the filtering.

[morgynn Hancroft]

I'm not sure, to be honest which is why I figured it would be smart to ask someone - anyone - if they knew anything? I know China has a lot of rules where they make their own versions of stuff and force those who live there to use it, while cutting off access to everything else (aka, skype, google, facebook...)... my boyfriend lives in China and can't get on SL now so I wanted to see if there was a way we could help him, or at least figure out what the issue is, if it is indeed China cutting off access to SL? 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Unless LL made an exception for them, they would have to comply with LL's policy on TPV's which means they couldn't make the shared experience of SL any different than it is for anyone else.  If they did, LL could ban the viewer and not allow it to connect to SL.

I read in my local paper recently that the US funds a project though that allows people in foreign countries that censor the net  to connect to it by bypassing their countries network and censors. Their censors don't even know they are on line from what the article said, so not sure how effective a Chinese viewer would be anyway.  I understand a lot of the Chinies use the special non censored connection.

 

[Ziggy21 Slade]

I dont know about any new ones, but China has had it's own SL rip off since 2007 called Hipihi....

Report on Hipihi

 

[Paul Hexem]

Just have the boyfriend bounce his connection through a proxy server. Problem solved.

[Orca Flotta]

A own viewer wouldn't make any sense since they would still see and hear all the stuff that we hear and see. I don't know if they blocked SL altogether but some years ago the People's Republic came up with their own SL clone, HiPiHi. Dunno if it ever caught on or not.

About censorship ... well, it's bad in parts but not as bad as in the west for other stuff. Chinese ppl are now very open to the world so a blocking of something as shallow and mindless as SL would hardly make any sense.

[Perrie Juran]

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Orca Flotta wrote:

A own viewer wouldn't make any sense since they would still see and hear all the stuff that we hear and see. I don't know if they blocked SL altogether but some years ago the People's Republic came up with their own SL clone, HiPiHi. Dunno if it ever caught on or not.

About censorship ... well, it's bad in parts but not as bad as in the west for other stuff. Chinese ppl are now very open to the world

so a blocking of something as shallow and mindless as SL would hardly make any sense.

---

Expecting the Chinese Gov't to make sense is to me about as plausible as my expecting my U.S. Representatives to make sense.

It is almost an oxymoron like military intelligence.

 

[Cerise Sorbet]

There was a Chinese virtual world very much like Second Life, called HiPiHi, that turned up around 2006-2007. It disappeared without notice around August.

[Orca Flotta]

Expecting the Chinese Gov't to make sense is to me about as plausible as my expecting my U.S. Representatives to make sense.

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Yes, right, nowadays hardly any gov'ment makes sense anymore. But China is somehow special coz it's in a development from pseudo-communism to a western-democratic empire kinda state. It's a wild west atmosphere there, almost like in Russia. So if you have some money you are free to do almost anything you can dream of. I still have no idea if they are blocking SL or not. Anyway, there's the language barrier which makes it almost impossible for Chinese ppl to really interact with us westerners.

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Orca Flotta wrote:

Expecting the Chinese Gov't to make sense is to me about as plausible as my expecting my U.S. Representatives to make sense.

----------------------------------

Yes, right, nowadays hardly any gov'ment makes sense anymore. But China is somehow special coz it's in a development from pseudo-communism to a western-democratic empire kinda state. It's a wild west atmosphere there, almost like in Russia. So if you have some money you are free to do almost anything you can dream of. I still have no idea if they are blocking SL or not. Anyway, there's the language barrier which makes it almost impossible for Chinese ppl to really interact with us westerners.

 

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In my travels about SL I have met a few Chinese people from the mainland.  China once maintained a few sims in SL as a sort of cultural exchange which I visited..  The Chinese I met spoke excellent English and demonstrated a keen interest in western culture.

English arguably has become somewhat of an international language with many countries offering it in their schools.  With the amount of trade China does with English speaking countries, it would not surprise me in the least if the barrier were not as high as you think it is.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

I read in my local paper recently that the US funds a project though that allows people in foreign countries that censor the net  to connect to it by bypassing their countries network and censors. Their censors don't even know they are on line from what the article said, so not sure how effective a Chinese viewer would be anyway.  I understand a lot of the Chinies use the special non censored connection.

---

China's Cybermilitary is vastly more advanced than the US's though. We barely have one, because we're too busy making sure we have enough horses and bayonets. For them its a core branch.

If we ever went to war with them, they've have us knocked into a stone age blackout in seconds.

It'd be like the Iraq war. We 'flipped a switch' and that country went offline. But worse, as we do so much with our internet... we'd probably even lose our GPS and satelites, and they could just casually come in and pick off our leadership with drones.

- They're actually military is primative compared to ours, but they can make ours blind, and our ability to 'see' is our greatest strength.

 

We already know they regularly hack into western networks - including US governmental and business networks.

 

We might 'think' we can hide connections for people over there... but there's probably some poor sod in a base in GuangZhao reading this post (assuming the right trigger words in here to get Baidu to flag it), and then chuckling...

We hide people who want to connect from China only because at present, the Chinese find this agreeable. Let your rival think they're methods are viable enough, and it keeps them from paying attention to the real walnut under the other cup on the table.

 

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Orca Flotta wrote:

Expecting the Chinese Gov't to make sense is to me about as plausible as my expecting my U.S. Representatives to make sense.

----------------------------------

Yes, right, nowadays hardly any gov'ment makes sense anymore. But China is somehow special coz it's in a development from pseudo-communism to a western-democratic empire kinda state. 

 

---

Western-capitalist. But NOT democratic. There is -NOTHING- democratic about the changes in China. It is becomming a very Adam Smith Capitalist Society - but this is a purely economic thing. There is no link between democracy and capitalism. One is about forms of governmental sovereignty, the other about economies.

Socialism - Capitalism are one axiom.

Democracy - Totaltarian are another unrelated axiom.

 

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

In my travels about SL I have met a few Chinese people from the mainland.  China once maintained a few sims in SL as a sort of cultural exchange which I visited..  The Chinese I met spoke excellent English and demonstrated a keen interest in western culture.

English arguably has become somewhat of an international language with many countries offering it in their schools.  With the amount of trade China does with English speaking countries, it would not surprise me in the least if the barrier were not as high as you think it is.

---

 The strangest event I've ever been to in SL was a 'your nude self' event (or a name with that kind of concept) hosted on a Chinese sim and run by a group that claimed to be a student organization at Beijing University (I did not know this until halfway through or I would not have gone).

They had us run from point to point on a crazy obstacle course looking sim - dance for a few minutes, and the move to the next one. I assume to make screenshots.

At the end was a contest where entrants got in front of a panel and described their nude self identity - what their avatar meant to them, and why it looked the way it did, and why we were beautiful.

- With all of China's censorship, I do wonder if this event was really Chinese... But they had clickable signs all over their land advocating a pro-Red-China stance... so, I dunno.