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.

  • @AgreeableLandscapeM
    4•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.

    • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
      0•2 years ago

      That is a valuable insight. It is hard to learn more about how Chinese society works, as it prefers being reserved away from bad faith chaos (example in this thread), and I feel intrigued by many such things. I would love to know more, how Chinese intranet works for example.

      I am sick of the Reddit/Twitter mindset on these topics. I want to talk in good faith, and I know very few people exist in the current way world works, who value morals, civillity and grace in discussions.