As a Chinese I have closely experienced the government’s censorship for online access ever since I started using the Internet. I do not oppose any criticism or judgments on the government’s strict surveillance on Internet activities, but I do not agree on the opinion that the controls are completely unethical for a government that is intend to keep the security of a country with over 1.3 billion citizens, and more than 300 million active online users.
Comparing to the Internet environment and popularity of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Google apps outside the mainland China, the Chinese Internet environment seems to be very upset for its users. Nevertheless, from my personal experience, I have never felt extremely frustrated with the Internet behind the firewall, and, as Michael Anti talks in his speech (2012), the commonly seen negative judgments on the country’s online censorship is just a sided view. If we want to de define whether the Chinese government is being ethical for building one of the strongest online filtering system and closely regulating its citizen’s online activities, we may need to consider why is the government doing so, and how do we want to define the ethnicity in such a case. Some points Paul Mozur mentioned in his article “China’s Internet Controls Will Get Stricter, to Dismay of Foreign Business” (2016) are true. The main purpose of Chinese government’s surveillance on online informational exchange is to guarantee its control of citizens, and make sure that no information that is rebellion to the Party or the Party’s government. This stops foreign companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google, who refuse to set their servers in Beijing for information observation from entering China’s market, and also limits Chinese online users access to information that are not regulated by the Party’s surveillance. However, the government is probably not as unethical as it seems to be. And Chinese people are not as pathetic or blind as Murong Xuecun concerns in the article “Scaling China’s Great Firewall” (2015), and I do not think it will ever go back to how it was before the Culture Revolution or the Economic Reforms. Because first of all, China is a SICK country --- one of the four countries that have no access to Facebook, but it is also one of the BRIC countries, who the devoting a major force in the development of the global economy (Anti, 2012). Although both are under pretty strict communist parties, and absolute government control, Chinese people are not restricted on any usage of the internet, instead, we are strongly encouraged to get involved online. Indeed there is a wall, there is not a real restriction. Chinese government are not preventing its people from learning creativity and communicating with others who are carrying different voices. People are free and welcomed to express their ideas online. Besides, the censorship does not take online social networking away from Chinese citizens. For all those platforms popular in other countries but blocked in China, there are clones in China, all of which functions as well, if not better, as those outside China. For instance, like the one Anti mentioned in his speech, Weibo, one of the most popular social platforms in China, is itself a media already. Despite the fact that the government’s regulation made the platform to ban certain sensitive keywords, people are not banned to dig truth. Chinese language is amazing, you can always find another way around to express what you mean, without being blocked. Moreover, Chinese online users will not be deemed guilty by law by using any VPN for personal usage. Even before I used VPN for the first time, my friends and I knew what was happening around the world. And know, at least the younger generation, the millennials --- the future leaders of the country, are aware of the wall, and knows methods to get over the wall, and learns ways to communicate with others, critically evaluate information within the wall while performing properly abide by the government’s rules. Last but not the least, at least in case of the terrorism information, Chinese government’s Internet censorship is doing well in protecting its people. While there are numerous news reporting young teenagers being brainwashed by the ISIS through information spread on social platforms, no Chinese parents would need to worry about their children, because the government has filtered all potential hazardous or illusive information from terroristic organizations.
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The definition of the cloud computing is “the applications delivered as services over the internet and the hardware and system software in the data center that provide those services” (Ambrust et al., 2010). More and more people nowadays choose the cloud to save their information. The cloud has changed many things from how we develop the software, and how we save our information, to how we write a paper. The impact that cloud has had on our lives are massive. The ethics of cloud is also a significant issue that need to be discussed. The main ethical issues and concerns regarding cloud computing seem to relate mostly to the security of using and trusting a third party to collect, store and guard your data and privacy.
Admittedly, cloud services provide customers with great convenience. As a consumer myself, I use it for three primary purpose: to archive files, to work collaboratively with others, and retrieve documents from various devices I am accessible to. The service saves me plenty of time from backing up and transferring data and documents from one device or account to another. Besides, its plethora storage space makes it possible for users to keep all wanted data, or trace back information that is mistakenly lost due to common operate error or device crush. A lot of users are also willing to use cloud for the easy access of data from various devices. But most Internet users enjoy Could’s efficiency in data management without knowing how such service functions, and what problems it may bring to them. The advantages and convenience cloud services provide are not really for “free”. While users upload and save their information in the Cloud, they are giving themselves to the service runner. Although all cloud service providers such as Apple and Google constantly claim that they guarantee the safety and privacy for all users, and will not use or track any of their customer’s private information, we never know how they really deal with it. As a developer, the cloud computing provides countless opportunities to the tech industry. The article The Era of Cloud Computing uses Pinterest as an example, saying without the cloud, it would be almost inconceivable to fund a startup like Pinterest, which now loads 60 million photos a day onto AWS but employs 300 people. The benefits that companies gain by using the public cloud as noted in this article are the exemption of upfront cost, and infinite capacity on demand. When Pinterest started up without upfront cost. It did not have to go and buy a bunch of servers to run on at its beginning period. When Pinterest’s user volume grew from 1000 to 100000, it did not need to worry about buying more servers. Even when Pinterest encounters a website traffic with massive visitors swarming into the site, it can still get service machines on demand, and only pay for them when they are really needed. The public cloud allows so many small or medium sized companies to get off their feet and scale up and down easily. The low-cost power and resources available through the cloud allow companies with a few employees to accomplish tasks that used to take hundreds of computers. In my personal experiences, as an Android mobile application developer, the cloud computing allows me to stream the data of applications to the cloud easily, and saves me lots of time to better manage the data and develop the application. |