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Comment by Macuyiko | Hacker News Reader

A little bit of both, I think, here is what was apparently send around:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-covera...

and in Chinese:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C...

"Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a live stream. If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it. Please convey the gist of this to sports channels. Again, we stress: this match may not be broadcast live in any form and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams, self-media accounts and so on. No website (including sports and technology channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push notifications about the course or result of the match."

Sounds pretty harsh... will be interesting to see how the rest of the event goes.

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I am not sure, but it's floating around.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8CA...

Sites like Sina and Sogou are able to report, and those aren't small sites. They got millions of views every day.

That site you quoted is anti-PRC news site. Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't.

> Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't.

That's the lowest bar in the world. It's a damn board game. The stream was six hours of two men sitting across a table from each other placing black and white stones. Optionally, some of the streams had commentators talking about how good the moves were as they were played. That such a thing could be subjected to censorship is absurd.

As for the result not being censored, well, it's literally a single bit of information. That was only censored because it's not practical to do so.

Agreed, that's why I mentioned "apparently", though it is what the NYTimes is referring to (although I guess they also have a bone to pick with the PRC).

I mentioned some of this censorship in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14403809. A tieba (your random big BBS site; https://archive.fo/0mh1t#selection-4961.0-4961.16 reply #10) link from http://archive.is/tTgsx (solidot, Chinese version of slashdot) points to a ban on mentioning Google by name & doing commentary on AI, and suggests doing a indirect livestream by showing a separate board instead. Someone's YouTube livestream mirror on Bilibili was supposedly taken down after the B site made it too public by putting it on the front page.

According to the tieba page, the ban was first noticed as CCTV5 deleted their Weibo (a microblogging service) post on the livestream.

Welcome to the 4th part of confidence doctrine -- cultural confidence.

That sounds absolutely absurd. Say what we may about the state of affairs in the United States, but if the media was over forbidden from broadcasting an AI competition, which is effectively educational research in nature, I think there'd be a lot of uproar.

When I worked in China nearly a decade ago, the general mindset among my Party friends was "there's no way this will last." Most of them had sent their kids off to get Canadian citizenship because they weren't sure there would even be a PRC in the long term.

I haven't been back in a while but my guess is things have sort of "settled in" more. The Chinese Firewall is absurdly effective - last I heard it was difficult to even get a VPN through.

That mindset comes from generational memory of high-risk political instability. In the PRC, there has yet to emerge a population without a cohort that personally experienced first-hand, or was passed by oral history with strong impressions like second-hand recitations, political upheavals that involved substantial loss of life, on the order of thousands or more. Get caught, even if incidentally, on the wrong side, and there are dire consequences. What will be interesting to monitor is whether or not the children of your Party friends (the ones who were sent off to obtain Canadian citizenship) do the same with their children. If they all do, then that's not a good signal. If there is abatement of the trend, then that's encouraging.

That's what they said about the current state of affairs twenty years ago. Uproar follows sudden changes. Slow and steady makes the totalitarian state.

They're probably afraid some guy will jump up and shout anti CCP 'propaganda'. It also means they'll lose face if they then proceed to put this guy in the prison.

I doubt the authenticity of the source, it's an anti-PRC site so it might be biased, and the source the article referenced was from a forum instead of some Chinese government's official website. Actually, the contest was widely discussed on some of China's major websites like Weibo and Zhihu so I don't think it was totally banned.

Gee, even with Trump as president this makes me so happy I live in the United States

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