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Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions
- science4sail 2y agoThat's actually kind of brilliant - akin to putting "David Mayer" into your documents to poison them for OpenAI [0]. That said, I wonder: what's the motive here? Too many spammy applications from Chinese? Affirmative action to favor native students? Plain old racism? This also makes me wonder if Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese people have different reputations in Japan given that Taiwan is a former Japanese colony and that the Taiwanese aren't shy about what happened in Tiananmen Square. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certain-names-make-chatgpt-grind-to-a-halt-and-we-know-why/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certa...
- gruez 2y ago>That's actually kind of brilliant - akin to putting "David Mayer" into your documents to poison them for OpenAI [0]. Or more relatedly, the "Tiananmen Square" copypasta. https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-tiananmen-square-copypasta-the-censorship-hack-to-silence-gamers-explained https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-tiana...
- maxglute 2y ago>actually kind of brilliant ... >what's the motive here It's smooth brain stupid, like comments posting Tiananmen copypastas on reddit or youtube thinking it would kick out PRC users, who are on those sites in the first place because they're already using VPN to jump over the GFW. Ditto with PRC cohorts who applies to study abroad, who will invariably have VPN access and just switch on if a admissions page times out. Like ~50% of Japan's international students are from PRC, and this is University of Tokyo who from anecdotes is very friendly to PRC applicants, and have one of the largest international student bodies in general. Quick search online Tokyo University has 4968 international students, 3232 is from PRC, or 65%, substantially higher than JP average, which is way more than I thought. So it's likely just some disgruntled racist who thought it was this one neat trick to block the chicoms, otherwise if it's formal policy, admissions could always just lowkey reduce PRC admission without any overt evidence and prevent drama.
- dudisubekti 2y agoChinese academia use VPNs all the time to access foreign sites. I doubt this is effective to deter applications coming from China. It's probably just a page admin trying to be an activist at best, or being racist at worst.
- numpad0 2y agoIt's not even activism, just a common snakeoil DDoS-away. Not to say it's okay but not rare.
- dudisubekti 2y agoThis is Tokyo U though, one of the best university in Japan. If they're really having a DDOS/spam problems, I don't think it's difficult for them to hire competent IT people to mitigate them (Cloudflare, captcha, AI spam detector, etc)
- clpmsf 2y agoThe Taiwanese tourists seem to have a significantly more favorable reputation in Japan (in comparison to the Chinese tourists).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tokinonagare 2y ago> Too many spammy applications from Chinese? As I explain in my own post, to many Chinese applicants, period. A lot of Chinese students are very good, but since China population is huge and a lot wants to go abroad (student visa is a door for immigration) there simply too much demand to go in what is a smaller country in comparison. Taiwanese are definitively seen in a different light than Chinese, however there isn't a strong awareness of the shared past between the two countries in younger generations.
- phoe-krk 2y ago> Discrimination against Korean and Chinese nationals in Japan is, sadly, not an isolated phenomenon. The whole article is based on two premises: * that the Great Firewall of China blocking all instances of 六四天安門 in website text is expected and normal, * that leveraging that behavior in any way (see Hyrum's Law) is unexpected and abnormal. If the government seeks to filter any and all websites containing a given string, why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website? They are not the actor performing the filtering. One can argue it's the government of China discriminating against Chinese people who want to access information abroad in general.
- quink 2y agoI’m also confused because based on that screenshot, the page has HTTPS, which would mean either the block would be client-side, or the entire domain is blocked.
- josephcsible 2y agoOr that China uses rogue root CA's to MITM their citizens' HTTPS traffic.
- jonny_eh 2y agoOr they scrape sites and block domains that have pages that contain keywords.
- tgv 2y agoWikipedia says "The National Intelligence Law of the People's Republic of China theoretically allows the Chinese government to request and use the root certificate from any Chinese certificate authority,[60] such as CNNIC, to make MITM attacks with valid certificates." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Active_filtering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Active_filterin...]
- gruez 2y ago
- joemazerino 2y ago[flagged]
- jknoepfler 2y agoTheir admissions site is also not available in North Korea, is this Tokyo University's problem?
- zaik 2y agoIt's a deliberate act to include this string in the website. Very different.
- jknoepfler 2y agoI don't think anyone anywhere should cater to suppression of Tiananmen Square, and think 100% of the fault lies on the active act of censorship, not the morally and ethically positive act of making a government attrocity visible. I guess I don't care "why"... color me crazy. Censorship goes away, problem goes away. End of story for me.
- gruez 2y ago>I don't think anyone anywhere should cater to suppression of Tiananmen Square Not including it in meta keyword tag on the website for graduate admissions is hardly "suppression".
- jknoepfler 2y agoRight, it's collateral damage from blocking all internet sites containing the string, period. Why are we blame-shifting from the Chinese government?
- gruez 2y ago>Why are we blame-shifting from the Chinese government? What gave you the impression that "blame-shifting" is happening? See my other comment. Blame isn't a zero sum game. The fact that the university is racist doesn't mean china is off the hook for censorship.
- orwin 2y agoHonestly I doubt this would have caused a lot of backlash, both in Japan and in the world, and personally I'm slightly impressed by the idea. Also it's poor taste. If it was 'Xi looks like Winnie the pooh' with a hidden image of the yellow bear, they should have left it on.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoYou don't think a conspiracy to keep Chinese students from applying to a university while on the surface saying you are open to such applications would cause any backlash? Regardless of your geopolitics, it's weird to claim one thing and secretly do another, especially regarding college admissions
- codedokode 2y agoNote that the keyword was used in a "meta keyword" tag, which is invisible when viewing the page in the browser.
- hinkley 2y agoThis is an important distinction. A history teacher saying idgaf and mentioning it in an article on a university hosted website is one thing. Putting it in meta tags, on a graduate admissions site, seems a lot less like free speech and a lot more like fuck you guys.
- huijzer 2y ago> In a bombshell accusation, This accusation is only a bombshell if you lived under a rock for the past decades. I have to admit that I have never been to Japan nor that I am a Japan or China expert, but I don’t read much positive things on their relationship. China says Japan should admit their wartime crimes when they invaded China, and Japan says China should stop conducting assertive actions especially in the East China Sea. According to one poll, the country with the most negative view of China is Japan [1]. Chinese citizen have a similar negative view of Japan [2]. Still, both countries do trade a lot which I don’t understand. I’m curious if anyone here knows more about this. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_Japan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_Ja... [2]: https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15534487 https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/15534487
- Onavo 2y agoFrom my understanding the underlying issue is purely geopolitical, neither side gives a shit about the historical reasons and it's mostly being used as propaganda material and a cudgel against each other. Maybe a Japanese/Chinese speaker should comment but from speaking to them, they seem to have no qualms about traveling to either country for tourism.
- cowpig 2y ago> neither side gives a shit about the historical reasons this goes directly against my understanding and also against all of my anecdotal experiences for example, people I know who lived in China described to me that bad guys in TV shows are often Japanese war criminals
- pupppet 2y agoCould you throw that in a page to block Chinese bots/crawlers?
- tothrowaway 2y agoThis post caught my attention because I do the same thing! Yes, it absolutely works.
- jncfhnb 2y agoVery funny to me.
- throwaway290 2y agoThat's amazing. I don't see any possible way Tokyo uni is guilty here but CCP isn't... otherwise it's some new level of 1984.
- bertil 2y agoDoes anyone know how the news is covered in the Chinese media?
- corank 2y agoPretty confident that it's not covered at all.
- numpad0 2y agoOuch. This won't look good. I doubt this was done to specifically block Chinese applications, as this string is just a common reverse spam filter. The idea is that Chinese GFW will catch it anyhow or give such impression to spammers to scare them. Allegedly suspicious TCP reset or packet losses following responses including this type of text wasn't rare up until 2010s. Legitimate traffic to Japanese websites is supposedly negligible, therefore resistance against even cutting off all Chinese IPs is quite small among savvy Japanese computer users, and so is to sprinkle this string. Searching "六四天安門 スパム" should give you general public sentiments on this method, not specific to this case. It's at most considered a mildly questionable choice.
- theyknowitsxmas 2y ago[flagged]
- ozarker 2y agoHow does this blocking work with TLS? Does the Chinese firewall MITM HTTPS somehow?
- exabrial 2y agoAfter working for Alibaba and being in China for several months, I can assure you it goes all ways. Racism is so casual it was literally talked about outloud during meetings. Was quite the culture shock.
- smegma2 2y ago> It also says it’s updated its source code check-in verification procedures to prevent anyone from entering the keyword into the University’s HTML code a second time. I agree that the phrase shouldn’t be used to intentionally filter out Chinese students but this sounds like a horrible precedent. We shouldn’t adopt the same censorship outside of China.
- tokinonagare 2y agoOf course the act is controversial, but it's more interesting to look at why it's happening. No, it's no "racism". There are plenty of Chinese students in Japanese university labs at graduate level. It depends on the branch, but for some speciality it's not rare to have half of graduate students being Chinese. Master degrees and PhD are no very attractive to the native since a bachelor is already almost a guarantee to get a good job, so I an way Japanese research is done on the back of international students, including a lot of Chinese. The thing is Japan universities have an issue with the number of (good) Chinese students applicants. They already have some special rules, but they can't be too special either. Which mean that without further tweaks, almost no other international applicants would get accepted. University already raised the requirement to the level of Japanese for exchange students a decade ago for that reason, but that didn't solved anything since Chinese writing and vocabulary plus education style give them an edge to reach the highest levels of JLPT easier than other foreigners.