Monday, March 21, 2005
Censorship and China
My sister can't view my blog. She's in China and the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to prevent the people from viewing material that is inappropriate. Seriously. They actually run the entire countries internet connetion through government servers that have data monitoring software in them. Then if the software detects an offending website it is blocked from being viewed in China.
Now you may ask yourself, what has Dustin done to offend China? Then you might chuckle and say what DOESN'T Dustin do to offend China? Heh. Anyways, the point is why would my blog be censored by the government of China? Because it's not easy to watch every single web page that comes through, so if a site has enough "bad" webpages the whole site is blocked. In the case of www.blogger.com there are at least one (if not many more) offensive blogs that triggered the detection and caused the entire blogger site to be censored. These blogs can range from Falun Dafa supporters, to anti-Chinese censorship blogs or just plain old porn blogs. (Are there plain porn blogs? If so, what's an unusual porn blog?)
Other sites China blocks.
abc.com
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) Calgary/Banff Chapter
Ice Rink Management Asia & Ice Rink Resources
The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia
The list goes on... Refer to the above link for more entertaining sites that are blocked.
THE GOOD NEWS.
Besides supporting organizations like Amnesty International who have kept track of China's human right's records like this issue you can start your own encrypted proxy whichallows people to "hide" there interent traffic. Keep in mind though: In 2001 it was found the Chinese government allowed the death sentenance to be issued for viewing "inappropriate materials" on the internet.
The other thing you can do is "syndicate" your blog by publishing an RSS feed and then allow a program (on a server outside of China) to harvest the feed and convert it to email.
QUOTE from my sister's email to me:
Now you may ask yourself, what has Dustin done to offend China? Then you might chuckle and say what DOESN'T Dustin do to offend China? Heh. Anyways, the point is why would my blog be censored by the government of China? Because it's not easy to watch every single web page that comes through, so if a site has enough "bad" webpages the whole site is blocked. In the case of www.blogger.com there are at least one (if not many more) offensive blogs that triggered the detection and caused the entire blogger site to be censored. These blogs can range from Falun Dafa supporters, to anti-Chinese censorship blogs or just plain old porn blogs. (Are there plain porn blogs? If so, what's an unusual porn blog?)
Other sites China blocks.
abc.com
Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) Calgary/Banff Chapter
Ice Rink Management Asia & Ice Rink Resources
The Legislative Assembly of British Columbia
The list goes on... Refer to the above link for more entertaining sites that are blocked.
THE GOOD NEWS.
Besides supporting organizations like Amnesty International who have kept track of China's human right's records like this issue you can start your own encrypted proxy whichallows people to "hide" there interent traffic. Keep in mind though: In 2001 it was found the Chinese government allowed the death sentenance to be issued for viewing "inappropriate materials" on the internet.
The other thing you can do is "syndicate" your blog by publishing an RSS feed and then allow a program (on a server outside of China) to harvest the feed and convert it to email.
QUOTE from my sister's email to me:
cool. i found a rss2email script and am running it on my cs server.
so now i can get your blog through email. :) china's firewall once
again screwed! funny that the u.s. government's mission to have
a decentralized computer network that could not be taken down even if one of the
computers was destroyed by warfare....also leads to the discovery of a network
where you cannot censor "public" information (well, even some "private" for that
matter, see hackers). alissa
