The international Olympic committee (IOC)'s not-so-secret deal with China about internet censorship. Read all about it here.
I'm getting really really tired of all the Western countries being ignorant and making up sh|t about China. It really is a joke.
I just stumbled across a Facebook group. This is what it said
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Search results re-routed. Websites blocked.
Try to search for blacklisted sites like Amnesty International in China and you will get an error message or be re-routed to an authorised government site.
The same thing happens when you search for terms like democracy, Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square – timed out, connection reset.
The Great Firewall
That's Internet censorship, China's 'Golden Shield Project'. The Government is watching you.
Behind what has been dubbed the 'Great Firewall of China' citizens can be imprisoned for sending emails, posting blogs or passing on information deemed to be sensitive, a threat to national sovereignty or a state secret.
In China the Internet has become a new frontier in the fight for human rights.
Thousands of Internet police
China has reportedly employed between 30,000 and 50,000 special Internet police who, with the aid of Western-provided technology, read private emails, conduct surveillance, remove blogs and block banned websites.
On screen, Internet users looking at China's most popular websites will see a cartoon cyber-police officer appear every half hour. The cartoon officer reminds them not to view censored material.
In Internet cafés users have to give their full name and an identification card before a using computer. Many cafés, which are subject to random checks, have installed extra censorship software to make sure their customers don't break the rules.
New rules are regularly created to keep up with the pace of the Internet. In January this year licence agreements came into force dictating – in reaction to video-sharing sites like YouTube – that all video material on the web must be approved by a government regulatory body.
Breeding fear
There is no list of what is censored or what authorities are looking for – it's kept deliberately vague and is constantly updated – this instills fear and uncertainty in Internet surfers in the hope that, on top of all the other controls, they will censor themselves.
China is helped by the Internet companies – global giants Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft, and Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu – who have signed a pledge with the Government, the contents of which have not been made public.
The pledge allows the companies to operate in China, but only under conditions that involve censorship of their users.
For more information, go to: http://www.uncensor.com.au/
I am soooo angry words cannot express how mighty pissed off I am to find one of my favourite websites, flickr.com is now blocked in China too.
Last night I accidently typed in flicker.com without realising my mistake and saw that some cybersquatter is trying to sell it, and rejected the latest offer of US$600,000. What an idiot.
Meanwhile, after I realised my mistake and went to the correct site, strangely, none of the images were displaying. None At All. Not my own, none in a search, NONE. I immediately assumed it was my computer or ISP being slow or something and just left it....
...to try again this morning, to find that it was still like that. I got suss. I got very, very suss. I went to my trusty Shanghai sites to find that it had gotten blocked by China. Interesting, it is also blocked in parts of the Middle East. If you do a google search you can read more about it.
Geez!!
As if it isn't bad enough that every time I find something through google for a wikipedia article I have to circumvent their blocking by going to answers.com first, and as if it isn't bad enough that I even have to go through another site to access this blog, my own blog, (and any other blogger blog, as well as livejournal blogs), but now I can't even view my own photos on Flicker!
Bastards.
There are always ways around this though. It's just a pain having to use them but better than nothing.
Someone has already invented a Firefox plug-in to view flickr here.
Why I like Flickr
* I love photography. I love looking at the beautiful, awe-inspiring photos from people's everyday lives, holidays, events, everything. I have only a handful of pictures up there but always planned to put more up when I got my next computer upgrade.
* I love that I can search for random things and find a RECENT picture of it. If I go through google images I have to search through tonnes of crap to find anything half decent of what I'm looking for. Some examples of things I searched for... when I was planning our wedding I looked for bouquet, cake, invitation, dress, veil, etc ideas. When I am holiday planning I liked to search for hotels as I can actually see what the room looks like inside for real, not some fake glossy brochure type outdated photo that is on the hotel's website. I like to look for places to go to, or things to do. I love I can search for almost any keyword and turn up a bunch of really interesting photos on that topic.
I just realised I don't know if that plug-in works for Mac or not. If it doesn't I'm going to cry.. booo hooo... :(
PS - if you are interested (which I doubt you would be unless you are in China), you can read more here on the flickr website for updates.
Aahh it had to happen sooner or later. China has banned blogger/blogspot right now so I cannot even view my own blog. Luckily I was already prepared for this and found out I can use pkblogs.com to view and edit my site. It's a bit of a hassle but better than nothing!
Let's hope the big bad censors hurry up and go away and find better things to worry about than someone's blog. It's a bit unfair to censor a whole blog site (with thousands of blogs on it) just because of a few worrying ones, don't you think? :(
