The Great Firewall of China
China has the second biggest online population, after the United States. Yet people in the republic are unable to mirror their brain through the Internet as the government is too cautious of what are the items deemed suitable for public viewing and not satire enough to be considered a threat to the Communist Party.
This comes as a news item after a plan to police the online community formed in blogs, chatrooms and other forms of media. This is a long follow up to the long imposed requirement to require websites to be registered not only through their domains and web hosts but through government agency tasked to oversee its activities. Failing to do so will mean fines of up to 1 million yuan.
An interesting sidebar I got from the news in the same week was the sentencing of a gamer to life imprisonment after he killed a fellow online gamer after the latter sold his virtual property -- a sword used in the game The Legend of Mir 3 -- for 7,200 yuan.
Back to the topic, I don't see China as a good implementor and the move will only backfire. Chinese bloggers will only be encouraged to do more and will eventually succeed in finding a hole in what could be purported security and censorship methods.
Just as pornography could never be prevented from spreading through the web, China will face the same problem in dealing with online content.
Just wondering though, in my tracing of spam messages, notably phishing emails (noted to trick someone to disclosing his password in a fictitious bank login system) in my junk mail folder, I found out that the e-mails were addressed from the United States but the IP addresses are from China. So with the campaign the government is trying to set up, it's purely political and nothing much as seeking welfare for online users.
This comes as a news item after a plan to police the online community formed in blogs, chatrooms and other forms of media. This is a long follow up to the long imposed requirement to require websites to be registered not only through their domains and web hosts but through government agency tasked to oversee its activities. Failing to do so will mean fines of up to 1 million yuan.
An interesting sidebar I got from the news in the same week was the sentencing of a gamer to life imprisonment after he killed a fellow online gamer after the latter sold his virtual property -- a sword used in the game The Legend of Mir 3 -- for 7,200 yuan.
Back to the topic, I don't see China as a good implementor and the move will only backfire. Chinese bloggers will only be encouraged to do more and will eventually succeed in finding a hole in what could be purported security and censorship methods.
Just as pornography could never be prevented from spreading through the web, China will face the same problem in dealing with online content.
Just wondering though, in my tracing of spam messages, notably phishing emails (noted to trick someone to disclosing his password in a fictitious bank login system) in my junk mail folder, I found out that the e-mails were addressed from the United States but the IP addresses are from China. So with the campaign the government is trying to set up, it's purely political and nothing much as seeking welfare for online users.
posted by Unknown at
8:50 AM
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