China's Censors Thrive in Obscurity

The Wall Street Journal ^ | March 31, 2010 | Loretta Chao and Jason Dean

[myknowledge]

BEIJING—The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.'s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government's Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.

By Wednesday, access to the sites appeared to have returned to normal—searches for some terms, but not all, were blocked. Government officials declined to comment when asked if they were the source of Tuesday's outage, leaving the situation and Google's future in China a mystery for users.

China operates one of the most extensive and sophisticated Internet-filtering systems in the world, according to analysts who have studied it. The system, unofficially dubbed the Great Firewall after China's most famous ancient defense installation, blocks access to a range of foreign content, from criticism of China's leaders to information about sensitive historical events.

[myknowledge]

Every time you are in a Chinese Internet cafe, you are under the watch of Cyber Big Brother.

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Going to google.cn now takes you to google.com.hk - it’s redirecting from here inside China to Hong Kong, where you still get everything.

And interestingly, if you type in google.com it brings up the US version, no problem at all.

Most of the younger Chinese know all about VPNs and proxies and use them extensively for “banned” information; a lot of the computers at Internet cafes have proxy software installed already, and nearly all personal computers do as well. It’s how I watch Netflix and Hulu worldwide (Netflix and Hulu don’t let you stream to anywhere outside the US) and it’s how most of the Chinese get information outside China. They simply don’t care most of the time...

Proxies and VPNs perforate the Great Firewall quite readily!

[myknowledge]

Wow! No wonder the techno-savvy Chinese netizens are thorns up the backside of the CCP’s Great Firewall.

[MissDairyGoodnessVT]

The Unpublished and Secret Diary of a Chinese Internet Censor

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Heh, the only way to stop information on the Internet is to disconnect it! I’ve shown friends visiting China the Wikipedia entry on the Tiananmen Square massacre, here in my apartment in Shanghai.

Information can’t be stopped; it is just a question of whether the youth of today care, and for most of the Chinese middle and upper class youth and young adults, they really don’t care. They are more worried about getting a good job, making money, buying a house and a car, and living comfortably.

In that regard, the Chinese Government is doing a better job than the Obama Administration - get the heck out of the way of people making their own lives better, and don’t ruffle feathers. If you keep the populace content, then you stay in power...

[myknowledge]

In that regard, the Chinese Government is doing a better job than the Obama Administration - get the heck out of the way of people making their own lives better, and don’t ruffle feathers. If you keep the populace content, then you stay in power...

Those two governments in charge of both countries (PRC and the USA) are controlled by the same globalist elite, and they are made to serve their purposes as the elite intends.

In China, the power elite want the CCP to stay in power for like, a century, so they keep the masses distracted and content at the same time.

However, in the United States, the same power elite want Obama to stay in power for one term, screw the masses' livelihoods, install another puppet (the 45th POTUS, unfortunately) and repeat the process over and over again at their whim.