Behind the Great Firewall: What It's Really Like To Log On From China 90
alphadogg (971356) writes China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them. This IDG News Service writer has lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to "harmonize" the Web and throw a wrench in his online viewing. It's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month — an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.
They could have asked me (Score:1, Funny)
I lived in China for 10 years. I don't like their censorship but I have to admit, they are very good at it. And they've developed something that the NSA can only wet dream about. I shudder to think how much computing power is used. They don't simply block content, they also modify it (text and images, particularly). For example, if you're looking at some standard western porn (white man fucking a white woman) they run image filters to shrink the penis size. There are some image artifacts but if you weren't familiar with white cock you'd probably mistake them for jpg compression. Interestingly, they don't shrink black cock.