· June, 2009

Stories about China from June, 2009

Study: Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Censorship

  25 June 2009

The academic debate on deep packet inspection (DPI) centres on methods of network management and copyright protection and is directly linked to a wider debate on freedom of speech on the Internet. The debate is deeply rooted in an Anglo-Saxon perspective of the Internet and is frequently depicted as a titanic struggle for the right to fundamentally free and unfettered access to the Internet. This debate is to a great extent defined by commercial interests. These interests whether of copyright owners, Internet service providers, application developers or consumers, are all essentially economic.

China: Blocking and framing Google

  25 June 2009

Last night, Google including search, gmail, document and other applications was blocked for 2 hours, although some ISPs have restored the access in couple of hours, a number of twitterers said that Google has still been blocked in some parts of China. Guardian quoted Xiao Qiang, the founder of China...

China: 2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens

  24 June 2009

In reaction to a series of internet censorship policy, in particular the introduction of Green Dam, a declaration has been circulated on the net in the past two days calling netizens to express and protect their rights to anonymity on July 1st. Below are the declaration posters and English translation...

China: Google.cn buys Green Dam service?

24 June 2009

Blogger dancing with G, quoted from a Google.cn source, reported that the company had spent a big sum of money to buy the Green Dam service for bettering the detection of obscene content. According to the blogger, google.cn's move is to make peace with the Chinese authority. Moreover, Google.cn has...

OpenNet Initiative Releases Results on Filtering in Asia

  17 June 2009

From the Great Firewall to the Myanmar Wide Web, Asia is well-known for its practices in Internet filtering. China has long taken the lead in blocking Web sites, filtering sites across the spectrum – from social to political content, pornography to Internet tools. The OpenNet Initiative (full disclosure: I'm involved)...

China: No more criticism against Green Dam!

  15 June 2009

Update: June 16 – Green Dam filter software ‘not compulsory’ – via China Daily. On June 10th, the central propaganda department issued a notice reminding all the media to report positively on Green Dam, Youth Escort, the filter and spyware to be installed in all PCs sold in China. Meanwhile,...

China: Green dam PC filtering

8 June 2009

According to Wall Street Journal (June 8, 2009), the Chinese government has required international PC makers to equip their PC shipped to China with filter software from July 1 onward. The new software, known as ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’, would link PCs with an updated database of banned sites and block...

China: Chinese Internet Maintenance Day

3 June 2009

On 2nd of June, a number of overseas websites including twitter, flickr and youtube have been blocked. Today, on 3rd of June, a large number of local websites, including Fanfou (Chinese version of twitter) and VeryCD (user generated resource sharing website), have put up system maintenance notices stating that the...

Twitter, Flickr, Bing, etc. blocked in China

3 June 2009

With the 20th Anniversary of June 4 approaching, netizens reported that a number of social networking and peer to peer communication websites have been blocked in China, including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Youtube, Blogspot etc. On Herdict, a censorship-tracking website, there are reports from all over China on the blocking of...