Posted on 01/03/2006 1:47:12 PM PST by Lloyd227
Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle "Michael Anti." MacKinnon notes that "Anti is one of China's edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible." His blog, hosted on Microsoft's MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to the Chinese regime:
On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong" (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: "This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item."However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled "I love you" had "Tibet independence" in the text body, and a post titled "I am happy" had "Falun Gong" in the body [...]
This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down [...] with an error message: "This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.
Gee, if I had a company and the PRC govt asked me to do something, I would probably do the opposite.
blogspot maybe more free speech oriented. Google owns them.
Agreed, and one would think you could get good PR out of standing up to a repressive dictatorship. Maybe Microsoft is counting on future revenues from China, but they have little reason to respect American IP laws.
First Yahoo now Microsoft... Guess it's just "the price of doing business in China."
"Gee, if I had a company and the PRC govt asked me to do something, I would probably do the opposite."
But if you didn't do as the PRC asked, you'd lose business. What then? I would venture a guess that 9 out of 10 freepers would do exactly as the PRC asked.
Enough so that PRC completely blocks direct access to the blogspot.com and blogger.com domains from computers in that country. I found this out while trying to update a "travel diary" blog during a trip there. Fortunately, I was able to post blog entries via e-mail from my Yahoo account.
Gee wizz Wally, Is everyone going to sell their souls to China? Well Beav, yes they are.
This isn't at all surprising to me having spent some time in MSN chat.
Same thing goes for the US side of the pond, I bet. Modern day governments prefer to play omnipotent, and most people have some other objective (e.g. earn a profit) than tussling with the gov't - if they can go along to get along, it's nooo problem. For example, what happened to the internet archives (the wayback machine) of declassified LLNL technical reports after 9-11?
What's really odd is the US industry in crying censorship, racism, injustice, etc without actual occurance. For example, consider Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton in the race pimping industry. Consider also the NYT and it's whistle-blower sources who somehow can't be bothered to blow the actual whistle (i.e. to the actual authorities).
Fork em. Some business you don't need.
Just like IBM equipment was essential for Hitler's government to be able to keep track of the geneologies of every citizen, not to mention run their police state.
Just like IBM equipment was essential for Hitler's government to be able to keep track of the geneologies of every citizen, not to mention run their police state
Oddly enough, I have personally reviewed the leasing records for IBM equipment in Europe prior to WWII. It was mostly leased in the late twenties and early thirties before the Nazis took power. Most of the customers were Customs agencies. In 1989 I saw records for keypunches and tabulating machinery which had been under continous lease (with maintenance!) to Austrian Customs since 1926...
Having access to the entire dataset I researched this as part of QA-ing the database it went into...
According to FNC, President Hu uses Windows.
Just think : China is the prototype for the New World Order. What better way to make Windows the official OS of the NWO by kissing the ass of the president of the NWO prototype?
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