hush!
Onto more controversial topics once again. This time it's all about censorship. You may have read on the news about China's plans to introduce internet filtering software as prerequisites on all new computers in China. As well, you may also know that school children will be the first 'beneficiaries' of this new policy direction.
As expected, this move by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (中華人民共和國工業和信息化部) has drawn swift condemnation by the online community and western media alike. Sceptics of the plan believe this is an extension of the country's censorship might beyond internet server and internet cafe management directly into the homes of its citizens.
This is the internet site people can download the censorship software. The software is called "绿坝·花季护航", which is a "绿色屏障" (green screen) created by the Chinese youth for the youth. 255,432 people have already downloaded the program at the time of writing. Interestingly, this software is also split into multiple versions for different users, namingly home users, internet cafe operators, schools and for servers.
China says that this software aims to prevent pornographic and immoral material from reaching the naive population. Many believe that the list of blocked websites contains more than just level-3 content websites. Hardly surprising when during the Tiananmen Square incident anniversary, major western media sites including news agencies, Youtube, Blogger, Twitter, etc were blocked.
What I found most funny throughout the whole process was the picture used to sell the idea to the public.
Translation: the black germs say "不良網站" (bad websites) "不良信息" (bad communications), the hands say "國家" (country) "財政" (finances), and the screen is the software project name. The focus of the project is to protect the youth of China. I am not quite sure if I understand the word 'protect' or if it should be 'suppress', but I will refrain from speaking my mind especially after all I have said in the last post.
Will Australia follow with our internet screening to be implemented by the government and enforced on all participating ISPs?
benny | Wednesday, June 10, 2009 
Comments
from