The "Great Firewall of China" is moving a lot closer to home. Literally. It may now have a presence in each Chinese home
China is requiring personal computers sold in the country to carry software that blocks online pornography and other Web sites, potentially giving one of the world's most sophisticated censorship regimes even more control over the Internet.
The software's developer said Monday the tool would give parents more oversight by preventing computers from accessing sites with pornographic pictures or language.
They say that it can be disabled by parents, of course, and that the government is not going to be using it to spy on Chinese citizens. Apparently it's only to allow parents to protect children from harmful influences such as pornography, drugs, ... and basketball.
Yes, basketball. As the company's general manager says: "If a father doesn't want his son to be exposed to content related to basketball or drugs, he can block all Web sites related to those things"
Of course, that's silly to think that pornography can be blocked effectively. I remember as a young boy back in aught three, confronting my school's Internet filter. Now, I didn't actually search for hardcore pornography ... at school, anyway. At least not for the purpose of viewing hardcore pornography.
At our high-school newspaper, we were doing an article on child trafficking. Unfortunately, we could not access many of the sites involved on the subject, because they were suspected to be child pornography sites. We also once needed a picture of some Klansmen; I believe we were writing about the tables in the school library arranged in a Swastika formation (almost certainly not maliciously, I would note). I couldn't access the Klan's website.
I also tried to show a friend a website called jerseygop.com that I had read about in the New York Times.
WHO knows if the Republican Babe of the Week feature on Tom Schneider's conservative Web site will do much for the party in New Jersey?
...
Don't worry about the official New Jersey Republican Party Web site (www.njgop.org) with its earnest assemblage of position papers and dour officeholders. Instead, check out its evil twin at www.jerseygop.com. That's where Mr. Schneider is hoping to prove that the party of Pat Robertson and James Dobson is also the party of lacy lingerie and bare skin, where being wrapped in the flag takes on a whole new meaning.
...
90 percent of the visitors to his site come for his Republican Babe feature, which exists somewhere between hard-core patriotism and soft-core porn, where state secrets meet Victoria's Secret.
In other words, I am certain Mr. Schneider had more than just starbursts for Governor Palin. Unfortunately, I could not show the site to a friend, because it was blocked for featuring "swimwear" or something like that.
Having been foiled three times, I set out to beat the censors. One search for 'porn' on Google, clicking to the 10th page of results, and voila, I had found some porn. I believe this may have been the first of many times I was kicked out of the high school library.
I believe this long, revealing anecdote more than shows the futility of blocking pornography.
However, it may not be futile for other purposes. As Charles Mok, an Internet freedom advisory group member, says:
"This is a very bad thing," said Charles Mok, chairman of the Hong Kong chapter of the Internet Society, an international advisory group on Internet standards. "It’s like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy."
In other words: on American Internet, you can watch videos on government sites; in Soviet China, government watch YOU!
On the plus side, the Chinese have, at least for the moment, forgotten that not everyone uses PCs.
Even beyond ethical concerns, those who have tested the new software describe it as technically flawed. An American software engineer said it led machines to crash frequently. Others worry that it could leave tens of millions of computers vulnerable to hackers. So far, at least, there is no version for the Linux operating system and Apple’s Macintosh system.
So, given that you can buy anything that's illegal to redistribute on the Chinese black market, one assumes that whatever the government tries, they won't be able to prevent distribution of Debian and Ubuntu and various other free (as in freedom) operating systems.