Google Says No More Cens*rship! Looks like a battle is heating up between Google and China. In response to a cyber attack, which led to the compromise of Chinese dissidents’ gmail accounts, Google is no longer censoring their search engine on Google.cn and is considering leaving China altogether. FYI, Chinese Internet users largely ignore Google, [...]
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The New York Times reports today that China is restricting Internet access to many news websites and other pages with information on the situation in Tibet. How true is this for me and my neighbors here in Shandong Province? China’s internet service providers are not always unified in their censorship – when pages are blocked [...]
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and to ensure that we in the rest of the country don’t know anything about it, YouTube has been blocked, once again. There are news reports on Chinese websites about the protests/riots, but as you would expect, the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama are squarely to blame. Chinese bloggers are saying the usual (as usual, [...]
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Although I didn’t blog much while in Spain, it would have been infinitely easier there. Blogging in China is a real headache. Over the last 2.5 years in China, I have witnessed a noticeable decline in Internet usability. Maybe it is just me, maybe it is not. It just seems that more websites than ever [...]
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China is not the only country engaging in Internet filtering and censorship. Be very wary, it could happen in your own backyard! From a Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (FAIFE) listserv I belong to: Music Industry Pressures EU Politicians for Filtered Internet The music and film industry continues to pursue its idea [...]
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Or, Something Infuriating. Censorship sucks. Plain and simple. Yahoo promotes censorship, of this I’m sure. Yahoo Betrays Free Speech New York Times Editorial – 02 December 2007 For a company that ostensibly believes in the Internet’s liberating power, Yahoo has a gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression. The company helped Beijing’s state [...]
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“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury This week is banned books week in the US, and it is all the more pertinent to me since I live in a society where books are frequently banned, movies are censored, protests are squashed, news [...]
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Flickr, the place where I upload all my photos, continues to be blocked within China. I wrote before about how I am looking for a flickr alternative, but in the meantime, I have found a way to access Flickr, and I want to share it with others who may also be having problems. There is [...]
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The Great Firewall of China is such a strange thing. For almost a year I have had no direct access to this blog, then one day – *ta da* – I can access it no problem. For how long, I have no idea. But by no means am I free of censorship. For several months [...]
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Blogging is difficult in China. My blogging platform, WordPress, is banned in China. For me to be able to update, I have to launch a program called Tor which allows me to bypass the Great Firewall of China. It is slow, and sometimes it just doesn’t want to work. I’ve maintained a mirror of my [...]
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I'm an American expat living on the fringe of Chinese society. Thanks to a lifetime spent moving around, I often feel like an outsider. This blog explores life in Beijing, China, the occasional aviation topic, expat issues, random travel experiences and interesting things I see, read and hear. If you want to know more about my latest hobby, visit Sewing on the Fringe, where I blog about learning to sew in Beijing. And for daily documentation of Beijing's ever changing air quality, visit My Beijing Window. And, yes, I do wear my santa hat year-round. ;)
