This thread is part of a larger topic, raised here.

The newspaper reports how China's political handlers are trying to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, as it were. Excerpts below are from Charles Hutzler, China Finds New ways to Restrict Access to the Internet, in today's Wall Street Journal.

. . .The phalanx of barriers China uses to block access to dissenting views on the Internet is growing in sophistication and reach, stretching from network nerve centers to home desktop computers.
. . .China's Internet police are using a filtering technology to disable a popular feature of Google. The feature taps into snapshots of Web pages stored on Goggle's servers – which are based outside China – and was once a common way for Chinese to view sites that were otherwise blocked. Separately, [another] research project found a list of banned words and phrases that a Chinese company embeds in desktop software to filter messaging among PCs and cellphones. Added together, these reports are helping to flesh out the shape of what critics have dubbed "the Great Firewall of China" and show how successful China has been in bringing to heel the Internet, which was once championed abroad as an unruly marketplace of ideas that would promote free expression.
. . .New filtering technology operated presumably by government authorities combs messages forr objectionable words. E-mails can be lost in Chinese cyberspace and never reach their destinations, and requestis to search engines, which provide lists of Web sites based on words, can go unanswered. Chinese hackers who unlocked the program file found a list of banned key words. One analysis estimated that 15% of the forbidden terms are sexual while the rest are political, including the names of Chinese leaders. Among the more than 1,000 taboo terms: democracy, sex, Christian, Falun Gong, Hu Jintao [China's president], human rights, multiparty, oppose corruption, underground church, overthrow, prostitution, riot, Taiwan independence, Tiananmen, Free Tibet, traitor, and dictatorship.
. . .[Also,] Chinese authorities two years ago temporarily blocked all access to the Google search engine. When service was restored, Google's feature that stores copies of Web sites, called its cache function, was disabled. Chinese Internet users had been able to view banned sits by accessing the cache. Since the stored pages could be accessed without visiting the original Web sites, Chinese consumers were able to get around some of the government's blocking techniques.

I solicit your thoughts, comments, and prognostications.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

When I was travelling I was staying in touch with friends using e-mail. Out of idle curiosity whenever I was in an internet cafe I always clicked on the history to see what kind of stuff the locals were browsing. In a dusty nowhere-nothing kind of town in the middle of Iran - a country with a repressive regime and allegedly a high moral standard - I found a list of several hundred sites accessing just about every kind of hard pornography I'd ever heard of and a good few I had never heard of.
I didn't actually check to see if the filtering software blocked them but someone had certainly been busy in trying to access them

In China I suspect that they are more concerned about letting people see world news though.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Quote "...in the middle of Iran - a country with a represivee regime and alegedly a high moral standard ..."

I suspect that all moral standards are set by those in postions of authority for others to follow. Such standards are generally a complete waste of time since those for who they have been set ignore them and those who have set them believe they don't apply to themselves!