With Google now creating a portal for Chinese searchers (in tact with government censorship) many people are looking at how their sites are effected. After following the links in Jon and Mental's posts, I decided to calculate my own FCR: 2.54 (1,110/437). Not bad.
The Great Firewall of China reminds me of my time at Motorola/Freescale -- which has one of the most regressive web proxies that I've ever seen. In one case I found a website on hacking DirecTV cards. As we were working on cable television, I thought it would be good to understand how other systems had been hacked. As I went to the website I got the all too familiar "Website has been blocked" message. On that webpage it allowed comments, so I submitted some explaining how this related to my job and why I needed to visit this website. It cam back with a response saying "we're going to e-mail your boss." By the time I could go to his office to tell him, he had already sent off a reply reaffirming my assessment of the material. In the end, I was unable to get the website unblocked. The IT person in charge was nice enough to cut-and-paste the website into an e-mail for me, so that I could get to the material. I guess he was mature enough to handle the content on his own.
Another time I filled the comments field with something like "or you could just assume that we're all adults." This got a phone call. The poor guy that called me was caught completely off guard when I challenged his "we legally have to protect you" argument. I personally believe, though I have no legal basis for it, that they are probably increasing their liability by allowing me to assume that the Internet at work is "safe." Then, when I finally did see something objectionable, it would be their fault. I guess that wasn't what the guy who sold them the software told them.
They even blocked gnu.org for a while.
Those in China reading this laugh at how trivial my stories of repression are. And that is why I'm glad I live in America.
posted Feb 3, 2006 | permanent link
