Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Bloggers Shanghai'd

I got this story via email from my oldest daughter....I'd heard some minor parts of it reported before but it appears the Chinese Government is really cracking down on bloggers ability to write, and Microsoft MSN has joined Google and Yahoo in cooperating with this restrictive behavior. You'd think porn would be blocked right?

Words blocked from Chinese Bloggers who also have to register with the Government by June 30th: (I apologize in advance for using such "profane" words here on my blog)



freedom
democracy
demonstration
human rights
Taiwan Independence

Microsoft has stated it has to follow the laws of the Chinese Government, Google and Yahoo have made similar statements.

From the article:

According to Reporters Without Borders, China is using a system called Night Crawler to patrol web journals and make sure that only registered blogs are published. Unregistered blogs will be shut down.

"Following Yahoo, here is a second American internet giant giving way to the Chinese authorities and agreeing to self-censorship", said the group in a statement.

"The lack of ethics on the part of these companies is extremely worrying. Their management frequently justifies collaboration with Chinese censorship by saying that all they are doing is obeying local legislation."

"We believe that this argument does not hold water and that these multinationals must respect certain basic ethical principles, in whatever country they are operating."

While I understand where Reporters without Borders is coming from the reality is a different situation. These companies feel they must cooperate with the Chinese regulations. The answer to me isn't to blame Microsoft, though I realize they usually are the ones with the big bullseye painted on. I checked to see who developed the Night Crawler technology that is being used to censor these blogs, it was developed by the Chinese.

So what is the real answer to stop this?

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