Internet Censorship in China

Over 100 illegal websites have been shut down by Chinese authorities since early May. Many believe that the crackdown is aimed at independent watchdog sites in mainland China.

According to the State Internet Information Office, the 107 websites were shut down for failing to obtain official permission to establish and run sites, allegedly blackmailing government and corporate officials, and using terms such as China and people in their names.

However the Chinese authorities didn't mention the onerous expense and conditions that make it nearly impossible for small websites to actually obtain such permission.

For individuals or small groups wanting to start their own websites, these regulations create large, often insurmountable obstacles. Many do not have the resources to comply with government requests for content removal and user data, which can easily become a full-time job for one or more people. Others are unable to obtain the costly business licenses needed to apply for an online content provider license.

To get around these bureaucratic procedures, some choose to affiliate themselves with established institutions or corporations so that they can register as a web-branch of a legitimate entity. Currently, there are many privately-run websites registered as web-branches of established institutions. A crackdown on these web-branches would be disastrous.

A handful of sites on the crackdown list are indeed linked to corporate extortion. But most of the so-called blackmailing activities are citizen initiatives that uncover corruption of government officials and party members.

Websites that use terms such as people , China and Chinese to name themselves are considered fraudulent and thus deemed illegal . The Chinese authorities claimed that websites such as People's Voices or People's shopping , People's News mislead the public, giving the false impression that these sites are affiliated with the Party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily.

Among the sites recently taken down are several devoted to citizen legal rights and anti-corruption efforts, including China Legal Rights Net, Xiaoxiang Anti-corruption Forum, Legal Rights Defense Net, China Legal System Monitor, People's Rights Monitor, Legal Report, People's Petition, and many other similar organizations.

China has censored an image of Winnie the Pooh strolling with Tigger, after it went viral on popular Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo.

The image was circulated after bloggers noticed the similarities between a photo snapped this week of President Barack Obama and Chinese premier Xi Jinping and an illustration of the cartoon characters.

China is reported to be trying to be more subtle in its internet censorship and is trying to hide it a bit.

In the past, a search for keywords in China related to the events of June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square, came up with a message saying:

According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for Tiananmen Square can not be displayed.

GreatFire.org said in the lead up to the anniversary of the massacre certain searches, such as June 4 incident , had been intermittently returning a series of carefully selected results , though it was impossible to click through to the actual webpages. GreatFire.org said searches for Tiananmen incident returned links to an unrelated happening in the square from 1976.

The organisation said this was an example of censorship at its worst , with users duped into believing the keyword they were searching for was not a sensitive topic. It said the changes were not applied consistently, concluding that the authorities were conducting tests on the new approach.

China has launched a new drive to silence its boisterous microblogging culture by closing influential accounts belonging to writers and intellectuals who have used them to highlight social injustice.

Attention has turned to the country's opinion formers. A recent commentary in the state-run Global Times newspaper warned that Big Vs -- meaning verified accounts with millions of followers -- had become relay stations for online rumours and accused them of harming the dignity of the law .

State news agency Xinhua claimed the account of He Bing, a well known professor, was suspended because he had purposely spread rumours . Other intellectuals have seen accounts deleted outright.

In the past few days, China's most influential microblogging platform, Sina Weibo, has been deleting posts related to a controversial editorial, known as the Southern Weekly's New Year Greeting incident . All the related keywords, and even terms like the South (??), the first part of the newspaper's name, are unsearchable. Outraged micro-bloggers keep yelling and cursing at Sina Weibo's managers.

However, a Sina Weibo's manager, @geniune_Yu_Yang, frustrated by the pressure the Propaganda Department imposed upon him and his colleagues, came out and wrote an inside story to explain Sina's difficult position. Below is a quick translation of what he wrote:

Last night in [Sina] Weibo, apart from the Propaganda Department, my work unit was the second most popular target of netizens' verbal attack. The screen was full of the terrifying note: The micro-blog has been deleted. The platform looked like a sinking ship with thousands of holes on it. My boss, Lao Shen's [Sina] Weibo's page is full of cursing. In particular, after the Southern Weekly incident had been reported by Netease [a popular web portal] extensively yesterday, attacks on Sina's cowardice and its role as the running dog [of the Propaganda Department] reached a climax. I was so frustrated and finally fought with a famous online script-writer. After I cooled down, I reflected upon the whole thing, feeling the urge to write a long micro-blog to explain the situation in detail.

Very often, you can't see the truth when you just see the phenomena and when you are overwhelmed with anger.

1. If we don't delete your post, the alternative is that your account will be banned. This platform belongs to the public. It has changed our life and can exercise influence on the society and government through the spread of opinion. On the one hand, we have millions of netizens, on the other hand, we have, not Sina [Weibo, but the government and the authorities]. Since the day [around the end of March 2012] when Sina Weibo suspended its comments function for three days, a special group of people have the authority to decide on the criteria for giving out alert signals, and can make [Sina] Weibo go game-over as simply as treading on some ants without giving a damn about people's needs. When they issue urgent orders (like the Emperor's 18 golden orders in ancient time), you have to execute them.

We need [Sina] Weibo to deliver voices. But a hand is manipulating behind us. Someone is doomed to be sacrifice in this game. We live in a country full of special and sensitive barriers and we have to operate within a set of rules.

2. With such background, we have the second thesis: The strategy on deletion and distribution. Please think about this: You guys keep posting messages like machines, and the micro-blog secretaries keep deleting them. If we don't delete messages one by one and suspend accounts, we could have saved more time and energy. We could have served better as the running dog. You can see the messages before they are deleted, right? You still have your account functioning, right? You are all experienced netizens, you know that the technology allows us to delete messages in a second. Please think carefully on this.

3. In some cases, other platforms have more space than Sina. Sina is the biggest tree and everyone is using the platform. Classmate Xuan [, nickname for the Propaganda Department,] will watch every single act. Once the leaves of the tree move, the bell rings. The way we receive orders is similar to the way the Catholic Father in the movie Cinema Paradiso rings his hand bell whenever there is a kissing scene. We have to take orders whenever we hear the ringing bell.

Before this incident occurred, and at its very early stages, we were under a lot of pressure. We tried to resist and let the messages spread. This is our accomplishment already. Our official account @Sina_Media reported on the suspension of the Southern Weekly instantly, and the news was retweeted by @headline_news, which was again retweeted again 30,000 times in 10 mins. Then we got the order from Classmate Xuan and we had to delete it. Fortunately, the message had been distributed. A friend from Penguin website left a warm message in my microblog: This is a battle. Sina [Weibo] is a human flesh shield. It is a courageous act.

4. Expectedly, my bosses have to go through tea session [euphemism for police interview] again. I have to stop here.

China's legislature has approved new rules that will further tighten government control of the Internet by requiring users to register their real names, and demanding Internet companies censor online material.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency says lawmakers approved the measures Friday at the closing meeting of a five-day session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.

The move seems to be in response to the runaway success of Weibo, a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, which has exposed corruption and other abuses of official power.

China has long tried to get Internet users to register their real names rather than pseudonyms with service providers without total success. The new rules lay the groundwork to police companies that are not complying with the government's censorship policies

China appears to be tightening its repressive control of internet services that are able to burrow secretly through what is known as the Great Firewall , which prevents citizens there from reading supposedly inappropriate overseas content.

Both companies and individuals are being hit by the new technology deployed by the Chinese government. A number of companies providing virtual private network (VPN) services to users in China say the new system is able to learn, discover and block the encrypted communications methods used by a number of different VPN systems.

China Unicom, one of the biggest telecoms providers in the country, is now killing connections where a VPN is detected, according to one company with a number of users in China.

Users in China suspected in May 2011 that the government there was trying to disrupt VPN use, and now VPN providers have begun to notice the effects.

Astrill, a VPN provider for users inside and outside China, has emailed its users to warn them that the Great Firewall system is blocking at least four of the common protocols used by VPNs, which means that they don't function. But the company added that trying to stay ahead of the censors is a cat-and-mouse game -- although it is working on a new system that it hopes will let it stay ahead of the detection system.

A blogger is facing five years in prison after he was arrested for writing a joke on Twitter about the deaths of Chinese Communist Party delegates.

Zhai Xiaobing, from Beijing, has received the support of hundreds of internet users following the joke about the party's congress on November 8.

Mr Xiaobing's tweet on November 5 suggested the next movie in the Final Destination horror film franchise would be about the Great Hall of the People collapsing on party delegates.

He posted on Twitter: An earth-shaking debut will be seen at the global premiere on Nov. 8!

Family members said that Miyun county police had taken him away on November 7 and seized his computer.

A Miyun county police officer said that Zhai was being investigated for spreading terrorist information .

Despite the fact that Twitter and Facebook are technically blocked in China, the two services are still widely used, according to data from market researcher GlobalWebIndex (see graph, bottom).

When asked which services they had contributed to in the last month, 25% of surveyed Chinese users said they had used Google+, 15% used Facebook, and 8% accessed Twitter. Local equivalents are Qzone (66%), followed by Sina Weibo (61%), and Tencent Weibo (56%).

GlobalWebIndex has been tracking the growth of social media use in China since 2009. At that point, there were 11.8 million Twitter users there, a number that grew to 35 million in the second quarter of 2012. Facebook use, meanwhile, jumped from 7.9 million to 65.2 million during the same time period, said GlobalWebIndex founder Tom Smith.

So how do Chinese users access Facebook and Twitter? According to Smith, people are using virtual private networks (VPNs), virtual cloud networks (VCNs), or internationally routed connections, meaning users won't be picked up by analytics and won't actually register as being in a Chinese location.

In short, Smith said, the 'Great Firewall' is not as solid as many people think.

Chinese internet users were barred from searching the truth on its leading social media website. Attempts to search for the phrase were blocked on the Twitter-like site Weibo.com, which boasts 300million users.

Users noticed that if they typed in the Chinese characters for the truth , they received a message refusing to display any results. It read: According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for 'the truth cannot be displayed.'

It is not known how long the phrase search was blocked and if China's controlling Communist government intervened. But under Chinese law, social media firms are also required to self-censor.

Qi Zhenyu, head of social media for iSun Affairs, a Hong Kong-based current affairs online magazine that is banned in China, said of Weibo:

It is not unusual but it is quite ironic this time -- you can't simply block the truth.

Whenever there is a word that upsets them, they just go ahead and block [but] most of the time you can't really explain why they censor a certain word.

China has suspended comments on two popular Twitter-like microblogs until April 3.

The state-run Xinhua news service in a report said the two were being punished for allowing rumors to spread.

Some 16 websites have been closed and six people have detained for supposedly fabricated rumors about military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing. .

A spokesman for the censors at the State Internet Information Office said the two big microblogs have been criticized and punished accordingly.

Update: Rumours of Coup

1st April 2012. See  article from  guardian.co.uk

China has intensified online censorship by closing 16 websites and detaining six people for spreading rumours of a coup amid Beijing's most serious political crisis for years.

The moves underline official anxieties ahead of this year's leadership transition, particularly since the sacking of Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai led to widespread speculation about infighting at the top.

As the mood on microblogs grew increasingly febrile, there were even claims of an attempted coup in the Chinese capital, complete with photographs of military vehicles that turned out to be from a parade three years ago.

Property tycoon Zhang Xin, who has more than 3 million microblog followers, wrote: What is the best way to stop 'rumours'? It is transparency and openness. The more speech is discouraged, the more rumours there will be.

The underlying problem is that you can't get the truth out of the government, so you might as well believe stuff flying around on the internet, agreed Jeremy Goldkorn, who runs the Danwei website on Chinese media.

Don't look at me.. I was just out getting soy sauce

Scaling the wall. Buying soy sauce. Fifty cents. A mild collision. May 35. Mayor Lymph. River crab.

These words --- mild, silly, inoffensive --- are part of the subversive lexicon being used by Chinese bloggers to ridicule the government, poke fun at Communist Party leaders and circumvent the heavily censored Internet in China. A popular blog that tracks online political vocabulary, China Digital Times, calls them part of the resistance discourse on the mainland.

...

Perry Link, the author of Liu Xiaobo's Empty Chair , described the use of code words and Aesopian allegory by Mr. Liu and other popular bloggers like Han Han: Harmony, for example, is a key word used in the government's rhetoric, and Internet writers use hexie, or river crab, which is a near-homonym of the Chinese word for harmony, to mean repression.

To be harmonized, these days, is to be censored.

Officials are aware, of course, of its barbed meaning on the Internet, said the Chinese writer Yu Ha in an essay in the IHT Magazine, but they can hardly ban it, because to do so would outlaw the 'harmonious society' they are plugging. Harmony has been hijacked by the public.

Offsite: Naming the Unnameable

25th March 2012.  See  article from  watoday.com.au

[A few] days ago, Beijing was hosting an innovative tug-of-war for the elderly; this game has nine contestants in all, wrote one internet user, in a thinly veiled reference to the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top political body.

The first round of the contest is still intense. The teletubby team noticeably has the advantage and, relatively, the Master Kong team is obviously falling short.

Teletubby is code for Wen Jiabao, who chided Bo publicly before his ousting - the Chinese version of the children's TV show, Tianxianbaobao, shares a character with the Premier's name. The popular instant noodle brand Master Kong is known as Kang Shifu in Chinese and stands in for Zhou Yongkang, who is reportedly supportive of Bo.

...Read the full article

Authorities in Beijing have issued new rules requiring users of microblog sites to register personal details.

New users of Weibo - Chinese equivalents of Twitter - will now have to submit their real names. Existing users have to register in three months. Those who refuse to do so will lose the ability to post tweets.

The move comes with Chinese people increasingly using Weibo platforms to criticise government policies or vent anger over particular incidents.

Chinese authorities have accused netizens of spreading rumours on Weibo in the past and have long been discussing putting in place a real name mechanism .

The new regulations - which take effect immediately - were issued jointly by Beijing's information, communication and police authorities, and published on the city's official news portal.

Some users on Sina Weibo have expressed unhappiness at the new rule, posting messages such as goodbye Weibo and time to move on and calling on friends and followers to migrate to other social media sites such as Twitter and Google+ instead.

The Chinese website Sina Weibo which features a Twitter-like messaging service is reportedly filtering out search results containing the word occupy when paired with the names of various places.

China Digital Times (CDT) reports:

As the Occupy Wall Street movement goes global, China's call for calm observation and reflection may have been followed by another round of censorship in cyberspace. A long list of banned keywords on Sina Weibo's search function has been uncovered and tested by the CDT team yesterday. All the listed phrases stick to one simple rule: a combination of occupy and a place name--provincial capitals, economically developed regions, and few symbolic local areas.

Access to the Android Marketplace has been blocked entirely from within China as The Next Web reports, but locals are also complaining that Android handsets are having a hard time getting onto the Gmail service. The Gmail block isn't being applied to IMAP connections, which means iPhones and similar are working well, lending weight to the idea that this is a political, rather than a security, issue.

The absolute block on android.com started over the weekend, just after Google announced it would be helping the Dalai Lama to (virtually) visit South Africa. That might be coincidence, but it's not the first time that China has been accused of using restrictions on internet access as a political tool.

Hits by Lady Gaga, Beyonce and Take That are among 100 songs that have been placed on an internet blacklist by China's culture ministry.

Music websites have been given until 15 September to remove the offending tracks, which officials claim harm national cultural security . Those that fail to do so risk being prosecuted by the Chinese authorities.

A notice posted on the culture ministry's website said the 100 songs had not been submitted for official approval.

A 2009 directive was cited that targets supposed poor taste and vulgar content as well as copyright violations. This directive requires that alll hosted tracks have official sanction.

Most of the banned songs are from Taiwan or Hong Kong, with several from Japan. Among the Western acts:

• Lady Gaga has six banned tracks: The Edge of Glory, Hair, Marry the Night, Americano, Judas and Bloody Mary .
• Beyonce's Run the World (Girls)
• Katy Perry's Last Friday Night.
• Backstreet Boys track I Want It That Way.

According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese government shut down 1.3 million sites in 2010. That number accounted for 41% of all Chinese websites.

Following its policy of censorship, China began a massive crackdown on pornography in 2009, and there have been hundreds of thousands of porn-based sites shut down in the last two years.

Despite the huge drop, Academy researcher Liu Ruisheng said China that overall number of web pages increased to 60 billion in 2010, up 79% year-over-year.

China has banned 43 recently published online pornographic novels, according to a notice issued by the National Office against Pornographic and Illegal Publications.

The notice states that since October, the General Administration of Press and Publication has issued several orders to investigate a dozen online pornographic novels and the websites that host them.

Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency has punished 24 websites and demanded the deletion of 209 links to illegal content. Eight of the sites were shut down for providing porn.

The notice also warns that it's getting more difficult to detect pornographic websites as they're becoming adept at concealing their content from regulators. Some move their servers to other provinces or abroad, while others find creative ways to disguise pornographic content.

Technological innovations have enabled publishers of erotic material to disseminate it through smart phones, tablet computers and e-books, according to the notice.

Police in China say they are seeking a man who allegedly threw an egg and shoes at the designer of the country's Great Firewall of internet censorship.

Fang Binxing was lecturing at Wuhan University, Hubei province, when the alleged protest took place.

Reports of the attack spread quickly on Twitter after a user named Hanunyi posted his account of the incident.

Hanunyi posted a live account of the alleged shoe-throw on his profile page, including a picture of a hand clutching an egg: The egg missed the target. The first shoe hit the target. The second shoe was blocked by a man and a woman .

Fang is reviled by many Chinese web users for overseeing development of China's system of internet censorship.

Chinese internet users suspect that their government is interfering with the method they have been using to tunnel under the Great Firewall to prevent them connecting with the outside world.

Since 6 May, a number of users says that internet connections via China Telecom, the largest telephone company, and China Unicom have become unstable , with intermittent access when trying to access sites in foreign countries using a virtual private network (VPN). Even Apple's app store has been put off-limits by the new blocks, according to reports.

The disruption has mainly affected corporate connections such as universities while home connections that use standard broadband systems have been unaffected, according to the prominent Chinese technology blogger William Long.

Normally traffic flowing over VPN connections is secure because it is encrypted, meaning that the Chinese authorities were unable to detect what content was flowing back and forth over it. A VPN connection from a location inside China to a site outside China would effectively give the same access as if the user were outside China.

According to Global Voices Advocacy, a pressure group that defends free speech online, the disruption follows new systems put in place in the Great Firewall -- in fact monitoring software on the routers that direct internet traffic within and across China's borders. The new software appears to be able to detect large amounts of connections being made to overseas internet locations.

The problem has become so bad that some universities and businesses have told their users not to try to use VPNs, and only to visit work-related sites; to do otherwise could lead to trouble for the company and the users involved.

The twitter-like microblogging site, Weibo, has deleted the account of a Chinese bigwig in the sphere of censorship

Fang Binxing, is president of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He has been tagged by establishment as the father of the Great Firewall of China for his role in building the mainland's sophisticated system of blocking free internet access to its 420 million users.

However it clear that Chinese netizens are less flattering.

When Binxing starting posting on Weibo he had posted just three times when internet users reacted strongly to his efforts, with comments pouring in minutes after he posted to the site - most of them ridiculing or criticising him for being the person behind the mainland's internet firewall.

Some internet users said it was a targeted campaign by activists, while others believed it was a spontaneous outpouring of anger.

Editors of the microblog were quick to remove the comments, but many harshly worded postings still made their way through. Internet analysts said thousands of negative comments had been posted on Fang's site before they were censored at about 1pm.

But internet users continued their assault on other platforms. A posting on other mainland bulletins calling for internet users to besiege Fang's microblog had more than 4,000 followers .

China has shut down over 60,000 websites for their pornographic content since the government launched its repressive campaign in December 2009, an official statement has said.

The National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications said some 1.7 million websites have also been checked since the launch of the campaign, according to the China Daily.

Around 2,200 cases of dissemination of online pornography were registered during this period, said the statement that added the office received over 160,000 porn-related tip-offs from the public.

Update: 350 million pages

7th January 2011. See  article from  eweek.com

China's Great Firewall deleted 350 million pieces of harmful information as part of what government's 2010 campaign to clean up the internet by shutting what it judged to be harmful sites.

Chinese government officials touted the success of its extensive system of filtering and blocking Internet content in 2010, saying the Internet is cleaner than before.

Over 350 million pages, or pieces of harmful information, which includes text, pictures and videos, have been deleted, and 60,000 adult content Web sites shut down, said Wang Chen, head of the State Council Information Office, during a press conference on Dec. 30, according to Reuters.

People in China have found that Amazon's Kindle e-reader allows them to bypass the country's Great Firewall , according to a report.

An article in the South China Morning Post suggested that the 3G-capable device's browser was able to access sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are banned in China and blocked at a national level. The access is made possible by Amazon's own Whispernet virtual mobile network, the article stated.

According to the piece, engineering professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan speculates that Amazon and its Chinese Whispernet partner — the virtual network is based on the real networks of operators around the world — might have agreed to transfer the connection to Amazon's station, presumably in the US, once the mainland gatekeeper sees the signal comes from a Kindle... The signal, which may be encrypted, then returns to the partner network in China so the internet patrols cannot see what is accessed .

Amazon does not sell the Kindle in China, so the devices referred to in the South China Morning Post article are grey-market imports.

Chinese authorities have just announced that microblogging websites – sites offering Twitter-style services – will be told to appoint self-discipline commissioners to be responsible for censorship.

In a parallel development, new rules took effect on 1 September. Now anyone wanting to buy a mobile phone that uses prepaid SIM cards will have to produce identity papers while anyone already owning such a phone will have three years to register their ownership.

China's censors are giving themselves an additional layer of control, Reporters Without Borders said. The Great Firewall of China is getting human reinforcements to boost its effectiveness. But if they are held to strict performance criteria, it seems these commissioners are being assigned an impossible mission, given the volume of information circulating online for which they will be responsible.

The press freedom organisation added: Nonetheless, their very existence will be dangerous because of their nuisance value and because they could encourage microbloggers to censor themselves. Meanwhile, under the pretext of combating spam, a new blow has been dealt to the personal data of China's mobile phone users.

The microblogging platforms will themselves have to hire the commissioners whose job it will be to monitor and censor anything that could threaten China's security and social stability. They are supposed to target content linked to illegal activities, pornography and violence, as well as baseless rumours and politically sensitive issues. Although hired by the site, each commissioner will be responsible for its content and will be operationally independent.

Chinese authorities in Tibet have ordered Internet cafes across the region to finish installing state-of-the-art surveillance systems by the end of the month, industry sources and local media said.

All the Internet cafes must now install it, said Chen Jianying, head of the customer service department of the industry group Internet Cafes Online: This is a nationwide policy which is part of the implementation of the real-name registration system .

The proprietor of an Internet cafe in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, which is still under tight security following widespread Tibetan unrest beginning in March 2008, confirmed the scheme is already in full swing. He said the new system will mean tighter online controls: If there is something that is being controlled, there's no way anyone will get to see it. It's definitely a tighter form of control .

Under the nationwide scheme, which took effect Aug. 1, second-generation identity cards belonging to the person using the Internet must be swiped to allow online access. Viewed content can then be traced back to that identity, using the the surveillance system.

China has scrapped a system that required websites to apply for a special licence before launching forums and chat rooms.

Analysts however cautioned that the loosening of controls, announced on the State Council's website late last week, might be brief and could soon be replaced with more stringent regulations.

For the past 10 years, applicants wishing to provide web messaging services had to submit their business licence, Internet Content Provider licence and other documents for official examination before a fresh permit was issued. They also had to agree to use filtering software and hire staff to monitor the services around the clock.

Green Dam Damned

Based on article from  china.org.cn

One of two companies linked to a nationwide Internet pornography-filtering project refuted reports that the controversial software has been halted.

The Green Dam - Youth Escort Internet content-filtering software, which aroused opposition due to privacy and security concerns at home and abroad last year when it was launched, is facing funding difficulties, the Beijing Times reported.

Authorities have stopped funding the distribution and maintenance of the software, a move that could halt the project, the paper reported citing a general manager of one of the two companies concerned.

But the same person rejected the report, saying the company just moved the office to a new location because of financial problems.

Until now, all pornographic content has been blocked by the censors inside of China.

But it turns out that you can now search on Google any sexual activity you like inside China and access it without censorship. Some, but not all, Chinese pornographic websites are also available.

No one knows why there has been a sudden change of heart. The friends who first told me the news speculated that with the recent spate of extreme violence carried out by middle-aged men (the kindergarten stabbings, today's shoot-out in a court in Hunan), the government might be allowing pornography in order to vent some pent-up testosterone.

Perhaps also, with the closure of hundreds of brothels and saunas, the authorities have deemed the pornography a consolation.

Or perhaps there is a more pragmatic explanation. It would not be a wild assumption to guess that this is a technical issue with the capacity of the Great Firewall [China's censorship system], said Wen Yunchao, an activist in Guangdong: The unblocking has been going on for weeks, so we can conclude that either the system has a limited capacity and wants to focus on other things, or this could be a long-lasting change .

China will push to end anonymous online comments, according to Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, who recently reiterated the need for more restrictions in cyberspace.

The news regulator said that China would strengthen its monitoring on harmful information on the Internet, in an attempt to block bad overseas information from spreading into the country via the Internet and prevent overseas hostile forces from infiltrating through the Internet, according to his full speech published by the People's Daily.

In the speech, Wang confirmed, for the first time, that major news websites and business portals in China have already complied with the no-anonymity comment rule; a trend that Wang said will be pushed through the Internet, including the populous online bulletin boards.

In a latest action against the online porn industry, China has reinforced its arsenal of laws now in effect.

The Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate said that the new rules would target wireless carriers, along with advertisers, advertising agents, third-party payment platforms and websites if they are found to be involved in the porn business for profits.

Measures against porn websites are already in operation but now others involved in the online porn business will have to prove that they were unaware of any porn content on the websites. However, a single complaint from any netizen could foil the attempt, according to the rule's definition of awareness.

The rule also enhances the protection for teenagers younger than 14 by cutting the conviction threshold in half. For instance, as few as 10 video clips verified as porn will carry the sentence of making, copying, publishing, selling and circulating porn articles for making profits, according to the rule.

Access to IMDb.com was blocked in China this week, adding the movie business Internet portal to a fast-growing list of banned Web sites featuring user-generated content, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The site, fully named the Internet Movie Database, is owned by online bookselling giant Amazon.com, and claims over 57 million monthly visitors.

There's no Chinese-language edition of IMDb and industry insiders here say they can't understand why it's been shut down for since Wednesday.

Typically the government's censorship efforts focus on trying to block China's 338 million Web users from accessing online pornography and violence. The government seldom reacts to queries about blocking foreign Web sites or gives any official notice when such action is taken.

For clues to Beijing's beef with IMDb, a quick scan of the site turned up plenty of information relating to politically sensitive search terms such as Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer — the names of members of two exiled ethnic minorities considered separatists by China's one-party government.

For instance, IMDb lists The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom, a 2009 documentary whose planned screening this week at the Palm Springs International Film Festival caused the state-run China Film Group to pull two of its films from competition in protest.

Likewise, typing Kadeer – persona non-grata for her alleged masterminding of recent violence in western China's Xinjiang region — turns up the IMDb listing for China: Rebirth of an Empire, a 2009 documentary featuring Kadeer and exiled Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng.

Chinese police have said that their crackdown on Internet pornography has brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009 -- a fourfold increase in the number of such cases compared with 2008.

The announcement on the Ministry of Public Security's website (www.mps.gov.cn) said the drive would deepen in 2010.

Police would intensify punishments for Internet operations that violate laws and regulations , said the statement from the ministry's Internet security section. Strengthen monitoring of information, it urged, Press Internet service providers to put in place preventive technology.

The ministry did not say how many of the 5,394 suspects arrested were later charged, released or prosecuted.

China has banned the registering of personal Internet domain names and people who have their own websites could lose them, the South China Morning Post said, citing a government regulation that came into effect recently.

Under the regulation, Internet service providers can no longer host individually owned websites and only businesses or government-authorised organizations can have them, the English-language report said.

The step was taken because of supposed concern over pornographic content on personal websites, the Morning Post said, citing the China Internet Network Information Center.

Website owners in Jiangsu, Shanghai, Henan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi can no longer access their sites, the report said.

Update: Domain Controls

26th December 2009. Based on article from advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org

The Beijing News quoted a recent meeting of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), summarized and explained the policies into 5 measures

• Set up a blacklist to prevent the owners of domain names found to be in violation from applying for additional domain names.
• Tighten registration procedures to ensure that all application documents are accurate. Transfer of a domain name
• Unregistered domain names will not be resolved: Domestic websites are usually registered with MIIT, but because some of them were in existence before the establishment of the registration system, some websites have not registered. Many foreign domain names have not registered with MIIT.
• Suspension of DNS service to violating websites and to any other domain names in the possession of the same domain name holder.
• Overhaul of registrars:

In the past, the website registration system targets at websites hosted in local servers, as for overseas websites, the politically sensitive ones were blocked by the Great Fire Wall (GFW - internet filter) under the blacklist system or keywords filtering. However, netizens can still get around by using proxy or TOR. If the MIIT is to white-listing the whole Internet, it will turn the Chinese Internet into intranet and cripple most of the circumventing devices.

However, it is net yet clear if the registration system will be extended to foreign websites. According to the MIIT official document on the campaign against the proliferation of pornography on mobile devices, the first stage (Nov-Dec 2009) of the white washing campaign has started with a ban on individual registration for CN domain name. The second stage, which involves what has been described in the Beijing News (strengthening of the registration without specific reference to overseas websites), will take place between Jan-Sep 2010. The final stage is between Oct - Dec 2010. Measures will involve a complete monitoring and analysis of online data flow and resources for identifying illegal and unsolicited activities.

Chinese officials have launched their latest antiporn initiative — this time offering surfers cash payments for reporting adult websites.

According to Chinese state media, the new program offers up to 10,000 yuan (around $1465 U.S.) to Internet users that locate and report pornographic websites. The move, seemingly designed to build a more comprehensive database of adult websites, has the consequence of encouraging more visits to suspected porn sites.

The Xinhua news agency claims that within the first 24 hours of the new program, its hotline at the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre received more than 500 phone calls and 13,000 online tips.

The rewards for identifying adult web and mobile sites range from 1,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan, will reportedly be paid to the first person to report a specific URL, with a review committee determining the appropriate payout.

According to some adult industry analysts, the reward money may very well exceed the revenues of operating these sites, thus encouraging a spike in Chinese adult website creation, simply for the profit potential of then reporting the new site to authorities.

In the past few days, Chinese twitterers reported that the Chinese censor has blocked a number of popular Twitter's third party applications.

Since Fanfou, the Chinese micro-blogging website, has been ordered to shut down earlier this year, many bloggers moved to Twitter to spread their ideas. Net activists believe that it is impossible to block Twitter as there are many third party applications that allow users to read and post information without accessing the site. However, beginning from early this week, many Chinese twitterers reported that popular third party applications such as twitpic, itweet, twitese, twittergadget have been blocked and they have to shift to other tools.

When you search #fuckgfw (great fire wall) in twitter, you can see the most updated blocking reports.

China has banned Web sites from advertising or linking to games that glamorize violence. A notice posted on the Culture Ministry Web site on Monday said games that promote drug use, obscenities, gambling, or crimes such as rape, vandalism and theft are against public morality and the nation's fine cultural traditions.

Such online games promote the glorification of mafia life . . . and are a serious threat to the moral standards of society causing vulnerable young people to be adversely affected, the notice said. The ban on the Web sites starts immediately.

No details were given on how the law would be implemented, but the notice called for law enforcement bodies to ensure Web sites adhere to the new law.

Two people have been jailed after threatening an undercover policeman at a clip joint in Soho, central London. Had he been a genuine customer, he would have been another victim of what is a well-established scam.

Video footage captures a man throwing his wallet onto the floor and offering to pay anything to escape.

He shouts: What's the problem? I'll pay whatever it is ... what, £300? I'll pay, I'll pay ... take my wallet. I don't want to be hurt. Leave me!

Unfortunately for those fronting Twilights, this was an undercover policeman armed with a hidden camera and microphone and he had caught them red-handed.

Kingston Crown Court was told that in December last year, a man fled the bar, in Rupert Street, in fear of his safety after being threatened and ordered to pay £300.

Stacey Crossley and Agnieszka Wolowska have since been found guilty of blackmail and false imprisonment.

Crossley was jailed for three years and his co-defendant was locked up for 14 months and recommended for deportation to her native Poland.

They were arrested by uniformed police officers as the scammers chased the undercover officer outside.

The scam involves customers, often foreign tourists, being enticed inside hostess bars with false promises of adult entertainment , Westminster Council explained. The bars, known as clip joints, employ women to stand outside or near their premises and bring the customers in for a small charge, in much the same way as other licensed bars and clubs employ staff to hand out leaflets promoting their offers. Once inside the clip joints, customers are served soft drinks, usually by a pretty young woman. But when the customer goes to leave, they will usually find themselves faced with a charge of several hundred pounds for having been in the woman's company.

If they refuse to pay, the customer may be threatened with violence by bouncers or frog-marched to a cash machine and forced to hand over cash.

Part of the problem in the past was that clip joints exposed a legal loophole. They did not need a licence to operate because they did not serve food or alcohol or provide entertainment. But in September 2007 the London Local Authorities Act reclassified clip joints as sex establishments, meaning they required the relevant licences, closing the loophole.

Councillor Daniel Astaire, Westminster City Council's cabinet member for community safety, said: Today's hearing marks the end of a long battle to close down all known clip joints in Westminster which lured in men under the false premise of adult entertainment, then charged them exorbitant rates for soft drinks in the company of so-called hostesses.

Most people who were ripped off were simply too embarrassed or scared to report the matter to police, and as these venues exploited legal loopholes to operate on the fringes of the law, our powers to close them down were extremely limited.

Chinese authorities has begun blocking the intermediate nodes and servers, directory services on the basis of the Tor anonymizing their IP addresses.

In the columns of Tor's blog can be read that the great firewall (GFW) is blocking communication with about 80% of the Tor node. Author of note also admitted that it was expected this turn of events.

Already in the middle of last year, China blocked Tor website. Therefore, the operator of the website and its creators tried to be the protection of the new Tor servers, to prevent the Chinese authorities to get into the list of public nodes - the intention is apparently failed.

Although the establishment of an anonymous connection is still possible using the remaining 20% of the nodes, but such an operation takes a long time. Author of this blog entry advises users that you run a Tor private goals (so-called bridge relays) if they want to help Chinese colleagues. This kind of goals do not appear on public lists, and thus difficult to find and block.

China has announced that all songs posted on music websites must receive prior approval and foreign lyrics must be translated into Chinese, in a new push to control online content.

The culture ministry says the rules are designed to step up regulation of the Internet, curb rampant piracy and protect intellectual property rights.

The official Global Times said that music providers would have to submit songs for approval by December 31, at which date the new rules go into effect.

In a statement sent to AFP, the ministry said the rules were necessary to regulate the transmission of cultural information, guarantee the safety of the nation's culture, and regulate public ethics.

The rules are an extension of requirements already in place for the offline music industry, which has to submit foreign albums to the government for prior approval.

According to the ministry's guidelines, the rules also aim to strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights, and to increase the market share of legal businesses and legal music products.

Online music providers will be required to get a special licence from the culture ministry.

A culture ministry spokesman said content generated by Internet users -- including songs composed, recorded or uploaded by individuals -- would not have to go through the censorship process.

In its latest move to crush porn, China has arrested or detained operators of adult sites that use foreign servers.

According to PC World, this latest crackdown follows the arrests of mobile porn website owners in China as well as the government's plan to have all machines sold in the country pre-installed with the controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software.

Police claimed two Chinese porn sites, May Babe and May Erotica , ran on U.S. servers and were updated through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) to avoid detection, according to the state-run Xinhua news service.

Officials said most owners of Chinese porn sites now employ server space abroad to avoid China's web police. It was not stated how the site owners were tracked down.

Police also arrested staff members of a Chinese company that created more than 40 pornographic WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites for mobile users, Xinhua said.

Chinese police have also warned third-party payment businesses against providing services for those providing pornographic and lewd material online. The ministry statement referred to one case in which people were arrested for selling porn site memberships to Love City through third-party payments via companies such as AliPay, PayPal and YeePay.

In a rare event for the Chinese capital a group of about a thousand people met for a public but convivial protest against government plans to install the controversial Green Dam filtering software on computers. They were responding to an invitation by Beijing artist Ai Weiwei who called for a day of boycott of the internet.

Recently Chinese authorities decided that all new computers made and sold in the country must contain this filter, ostensibly to fight pornographic or other dirty websites.

But many in China and abroad believe the real motive behind the move is to establish total control over mainland internet users. For this reason there have been many protests.

However, on the eve of its official starting date, Chinese authorities put the web filtering software on hold

For those who came out to protest this was but a short term victory, conscious that the battle against internet censorship must continue.

China's Green Dam internet filtering system will go ahead

Based on article from guardian.co.uk

China's controversial plan to install Green Dam internet filtering software on all computers will go ahead despite being postponement, a government official told state media today. The official said it was only a matter of time until the software was installed.

An official, speaking anonymously, told China Daily: The government will definitely carry on the directive on Green Dam. It's just a matter of time.

What will happen is that some PC manufacturers will have it included with their PC packages sooner than the others. But there is no definite deadline at the moment.

The official said the delay was necessary because some computer manufacturers needed more time to prepare.

China has backed down from a plan to install censorship software on all computers sold on the mainland.

A law requiring computer manufacturers to include a program called Green Dam on every PC was delayed just hours before it was due to come into effect.

Green Dam filters the internet and blocks access both to pornography and to politically sensitive content. Researchers also discovered that it is capable of sending reports about an individual's web use back to the authorities.

China retreated in the face of angry and sustained criticism not only from internet users but also from computer manufacturers and trade bodies. In addition, a US company called Solid Oak has filed a lawsuit against the makers of Green Dam, charging them with having stolen the software that makes up the program.

China will delay the mandatory installation of the software on new computers, said Xinhua, the government newswire. The pre-installation was delayed as some computer producers said such massive installation demanded extra time, it added.

Damning Report

Based on article from independent.co.uk

A trial of the Green Dam program suggested its filters may be of limited use to worried parents.

When the software is installed, and an image scanner activated, it blocks even harmless images of a film poster for cartoon cat Garfield, dishes of flesh-color cooked pork and on one search engine a close-up of film star Johnny Depp's face.

With the image filter off, even though searches with words like nude are blocked, a hunt for adult websites throws up links to soft and hardcore sites.

Green Dam has not detailed how it scans images for obscene content, but computer experts have said it likely uses color and form recognition to zoom in on potential expanses of naked flesh. When too much skin is detected, Green Dam closes all Internet browsers with no warning, sometimes flashing up a notice that the viewer is looking at harmful content.

But the interpretation of obscene is apparently generous enough to include the orange hue of Garfield's fur and, on the highest security settings, prevent viewers clicking through to any illustrated story on one English language news website.

The software also allows users to choose what they want to filter for, and besides adult websites and violence, categories include gay and illegal activities. ay and health activists fear the blanket ban on gay content, in a country where homosexuality is not criminalized, could damage projects including sexual health and Aids education.

Another setting allows Green Dam to take regular snapshots of a user's screen and store them for up to two weeks - ostensibly so parents can monitor computer use by minors.

Google has been ordered to put a halt allowing pornographic and vulgar content from being accessed through its Chinese-language search engine, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center has told Google to make immediate changes and clean up the content available at Google.cn.

Google said it met with government officials to discuss the problem of pornographic content and material that is harmful to children on the web in China and that it is taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results.

The order came one day after Chinese state television chastised Google and the center denounced it for allowing foreign Internet pornographic information.

Chinese PC Company Lenovo is set to be among the first PC Companies to bow to Chinese Government pressure that all PC's being made for the Chinese market after July 1, must be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites.

Chinese PC Company Lenovo is set to be among the first PC Companies to bow to Chinese Government pressure that all PC's being made for the Chinese market after July 1, must be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites.

The censorship move will give the Chinese Government unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet. The software must be pre installed claims Chinese Government officials who have also said the move is aimed at cutting out access to pornography web sites.

According to the wall Street Journal the Chinese government's history of censoring a broad range of Web content has raised concern among some foreign industry officials and the U.S. government that the new effort could significantly increase the government's control over Internet access in China.

It is expected that US manufacturers like HP and Dell who have around 22% of the Chinese PC market will bow to the demands of the Chinese Government and install the new software which was developed by Jinhui Computer System's with input from Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy. Both companies have ties to China's military and its security ministry.

Update: Behind the Green Dam

12th June 2009. Based on article from businessweek.com
See also Seeing red over green: China to install censorship software from cpj.org

It seems China is stepping back from its new censorship policy for computers. They have recently proposed that the internet filter Green Dam Youth Escort, should be installed on all new PCs sold in China

As TelecomAsia's Robert Clark writes, the Chinese government has retreated on its controversial new web filtering plan. I'm not sure it's a full-fledged retreat yet, but there are certainly signs that the worldwide outcry is having an impact. For instance, Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, does seem a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. According to the government mouthpiece, China's Ministry of Industry and IT on Wednesday insisted that its notice to the PC makers and sellers does not mean the software's installation to user's operating system is mandatory, instead, the software package should be installed on either the hard drives or a compact disc with the computers.

This is a typical pattern with off-the-wall new requirements from the Chinese bureaucracy: Outlandish policy gets announced, outcry begins, outlandish policy gets ignored.

Update: Propaganda department orders positive comment about Green Dam

Based on article from advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org

On June 10th, the Chinese central propaganda department issued a notice reminding all the media to report positively on Green Dam, Youth Escort, the filter and spyware to be installed in all PCs sold in China.

Meanwhile, netizens continue to dig out all the flaws in the software and the company's background; Information activists and various organizations on the other hand, have compiled a number of documents and reports on Green Dam. .

Given the propaganda department's notice, people were surprised to see that the government's mouthpiece people.com.cn's nationalistic “strong country” forum had created a special page (now removed) and criticized the Ministry of Information Industry and Technology for taking the decision without consulting the public. Moreover, a poll in the forum showed that more than 80% of the netizens are against the introduction of the compulsory filter on their PCs.

Update: Uninstallable

19th June 2009. See article from news.bbc.co.uk

Widespread disapproval inside China, legal challenges and overseas criticism have forced the Chinese government to clarify its policy.

"The use of this software is not compulsory," an official with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) told the AP news wire.

The state agency that created Green Dam has said it was possible to uninstall the program. But it was unclear whether those that did so would face prosecution.

In its ruling this week, China said anyone removing or refusing to use it would not face official sanctions.

China is blocking access to Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, and its Hotmail email service, the company said ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

These are among several Internet services that have been blocked for customers in China, Microsoft director of public affairs Kevin Kutz said in a statement received by AFP.

Microsoft did not say when China began blocking the sites, but Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said it had been notified by Chinese Web users that access to the websites began being blocked inside China on Tuesday.

Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the blockage of a dozen websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Bing, Flickr, Opera, Live, Wordpress and Blogger in China, the media rights group said in a statement: The Chinese government stops at nothing to silence what happened 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square. By blocking access to a dozen websites used daily by millions of Chinese citizens, the authorities have opted for censorship at any price rather than accept a debate about this event.

Asked to comment on the Chinese moves, a US State Department spokesman said there would be a more expansive US response on Wednesday, but underscored that US policy supports freedom of expression. [Except of course for the countries where the US itself blocks the use of Microsoft services such as Messenger in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea].
Rights group Freedom House, which is funded by the US government and private groups, condemned the Chinese government?s blocking of the websites. China's decision to block these sites today represents the latest salvo in a relentless campaign to erase the past," executive director Jennifer Windsor said in a statement: China is blocking sites like Twitter and Flickr because they provide a means for people to circumvent government control and mobilize dissent.

Amnesty International have said that their Internet website had once again been blocked in China and urged Beijing to re-establish the site immediately.

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the London-based human rights group's website was unblocked by the Chinese authorities,

China had rolled back a few high-profile planks of its web censorship in an apparent effort to defuse an embarrassing dispute over media freedom ahead of the August Games.

We fear the re-blocking of Amnesty International's website indicates a widening crackdown, particularly as 2009 will see a number of important commemorations, said Roseann Rife, deputy director of Amnesty's Asia-Pacific program.

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in Beijing, the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement and the 50th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.

China expanded an Internet cleanup campaign, shutting down a blog hosting site www.bullog.cn for apparently carrying harmful comments on current affairs.

The founder of bullog.cn, Luo Yonghao, told The Associated Press: I got an e-mail from the Beijing Communications Administration this afternoon, saying the Web site contained harmful comments on current affairs and therefore will be closed .

It was not known whether the shutdown of bullog.cn was permanent. The site, home to some outspoken social and political commentary, was closed temporarily last year during a key Communist Party congress after criticism of the meeting was posted.

Update: 91

12th January 2008

91 websites have now been added to China's block list in the last few days

Update: 277

16th January 2008

277 websites have now been added to China's block list in the last few days

A Chinese organization has listed a group of big name websites, including Google, Baidu, Sina.com and Sohu.com, which have been found to supposedly spread pornography and threaten youth's morals, and could tighten regulations on these websites.

China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC) said it has found 19 websites that provide content that includes pictures, text, video clips and web links inappropriate for Chinese people.

Major websites such as MSN, Google, Baidu, Sina, Sohu, Tecent and NetEase are on the list. Google's photo search was singled out for particular criticism.

The announcement is part of a nationwide campaign launched jointly by seven Chinese ministries to clean up the online environment. The list identifies a number of websites that violate the government view of public morality and supposedly harm the physical and mental health of Chinese people.

CIIRC said the listed websites did not take effective measures to take out the inappropriate content after they were noted.

41 porn sites were also said to be closed by the Chinese censors.