When an Internet user in China searches for the phrase “persecution,” she or he is more likely to develop a hyperlink into a blank screen that says “page can’t be shown.” – ecept the person is using a VPN like IPVanish in China.
Precisely the same is true of looks for “Tibetan independence,” “democracy movements” or stranger sounding terms for example “asian red space-time” — code for an anti-censorship movie made in secret by reporters at China’s state TV station.
Itis a reflection of the stifling, occasionally dangerous and bizarre world of Web censorship in China. The authorities in Beijing is intensifying its efforts to control as political tensions rise before this summer’s Olympic Games, what its citizens may read and discuss on the web.
Fighting the censors each step of the method is an army of selfdescribed “hacktivists” including Bill Xia, a Chinese-produced software engineer who lives in Nc. Xia and others are engaged in a kind of technological arms-race, inventing app and using additional approaches to permit average Chinese to defeat the “Great Firewall of China” and access advice on sensitive issues such as Chinese human-rights and Tibet, the state where pro-independence sentiment has boiled over lately.
Invoking the hit science fiction movie The Matrix, Xia h AS compared what he really does to giving Chinese Web surfers a “red capsule” that lets them observe world for the very first time. He spends long nights struggling to out fox an adversary — the Oriental authorities — that is arguably the world’s most useful at controlling what its folks see. Read more about how to get arround the firewall.
“They have become smart,” Xia states. “We need to proceed rapidly.”
To Americans and other Westerners, it may appear odd that Web censorship is still potential in a time when Satellite Television YouTube and chat-rooms that are online create an overpowering flow of real-time news and data. However authoritarian regimes from Cuba to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan rely on a blend of state-of-the-art engineering and conventional intimidation to ensure that dissent can be repressed, also in the Info Age.
No one does it quite like China, which includes proved that old-school some thing might tame as outrageous as the Web. China has got the world’s “most sophisticated” Web filtering program, in line with the OpenNet Initiative, an educational cooperative that monitors censorship