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Bloggers Test New MS China Filter

Posted by Zonk on from the free-as-in-freedom dept.

earthbound kid writes "Rebecca MacKinnon at Global Voices Online has set up a test of Microsoft's censored blogs on MSN China (see previous Slashdot story) with screenshots. It seems that MSN rejected titling a new blog 'I love freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy' (in Chinese) because 'The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity.' MacKinnon managed to use a workaround and got a pro-freedom blog up, for the moment."

4 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The key is Dallas by slavemowgli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There often is a difference between what's legal and what's right in a moral sense - in other words, the "right" in "a right" is not the same as in "morally right".

    China may have the legal right to do whatever it wants with its citizens, no matter what that is, but it doesn't mean that it's morally OK for them to do it. Furthermore, China *did* sign and ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - in fact, there even was a Chinese professor (Zhang Pengjun) on the commission that drafted the declaration.

    That being said - as has been reported, there *is* not even a law in China that would require censorship of words such as "democracy". MSN is simply sucking up here, in one of the worst ways imaginable.

    --
    quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
  2. I Loev Mircosoeft by monsterX · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry for the spelling, I had to get past the slashdot profanity filters.

  3. Re:hmmmmmmmmmm by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 5, Funny

    The English language has a similar dependency upon capitalization. For example, in English, these two sentences, although containing the same words, have different meanings through the use of differing punctuation:

    1. I must help my Uncle Jack off the horse.
    2. I must help my uncle jack off the horse.

    --
    Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
  4. Re:hmmmmmmmmmm by pcmanjon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "(If Slashdot would only get with the 20th century and permit Unicode in postings - or even just parse HTML entities instead of stripping them - then this sort of misunderstanding would never happen...)"

    Unlikely, I've modernized slashdot and the slashcode engine to be fully XML compliant and use DIV's instead of tables.

    I've even fixed it so you can make text larger in CSS without the overflow (like many of the people who have tried to modernize slashdot)

    My code additions were rejected, and I contacted every one of the editors through their personal emails... and haven't had a reply.

    I guess they're not concerned. Oh well..