Reporters Without Borders Internet Annual Report

kratei writes "The BBC is running a report discussing the Reporters Without Borders internet annual report 2006. The RWB study details and decries the rising tide of net censorship and lays the blame squarely on the west as the source for the technology that allows repressive regimes to stifle freedom on the web." From the article: "China's success at censorship means it has effectively produced a "sanitised" version of the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online. The wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online. "

Comments

Proxies

[CptChipJew]

The people I know in China all claim to use Japanese and Korean proxies to get access to everything. Anybody know if this is true? If so, then you can be assured that plenty of people are doing this, and largely making the PRC efforts pointless.

Re:Proxies

[AtomicBomb]

I think I know a bit about this subject because I often browse a news forum which is in the blacklist by Chinese government. The site is not about politics or religion. Many over there are oversea Chinese geeks in sci and tech. It was blocked ever since someone spam the forum with something the government does not like. While I am based overseas, many guys are from mainland China. They manage to get pass the ban through a number of tricks. For example, there are search programs that keep track on oversea proxy servers which are not blocked at this moment. Some more resourceful guys managed to use SSH tunneling type of technique to connect.

Many in the news forum often think the government ban is kind of a token effort. If they were really serious, they could have banned the encryption software usage and firewall all the non-web traffic ports for residential/net cafe users altogether (by letting the business run as usual, the disruption to economy should be minimal). The main intention is however preventing the crowd from accessing the information easily (eg no daily browsing of BBC) and makes unwanted news "unconfirmed".

I can observe some interesting patterns emerged from the forum during a couple of major events. 1) SARS 2) a large scale food poisoning event in one of the forum goer's univeristy. The info we got from the forum was first hand (at least half day faster than any mainland/overseas media). The first hand fact/rumour are then spread to friends and relatives over there by word-of-mouth/ SMS .

Restricting the sale of equipment

[ma11achy]

So this equipment is helping the cause of repressive regimes.

How difficult would it be to restrict the sale of this equipment, just like certain defense equipment?