The Financial Times reports on China’s latest censorship move: telling Google to shutdown its google.cn site for Chinese residents.
With the rise of technologies like Tor, Freenet, GNUnet, Mixmaster, and OpenPGP (including GNU Privacy Guard), censorship as a whole is unsustainable in the personal computing realm.
China is trying to hang onto a fasicst-communist regime similar to the USSR’s. The USSR broke up 20 years ago. How dumb can you be to not know this, unless you are intentionally ignoring all references to it?
Censorship, the way China is doing it, is doomed, and in fact, has already been circumvented. As John Gilmore said: “The Net interpets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
The Internet is about a lot more than the physical wires and the computers across the world. The Internet is about the people that use it. The Internet is about freedom of speech. More importantly, not just free speech for those in Western countries, not just free speech in the US where we damn near take the First Amendment right of free speech for granted–the Internet is about free speech everywhere.
The sooner they figure that out in China, the better.