Does censorship really work?
I’ve been planning to go to Tiananmen Square to snap some pictures this week. Maybe after the workshop one of the next three days.
So I thought I’d search YouTube this evening to see some videos of the area, just to check out what it will be like and start anticipating some of the photos I’d like to take. I have a high-speed reliable internet connection here at the hotel, but when I search for Tiananmen it suddenly doesn’t work. I get the “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” error on this link, for example:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tiananmen
So just for fun, I tried some other searches to see what works and what doesn’t. This works just fine:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=teen+sex
Hmm .. it’s not exactly clear to me what kind of behavior they’re trying to enforce.
By the way, I have no trouble posting content like this, although I suppose if I do enough of it this blog may become unreachable. So, just to be safe, I’m going to bed. good night from Beijing!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 6:47 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on April 11, 2007 at 3:48 am George Siede wrote:
Speaklng of China, and based on the photo you chose to illustrate the square, I suggest that everyone watch the Frontline program called ‘The Tank Man’. Available free as streaming video from the Frontline website. Doug, I doubt if you’ll be able to get that over there.
Still amazed by your travels as always,
Xorge
on April 11, 2007 at 3:53 am Doug wrote:
Hey, here’s a fun one — I can’t get to any Wikipedia page. Not just the home page, but not any specific definition pages either either. Although, given my history with them, I suppose that could be Wikipedia themselves keeping me out and not Big Brother.
Hey, speaking of … I had somebody tell me today that “Doug” sounds just like the Chinese word for “big brother.”
on April 11, 2007 at 5:09 am Scott wrote:
Doug is watching….
From a technical POV, is it really possible for an entire country to block internet content?
Happy travels…
sp
on April 11, 2007 at 5:41 am Doug wrote:
As I understand it, the underlying internet infrastructure is controlled by academia and other interests in many areas, but it’s 100% government here so they can do what they want. In any event, it really seems to work.
There are probably some good writeups of how it works that I should read to understand the details better, but that’s not an option this week.
on April 11, 2007 at 11:53 am Scott wrote:
…amazing.