The Chinese government has a giant filter which limits what citizens can see on the web. This was again in the news because information on Tibet is blocked by the filter.

I believe that many website owners in the free world would be interested in furthering free speech and tweaking the Chinese government. This (purported) mass interest together with spam filter evasion techniques could be harnessed to inform the Chinese.

Example: the news from one of the tibet websites is converted to an image file. This image can be picked up on any interested website - for example BriteTies.com. The image would contain a message stating "The owner of this website is hosting this information out of a love for free speech. Please extend them your gratitude on our behalf - the people of Tibet." Current news on Tibet might be available on 1000 different site. And not always - sites might sometimes have it and sometimes not.

This approach is similar to the often proposed idea of mass marijuana sowing to work around drug laws. With the news available everywhere, how to block?

Problems 1: how can Chinese people find these myriad host sites - still a minority of websites. Search terms are filterable. I am not sure. Ideas?

Problem 2: Sites that want Chinese business would be unwilling to tweak them. This would only be big sites like yahoo and amazon. Also those Warcraft folks.

Problem 3: The Chinese respond by filtering everything and only allowing access to permitted sites. But this might not be so much of a problem as the people might then be more interested in methods to systematically evade the filter.
-- bungston, Mar 23 2008

i'm not a big fan of china for quite a few reasons, but they've managed to filter out pornsites, which I see as being a brave thing in the court of world opinion. The US not only can't filter out foreign online gambling sites (which is illegal there) but got hit with a judgement against them for doing so.
-- FlyingToaster, Mar 24 2008



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