China in drive to register websites. 29/05/2005. ABC News Online:
China in drive to register websites Chinese-run websites have until the end of May to register their sites or face being shut down as part of a new government campaign to police the Internet, a leading portal has announced. The registration drive is an effort by the Ministry of Information Industry to clamp down on fraud and other "unhealthy" activity on the Internet, the portal Sohu.com said. "If you have not registered by June, then your website could be ordered shut down," the portal quoted an official from the Beijing communications bureau as saying. The registration drive started in March and aims to issue registration numbers to all China-based websites, including commercial, government and personal sites, it said.

Now, I have my site hosted in Australia, but the worst thing that could happen is that access to this website gets 'denied' - meaning no more posts. I've learnt that the filtering that goes on here is sometimes revised - with me now being able to access certain inocuous websites (such as a greenroom Sargent Major A$$hole - you Noam Chomsky lovin' hippie). This one has been denied to me ever since I got here - and I get many a 'document contains no data' websignals from various connections.

Linda wrote about this situation in a previous post of hers. She's much more eloquent and righteous about this topic than what I am. Luckily my workplace has a very secure network & proxy connections that allow me to view outside of the sphere. Its only when I am at home that I realise how much has been denied to the average user here. Various anonymous proxy servers are around that would normally allow people to surf anonymously, but all of the ones I have found out about have the 'document contains no data' call back. There's many more ways to get around this, but I'm yet to discover them (and maybe its all just too hard - hence the idea of content filtering disuading further investigation).

I was contacted by an IT guy who runs a new expat-website that wants to initiate a blog ring about expats worldwide. Asking me to join up, I said that I would check it out. No luck. Writing to him, he complained that he has a lot of problems getting traffic to his site from the PRC networks. I wonder if this will close his desire to get PRC-based expat websites linked to his blog ring?

Currently listening to....
Out Of Habit from the album "Like I Said: Songs 1990-91" by Ani DiFranco
The Stars Of Track And Field from the album "If You're Feeling Sinister" by Belle & Sebastian