China has been using "state-of-the-art technology" and "its sophistication is greater than ever,"
wrote Paul Mooney last week in the
International Herald Tribune about the 18-month-old filtering efforts by that country to control the Internet. Early on, the government used simple URL-blocking, which would prevent access to certain IP addresses, but that was easy to circumvent by blocked sites using
proxy servers. Even if they too were blocked now and then, they could easily be replaced -- and nowadays it is possible to use proxy servers for months without problem. Now RSS reader applications also offer a good alternative for web users wanting to view sites blocked by government filters.
The estimated US$100 million worth of filtering equipment proved to be a misinvestment in the month after it was introduced. That technology searched incoming data for keywords and disconnected an Internet connection for half an hour as a punishment. That crippled Internet traffic to such a degree that it started to hurt China's economic interests. One "wrong" message could stop all other e-mail, creating a potentially dangerous tool for anybody wanting to bring China's Internet to a standstill. After five or six weeks, government officials apparently decided that enough was enough; since then I've again been getting my e-mail messages containing news about
Falun Gong and all the other information that the filters were expected to block. I've noticed that every now and then somebody tinkers with the system -- when the National People's Congress is in session or when
Chen Shuibian got shot -- but otherwise only the traditional URL-blocks are up. Last month, some weblog hosts got hit by this simple block, but as long as I can read the Chinese website of the pro-independence party DPP in Taiwan without proxy, I do not take the controls to be that serious.
