The Chinese are big readers of The Safer Sex Pages. I am continually amazed at the amount of mail I get from Asia. But it's always particularly interesting to note that this site has not been censored by the Chinese government. Perhaps that is about to change. I have never mentioned China on this site until just this week. I am confident Communist censors will soon notice I used the word China. I would be very surprised if censorship did not immediately follow.

Dave writes about China, publishing, & freedom. The Peking Duck is a peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who somehow ended up in Beijing for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him. That accidental expat is named Richard. Dave asks "How much longer will The Peking Duck be available outside China, or for that matter behind the firewall in China? That's the big question."

China, like some other countries, for instance Iraq, (notice how Saddam Hussein's website is not even on a domain with Iraq's tld) put all their citizens access to the internet behind a firewall. This means the government firewall acts as a censor to keep out all information which the government's censors decides is dangerous to the citizenry. Information dangerous to citizens, got it?, check.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that South Korean police say a Chinese computer hacker group is suspected to be behind a virus that wreaked havoc on the Internet over the weekend (01.25.2003).

Back in 2000 a Chinese consumer electronics firm Hisense had a firewall challenge in order to engage the Q&A; skills of crackers worldwide.

The Chinese sector of the net is an area of some concern for a lot of parties. For several years now the Chinese have been placing a firewall between their citizens and the rest of the net. Bennett Haselton of Peacefire recently informed me that he is working with the Voice of America to develop further methods of infiltrating and disabling Chinese firewalls.

It looks to me as though the answer to Dave's question is there will be many more Peking Ducks. And for the foreseeable future there will be an arms race between the censors and crackers over who exactly gets to speak in Peking.

1/30/03:12:15:58 PM PST    comment