The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Microsoft a patent, first applied for in 2004, on technology to censor profanity — or any keywords off a list — from an audio stream in real time. This technology could be applied not just to online video like YouTube but also for cell-phone audio and internet chat. Think China will be the first buyer? @#$% yeah. [Ars Technica]
The Chinese government may have assured the International Olympic Committee that reporters would enjoy Western freedoms while covering the Olympic games, such as unfettered access to the Internet. Once on the ground, however, journalists have discovered that's not exactly the case. The IOC has been busy backtracking. Olympics reps now have clarified that open Web access is only for sites about "Olympic competitions" — not, say, Amnesty International, one of many sites that has been blocked. The question no one has asked, however, is why China should feel compelled to act in any other way?
After China's Internet censors blocked access to YouTube because of clips depicting riots in Tibet, Google immediately began work to restore access to the online-video site in the country. But news stories regarding the Tibet protest remain censored from Google News China, Blogoscoped's Phillip Lenssen reports. Below, screenshots from Google News Hong Kong, which features the Tibet protests, and Google News China, which does not.
James Fallows's epic 4,221-word article on the Great Firewall of China in The Atlantic breaks with geek convention. When writing about China's technological efforts to block undesirable Web content, we're supposed to conclude that censorship is damage, and the Internet will route around it. (Wired did so last October.) Fallows instead concludes that all the Chinese authorities have to do is make finding unlawful content on the Internet slightly annoying. The masses of people with more interesting things to do than configure proxy servers will comply. But what we really like is how The Atlantic pitched this story to us: Fallows's work isn't a provocative thinkpiece on the nature of censorship in the age of the Internet, it's service journalism! Who cares about the Chinese people — you just want to know if the Internet will work when you travel to Beijing for the Olympics. Forthwith, the PR person's suggested questions, and answers extracted from Fallows piece:
The Middle Kingdom's net censors have finally patched up a great gaping hole in the Great Firewall of China, its not-so-effective Internet defense against the rest of the world's free press. It's now blocking all RSS feed traffic in an effort to stop the flow of information critical of the Chinese government. The Public Security Bureau has attempted to quash blogs and other forms of forbidden information ever since the great Chinese Internet surge in 2006. Of course, this ban will probably get swiftly dropped once China's intelligentsia discovers that RSS, besides being used for blog-headlines distribution, is also a vital tool for data transfer from Web-based applications. Photo by David Baron)
