Jimmy Wales, who was in Hong Kong over the weekend for the annual Wikimania conference, said some impolite things about Chinese Internet censorship. As reported by WSJ's Digits:
“We don’t approve of filtering, but there is nothing we can do to stop it,” he said.
On August 3 at 2:50 pm, the influential political blogger and journalist Michael Anti tweeted that Wall Street Journal's Chinese website, cn.wsj.com, had been blocked within China. That afternoon, after testing on multiple browsers, we emailed WSJ for a comment, then posted a story announcing WSJ Chinese had been harmonized, i.e. could only be accessible in China with a VPN.
Two hours ago, Kathy from Dow Jones's Hong Kong office emailed back:
Today, barbarians of the unruly and unruled Internet are less dangerous. Today, your sleep will be sounder, your dreams more colorful, your future freer. For today, Britain, you are one step closer to achieving China's harmony-promoting, children-protecting Net filtration system, which we lovingly refer to as the Great Firewall. And how great it is: no porn, because it can be eradicated like rats; no discussion of historical events, so as not to offend the sensibilities of certain mothers who would prefer to forget those things ever happened; no YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, or Bloomberg, because screw 'em; and no dissent (and why would there be dissent?). Hadrian's Firewall, we'll call it. You'll love it, as we do.
Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which has sources within Zhongnanhai, has apparently flown too close to the sun. It got scorched on Wednesday, with Sina, Tencent, NetEase, and Sohu all deleting the paper's microblog accounts. Reasons remain basically unknown.
Astrill wants its users to know it was the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack yesterday, and that they "are experiencing technical issues with our API servers," and are investigating, and "apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."
Unfortunately, if you are in China and only use Astrill, it's unlikely you've gotten this message (unless you happened to see it on Reddit). Astrill's been tweeting, beginning with this 13 hours ago:
The above was posted to Sina Weibo recently and was, of course, deleted. If it doesn't seem like a picture that compares China's president to a chubby bear with a sweet tooth would be allowed to stand, it's because a picture that compares China's president to a chubby bear with a sweet tooth isn't allowed to stand, even if it's done in good fun (as the above obviously is). But as we've said before: censors don't like fun. (They prefer their jobs.)
Those wonderful viral marketers at Durex -- who were responsible for this ad that implied Barack Obama has a bigger penis than Mitt Romney -- sprinkled some photoshop magic to one particular photo of Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan that's been making the rounds.
In the original -- somewhat lampooned because China's First Lady is using an iPhone -- Xi Jinping definitely does not have a condom in his breast pocket.
Global Times chose June 4 to publish two editorials about how the Internet and media need to be brutally censored. One editorial is by Shan Renping -- the party’s stupidest editorial lapdog -- and the other is from the rat-infested oozing pile of vomit and bile shat through the vagina of a dead yet zombified tapeworm screaming at the top of its intestines, Hu Xijin.
Let’s start with Hu: “Web regulation in public's best interest”
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