Revealing The Chinese Great Firewall Filter

Culture

from the spam-good,-sex-bad dept

There have been plenty of stories about the somewhat arbitrary nature of the nationwide internet firewall/filter used in China to block out any websites or conversations that they believe are somehow harmful. We’ve already mentioned that the country has backed down from the most restrictive filter they had, after businesses were complaining that it was impossible to get anything done online. However, Dan Gillmor points out that some Chinese hackers have found the forbidden words list that was included in a popular instant messaging program, noting that it appears to be the same list used on a national scale. Still, my initial response is the same as the first comment on Gillmor’s site. They spend all this effort blocking out terms related to sex and political dissent, and they couldn’t be bothered to block out spam?