Friday, July 04, 2008
Writing Backwards to Defeat Censorship in China
While Americans are celebrating their freedom and independence this July 4th, let's not forget that everyone isn't as fortunate. The Chinese in particular live in a highly restricted society, but they are finding new and clever ways to express themselves and defeat the censors.
To slip past Internet censors squashing reports of a weekend riot in China's Guizhou province, some Chinese Bloggers have started writing backward.
Some 30,000 rioters set fire to government buildings over the weekend to protest the way authorities handled the death of a teenager in the province's Weng'an County. While state-controlled media provided immediate coverage, government censors moved fast to delete online posts providing unofficial accounts and deactivate the accounts of those users.
So bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally.
These techniques scramble the message juuuust enough to confound censors, but not enough to render the message itself unreadable.
[Via NowPublic.com]
To slip past Internet censors squashing reports of a weekend riot in China's Guizhou province, some Chinese Bloggers have started writing backward.
Some 30,000 rioters set fire to government buildings over the weekend to protest the way authorities handled the death of a teenager in the province's Weng'an County. While state-controlled media provided immediate coverage, government censors moved fast to delete online posts providing unofficial accounts and deactivate the accounts of those users.
So bloggers on forums such as Tianya.cn have taken to posting in formats that China's Internet censors, often employees of commercial Internet service providers, have a hard time automatically detecting. One recent strategy involves online software that flips sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally.
These techniques scramble the message juuuust enough to confound censors, but not enough to render the message itself unreadable.
[Via NowPublic.com]
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