I no longer need to use a proxy server to access most blogs? Very interesting. China was lauded for freeing internet traffic in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake; but it was supposed to be temporary. Both the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia are accessible, and have been for some time. Is this an anomaly, or part of a more permanent policy change?

Within the ‘white-person-living-in-China’ blog community, a number of clever ways have emerged of avoiding censorship by Ministry of Information psuedo-sentient state automated security algorithms. Actually, I’m pretty sure they are just text filers – but I like the high-tech version better.

One way is to simply 1337speak anything objectionable (ie: 0|ymp1cs 2oo8 ftw). Another, potentially less crass method is CensorvativeCensortive, a wordpress plugin that might come in handy for anyone commonly writing about touchy subjects.

In truth, I don’t think that much of what people like me say on an open forum such as this draws any attention at all from state censors – especially since I’m not Chinese. The author of Censorvative himself acknowledges the limitations of such technology:

this plugin isn’t meant to be a fail-safe solution (as the disclaimer on the plugin’s site indicates). It is meant to stop mass blocking at the automated level.

I’ve had my sites blocked a number of times due to use of keywords. Once the keywords were deleted, the site was unblocked. It is very unlikely that the site would be “cleaned up” by a human censor and permanently blocked at the IP level. Army or not, there are just too many sites to monitor and too little reason to block a site like this.

ISP level censorship, whereby HTML is scanned for the keywords and bounced if it is shown to contain a high enough concentration (or right keyword combination) is what this plugin will help bloggers get around.

Indeed.