looking east

I remember a lengthy discussion I had with Basile about two years ago after reading this article in the Wired magazine about China’s great firewall. I wrote a blog post about it on my old blog, and I want to cite two paragraphs here:

“The teacher of the course thinks that many of the blogs are just a kind of self-profiling, meaning that the importance doesn’t lie in the content of what a blogger really thinks, but rather in the fact that they are cited in other places. As an example he translated Wozy Yins blog where he writes: ‘I am in the Wired!’ which means that he is rather proud of it. ”

“Another thing that I was wondering about is if the Chinese really feel like victims of this online censorship, or if it is a Western attitude to believe that the information of the internet should be freely accessible to everyone?”

This is the first time I am in China with my own computer, and I have to admit that China’s great firewall seems rather annoying to me:

• Wikipedia is blocked
• Feedburner is blocked
• wordpress.com is blocked
• del.icio.us is sometimes blocked
• flickr is sometimes blocked
• Skype is working
• IRC is working
• Gmail is working

I know there are plenty of ways around it, but still, these are websites I regularly visit. Especially feedburner is hard as this prevents me from reading a very large portion of my daily feeds. This means that if Chinese software developers want to stay up to date with what’s happening in the techie world, they’ll have to use proxies and ssh tunnels. It also means that software developers are heavily affected by the Chinese online censorship. Although I know that they are not very worried about it, I still believe that it’s just one more obstacle to China’s participation in open source. It also made me think that maybe the government doesn’t really want Chinese to actively participate in open source communities as this could encourage people to think about free information, available source code, and open collaboration.