Backpacking Across the Great Firewall

Everyone's heard about it, but what are people doing about it?

Wiki vandalism at 20:05 Jan 26th:

Google is trading off freedom of information for market share

On the 25th January, 2006, Google has announced that it will censor itself in order to please the Chinese government. This means that thousands of search terms cannot be accessed by ordinary Chinese via google.cn. Taking into consideration Google's own mission statement, taking into consideration Art. 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, taking into consideration chapter 40 of Agenda 21 this is unacceptable. Goolge slaughters the promise of free information – a promise shared by the wiki community! – for the simple and crude reason of money. Thus, the world as a whole is left with two choices: 1.Google returns to its ethics and does not allow the Chines government to dictate its content. 2.Google does trade ethics for money and as a consequence the community still upholding the values of open source, open access, open information creates its own search engine and boycotts Google. Inaction on behalf of us, who have gathered here in order to give the world the greatest gift of them all – access to knowledge – , is not an option, not without selling our own open spirit. We cannot stand aside and tolerate and accept that the Google enterprise is turning into a corrupt, money-minded empire, which gives a damn where this world is going to end up. You may delete this appeal from this page, but you can never delete it from your conscious. Whether you hit “trash” or “copy” makes only a small difference to your keyboard, but it makes a huge to the rest of the world. If this world wants to be one nation of free and shared information we have to act now.

I, meanwhile, have taken to performing a daily censored-word search at google.cn. I got lucky today with a search for "June 4th" (6月4日) and Tiananmen (六四天安门事件) - at the bottom of the page the following appears:

据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。

Poorly translated via Babelfish gives:

According to the local law laws and regulations and the policy, the part searches the result not to demonstrate.

Yes, it truly is the Asian Century: Chaos in Iraq, Thailand is considering censoring the internet, Religious wackos in the hills of Afghanistan, regional-power wannabes in Iran, the odd earthquake or tsunami, North Korea still exists, and school children are forced to kill each other in a bloody 3 day contest on a remote island.