articles on the Great Firewall of China

Hi folks,
Here are a few items about the Great Firewall of China.

The Net Effect
by Steven Cherry
from Spectrum Online

This article gives an overview of the cat-and-mouse game between web publishers and censors in China:

"...BLOCKED POLITICAL sites are generally inaccessible for months, not minutes. That was the experience of Yan Sham-Shackleton, a resident of Hong Kong who goes by the Internet nom de guerre Glutter Girl and writes a blog about China's underground democracy movement (Hong Kong is located just outside the virtual gates of the Great Firewall.) On her birthday last year, she wrote, "My 30th Birthday Wish: Democracy in China." That entry got her blog, at http://www.glutter.org, banned in China for several months. As a protest, she altered its design, putting white text on a black background. In sympathy, a hundred or so sites around the world also reversed their layouts and "went black," an action that in turn was noticed on the discussion site Slashdot. Sham-Shackleton says Slashdot itself—one of the most popular locales on the Internet—was unviewable for a time within China". More...

The Filtered Future
China's bid to divide the Internet

By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, July 11, 2005, at 8:20 AM PT

This is an article from slate.com describing internet censorship practices in China:

"...China's long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the Communist Party's monopoly on power. With every passing day the Chinese Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we're only beginning to understand—one in which powerful countries refashion the global network to suit themselves." More...