Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Blacklist Whitelist

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Communist Party announced on a conference held in Beijing on Dec 16, 2009 that the entire overseas Internet would be blocked. Instead of past practice of using a blacklist (on the list: Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter, to name a few) to filter out unhealthy information, a whitelist will be used to allow only selected sites going through the Great FireWall (GFW). Overseas websites must file a record to be white-listed.

The measure is hailed a critical step to protect our children from harmful information such as pornography and gambling, and to shield adult Internet surfers from junk EMails and computer viruses.

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