Thursday, February 16, 2006
Breaking the Great Wall of China
I've had mixed feelings recently about this whole ordeal with China and Google's willingness to help with the repression of free-speech. I love Google for it's vision, morality, and access to information ... but, I find this to be a bit against all that, and more about the good, old American Dollar (which is growing weaker by the day against the CDN -- woot!) Google, of course, has tried put a good spin on it, saying that it is better to give them access to a restricted amount of knowledge then nothing at all ...
... I disagree. By restricting information, you are allowing only access to what other people want you to see / hear. It completely defeats the purpose and usefullness of Google and the internet if you can't get accurate information.
However, I just found a very good article on Digg found in The Globe And Mail saying that a project at the University of Toronto is working on breaking down this wall. Go Canadians! The article is a bit technical, but I think you can still get the jist of it ... I can see a potential for mis-use, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Backstory: Google's network in China has been buggy at best, so now they have been given the ability to use Google.cn in exchange for restricting search terms and websites that the gov't doesn't want it's people to access ... "Google hopes its new address will make the search engine easier to use and quicker" -- and make them more money.
... I disagree. By restricting information, you are allowing only access to what other people want you to see / hear. It completely defeats the purpose and usefullness of Google and the internet if you can't get accurate information.
However, I just found a very good article on Digg found in The Globe And Mail saying that a project at the University of Toronto is working on breaking down this wall. Go Canadians! The article is a bit technical, but I think you can still get the jist of it ... I can see a potential for mis-use, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Backstory: Google's network in China has been buggy at best, so now they have been given the ability to use Google.cn in exchange for restricting search terms and websites that the gov't doesn't want it's people to access ... "Google hopes its new address will make the search engine easier to use and quicker" -- and make them more money.
# posted by AllCdnBoy @ 4:32 PM 
