Great Firewall of China Winds Down; Censorship Battle Continues

Mashable, Ben Parr, June 9 - Last Tuesday, China took dramatic steps to quiet chatter on the web by blocking Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Hotmail, YouTube, and a wide range of social websites. This was done in advance of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre.

Well, it looks like the Great Firewall of China is finally coming down, at least for now. According to The Wall Street Journal, Chinese Internet users have been regaining access to most of social networking websites. However, it seems that the bans have not yet been lifted for YouTube () and Blogger (), both subsidiaries of Google ().

This doesn’t mean that China is giving up censorship of the web. Far from it, in fact. We reported just yesterday that China intends to force PC manufacturers to install a software that blocks specific websites that the Chinese government deems detrimental. There’s still no word as to which websites will be blocked by this new software.

While the Great Firewall of China may be disappearing, the battle for freedom on the web is only beginning. There are plenty of workarounds to these blocks and now there is plenty of attention on the Chinese government’s practices. People will continue to fight censorship and oppression, even in the face of insurmountable odds because it’s just human nature. The battle over web censorship in China has only begun.

Source - http://mashable.com/2009/06/09/china-firewall-ends/