Day 1 Thoughts

Tyler: I thought JZ's point about "half-assed" censorship was quite interesting. For example, I like the idea that Google created google.cn, while retaining an easy way for people in China to use a Chinese-language, uncensored google.com instead, as a way of convincing the Chinese government that it had taken steps to censor content that it had been ordered to censor but without actually preventing access to anything. A similar example of Microsoft censoring the titles of blogs but not their content was also given that I found interesting. I wonder if there are other, more subtle, behaviors that have been built into products that allow for the appearance of censorship without actually fully implementing the censorship?

Also interesting is the distinction between the two types of countries that may want to filter online content. The first type, like Saudi Arabia, can filter content as it comes into the country because its network topology is small and simple enough that each incoming server can be configured to support the government-ordered censorship. The second type, like China, has too large of a network to rely on an approach that is working in Saudi Arabia and must rely more heavily on the content servers/providers doing the filtering themselves. Are there steps, such as encrypting URLs to make keyword filtering more difficult, that could make filtering more difficult in either of the types of countries?