What about ISPs whose customers bring their own portable IP address space along with them, and then multi-home? (i.e. have two or more ISPs, and request BGP peering with both?)

The directly-connected ISPs can do their checks to make sure that their customer owns that IP address and adjust their filters accordingly... but anybody else with BGP peering to these ISPs (i.e. other ISPs) can only hope and pray that their peers are doing the right thing. Blind faith might not be good enough.

As I understand it, SBGP would implement PKI and digital signatures to ensure that only someone who actually *owns* a particular netblock/ASN can advertise a route for it.

Currently, anyone can advertise pretty much anything and it's only individual ISPs filtering settings that would prevent it getting propagated.

Not exactly. There's more of a tradition of censoring websites from Taiwan, not as much of a precedent for doing it for websites from HK.

Hong Kong also uses Traditional Chinese, and there are differences in word usages etc between HK written Chinese and mainland written Chinese.

Google have specially made a Simplified Chinese version and are hosting it out of google.com.hk, aimed at mainlanders. When you access google.com.hk from a browser that is configured to ask for pages in Simplified Chinese, google.com.hk delivers you that version.

It even says under the search box (in simplified Chinese), "Welcome to the new home of Google in China!".

I had a conversation with a Chinese friend once about censorship of anti-government sentiment in China, he agreed with me that there are a lot of things Chinese people don't like about their government. Guess what his number one gripe with the government was? "That I have to get a visa to go to Hong Kong! It's the same damn country!".

So you're right, I think feeling second class to Hong Kong is an issue for the mainlanders.

Ditto Australia. Works on carriers that haven't specifically asked Apple to turn it off, incredibly easy to set up and use, nice and fast.

There, fixed that for you.

This survey on a Chinese news website (admittedly one run by the Gov't, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's rigged) asks the questions:

1. Will Google exiting from China affect your use of the Internet?

Yes - 43.4% (2032 votes)
No - 56.6% (2645 votes)

2. What search engine do you use most often?

Baidu - 78.5% (3714 votes)
Google - 19.2% (907 votes)
Sougou - 0.8% (36 votes)

and the rest are so small I won't bother listing them .. but they include, Yahoo, Bing, and a number of other Chinese search sites.

I don't know that Google will be missed as much as you think it will be, and foreign websites disappearing from the Chinese internet is a regular enough occurrence that it hardly rates a mention anymore.

YouTube has been gone (blocked) for a year+ now. Same with Facebook, which was blocked just as it was achieving some popularity in China.The average Chinese person doesn't use Google, YouTube or Facebook. They use the local versions: Baidu, Youku and Kaixinwang.

That said, I would prefer to see Google stay in China, even with a little bit of censorship. The Chinese internet is already so disconnected from the internet that we know, but having a player like Google is at least a small bridge over the divide.

HTTP POST?

So, you're saying that buffer underruns would be inconvenient... and overruns could get downright nasty :)

Great, that's not a bad reason at all. That must be why China flipped it upside-down when they adopted it.

I'm not sure why you say the earth pin being on top or bottom matters.

It wouldn't do us much good anyway, as we have most of our receptacles the wrong way around anyway.

Surely if most sockets have the earth pin on the bottom, then you could make the plug (or wall-wart) so that the cord comes out at that end, and still have plugs that sit against the wall like the UK ones? What is it that I'm missing?

Contrary to the picture shown in TFA, Australian plugs are orientated so that the earth pin is at the bottom (their picture is upside-down). Both flush-fitting (cord out the bottom) and standard (cord coming straight out) plugs are readily available.

(Interestingly, China adopted the Australian plug as their national standard a few years ago... but they turned it up-side down so that earth *is* on the top - I have no idea why!)

Woman.

Is that like Meta-Moderating?