thewils's Journal: How to Screw the Chinese Regime

It is known that China censors web content - search engine restrictions, the great Firewall of China, etc. etc. There is a lot of, shall we call it "content" out there that the Chinese government would not like the people of China to see.

What if that content could somehow be mirrored by lots of other web sites - I'm not thinking in the tens or hundreds, but Millions! Now, in addition, what if that content was concealed until a pre-arranged signal. Then the whole web would light up with said content and would be freely browsable from within China because the censors would not know which sites were involved until they were all switched on.

In 2008 when the Beijing Olympic flame is lit, wouldn't it be fantastic if all the mirrors were turned on at the same time and remained active until the flame was extinguished?

You could take a portion of your personal site's home page and maybe have some text about Tianenmen, or some pictures. Censored sites could identify information to be distributed and mirrors could select from the available content to display. There should be plenty of time between now and 2008 to come up with a solution for a central registry for content donors and mirrors?

Ah, well, just a thought...a dream maybe.

Sounds nice

[ZachPruckowski]

But it'd be tough to pull off. You'd need a list of major websites that work in China. Then the problem becomes that the more people a website has in China, the less willing it is to piss off the Chinese (because it loses that many more visitors).

Re:Sounds nice

[thewils]

Well, not necessarily. I don't believe that China censors a lot of personal blogs for a start. I personally run a website that I know isn't blocked. The idea is that the sheer quantity of sites carrying content will allow information to percolate through

Re:Sounds nice

[ZachPruckowski]

That's a hope, but my worry is that

1) No offense, but no one from China probably reads your blog, or my pages on virginia.edu, or anything like that. Not trying to be mean, but we can't count on hitting more than a few hundred or thousand people with out major sites. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the 80-20 rule applies here: 20% of sites get 80% of the traffic. Slashdot or msn or CNN or wikipedia won't do this for fear of getting blocked in China forever.
2) We can't count on information spr

Re:Sounds nice

[thewils]

No offense, but no one from China probably reads your blog, or my pages on virginia.edu

None taken, that's good. We're below the radar. Actually though, someone from China does contribute to one of my sites.

but the idea needs work to make it go

That's why I mention it now. There's still 2 years from now until the Olympics. A lot can be done in that time. I appreciate you taking the time to think about this and respond.