China's Online Panopticon

It's been reported in 'China's Eye on the Internet' that the infamous "Great Firewall of China" is being is actually a "panopticon" that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than being a true firewall - according to researchers at UC Davis and the University of New Mexico. The article states that:

The researchers are developing an automated tool, called ConceptDoppler, to act as a weather report on changes in Internet censorship in China. ConceptDoppler uses mathematical techniques to cluster words by meaning and identify keywords that are likely to be blacklisted.

Many countries carry out some form of Internet censorship. Most rely on systems that block specific Web sites or Web addresses, said Earl Barr, a graduate student in computer science at UC Davis who is an author on the paper. China takes a different approach by filtering Web content for specific keywords and selectively blocking Web pages.

In 2006, a team at the University of Cambridge, England, discovered that when the Chinese system detects a banned word in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three "reset" commands to both the source and the destination. These "resets" effectively break the connection. But they also allow researchers to test words and see which ones are censored

Via Roland’s Sunday Smart Trends
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