No posting yesterday - Blogger problem
I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post yesterday, Wednesday 7th. The Blogger site was down for most of the evening, UK time. Now, just after midnight here, it is up again. My apologies also to the friends who I just pointed to this site and encouraged to comment, that although they could read it they could not comment. But now they probably can - unless the site goes down again.
A friend who is currently in China reported that his access to this blog is blocked. I must say that I somewhat flattered that the authorities there consider me a threat! Does anyone know, are all Blogger blogs blocked there, or is it because their automatic system has found certain keywords like "God" or "Bible"?
posted by Peter Kirk @ 12:30:00 am
5 comments
5 Comments:
Does anyone know, are all Blogger blogs blocked there, or is it because their automatic system has found certain keywords like "God" or "Bible"?
Peter, I think you might be able to find out using the Google website for China. Google, as you may have heard, is cooperating with Chinese authorities in filtering out undesired websites.
I tried Bible 圣经 and twice got an error message but several times it did go through. Hmm.
By putting '圣经 cn' into the Google china window I was able to pull up sites in China that posted about the Bible. Here is one.
Then I pasted 圣经 into 'find on page' and found that this site does mention the Bible quite often.
Wayne, thanks for the suggestion, but when I try your link I am automatically redirected to Google UK. I could ask my friend to experiment, but I don't think he would want to, and it wouldn't be wise for him as they may log attempts to search for certain sites.
Suzanne, thanks for your suggestions, but they are not much use to me as I don't read Chinese. But the page you linked to is from the "State Administration for Religious Affairs of PRC". Obviously they allow access to what is said about God etc with their own government's approval, for example through the official churches. It is foreign and "sectarian" material that they are concerned about. And not without reason: we in the west are rightly concerned about some Islamic and other material on the web which has a partially concealed radically political and possibly pro-terrorism message. But it would be even more worrying if our governments sought wide-ranging bans on Internet sites on mere suspicion, for that would mean that the terrorists had acheived their goal of destroying our hard-won freedoms.
Oddly, I followed the link in Wayne's comment and I did get Google cn (China) Then I input 圣经 and got 5 million search results, most of them foregn to China. Then I specifically tried for sites from within China and got 800,00- search results.
Never mind. I am a google addict, any language any time.
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