June 24th, 2009
July 1: Day for offline protest against Green Dam
While PC makers are saying nothing about the impending July 1 deadline to install Green Dam Youth Escort on machines sold in China, as The Wall Street Journal non-reports in a non-story, Beijing artist Ai Weiwei is agitating for Chinese citizens to protest by staying offline July 1. The Daily News reports:
Ai recently used Twitter to call on Chinese citizens to cease internet use as the government debuts Green Dam. “Stop any online activities, including working, reading, chatting, blogging, gaming and mailing,” Ai posted in Chinese. “Don’t explain your behavior.”
With the backdrop of Iranian citizens being gunned down in the streets, staying offline seems a pretty mild form of protest. That’s the point, Ai says:
It’s an online protest without any cost or risk,” Ai wrote in an e-mail to Reuters. “It aims to oppose Internet censorship.”
Meanwhile Google is working furiously to scrub porn from the search engine.
“Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there,” the search giant said in a statement about Green Dam. “This has been a major engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the government.”
