internet - To the North Korean model


When you can read this, the situation might have cleared up, but I will most certainly not make any jokes about the North Korean model for the internet. After the uproar that started last week because of new restraints on BBS's I joked in one of the comments on this blog that only North Korea has found an effective way to keep its country closed: no access at all.
This morning I could not get access to almost anything here in Shanghai, just like a few of my colleagues. The internet had slowed down to a trickle, and of course I thought we had to deal with an upsurge in filtering activities that caused the internet to virtually close down.
While it supported my key argument, as an internet addict I was still not happy about the whole situation. Still not sure it is really nanny, I just skyped with a friend in the US (very few people today online) and she said it was a global problem, since the US also saw a slowdown. You can never be sure.
For more updates on the developments in China, you can follow this technorati-tag (thanks for the tip, Andrea).
Danwei points at this post by Isaac(whose RSS-feed does not work very well) who predicts more North-Korean like action in China, he qualifies as "red terrorism".

I wrote on CNBlog that not only BBS is dying in China as a majoy window to watch China's public voice, but also those centralized Blog hosting services. They are all very easy to be blocked or orderred to shut down by gov. I'm happy to see that more and more netcitzen and bloggers realized it and moving to more distributed blogging solutions.

Isaac fears that the weblogs hosted in China are going to be the next ones that will have to register and advises them to get a host abroad.