Polevaulting the Great Firewall of China: Human Rights Olympic Knockout
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- Polevaulting the Great Firewall of China: Human Rights Olympic Knockout
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- Beijing Human Rights “It’s a Knockout” starting soon…
- Target Shooting: Beijing It’s a Human Rights Olympic Knockout
- Beijing Olympics “It’s a Human Rights Knockout”: New from China
There are many ways to keep your website visible in China despite the censorship of external websites by the authorities; here is one that is quick to setup and also nimble.
Domain Mirror Plugin
There is a full mirror of The Wardman Wire at www.mattwardman.co.uk.
That is done using a plugin called Domain Mirror, which allows the copy of Wordpress installed on mattwardman.com to provide service to people viewing mattwardman.co.uk.
The Wordpress plugin
The approach is quite nimble, as I can set up a mirror viewable from China anywhere where:
- I can get a domain that can be configured to mirror this one.
- That domain is not blocked by the Great Firewall.
The advantages are:
- I only need to maintain one copy of Wordpress (my previous “UK Edition” of the blog
- I can move the whole thing to any domain that can be configured appropriately in about 24 hours for very small cost (e.g., a .uk domain would cost me around £5.00 for 2 years).
That is one way; there are several others mentioned on Wikipedia (for example) - and even more elsewhere.
A comparison: “Baby, Yer Feets Too Big”
The Chinese tradition of footbinding - preventing the the feet of women growing properly by binding them with strips of cloth into shoes as small as 3-4 inches long, involving the gradual breaking of toes and arches - has gone. (More information: not for the squeamish)
It seems to me that the current Chinese tradition of censorship - preventing the minds of people growing properly by attempting to bind them using the The Great Internet Firewall of China is as outdated and backward looking as footbinding - and should also be consigned to history.
Or to put it another way
Wrapping-Up
Let me add that I am fully aware that in my own country - the UK - there is also much work to be done to secure greater free expression.
But we do not have a government that simply bans most criticism of itself.
[tags]free expression, china, 2008 olympics, beijing[/tags]
You can get an idea of whether or not your blog is currently being censored or blocked by the Chinese government or by other evil regimes via the OpenNet Initiative website
Of course sometimes the censorship is a bit more subtle, for instance the Chinese language versions of the BBC News website are censored in China, but not, currently, the English language version.
Also worth reading is the recently updated Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents - March 2008 version - (2.2 Mb - 80 pages .pdf) by Reporters Without Borders
Thanks for those - always pleased to have extra information.
[...] to do this easily from Blogger, but it is easy from Wordpress. I covered this recently in “Pole Vaulting the Great Firewall of China“. A less elegant way to create a mirror site is to use a desktop blog editor such as [...]