China Cracks Down -- AGAIN. (Need for proxies)

When anybody questions all the interest in developing anonymity tools for the Internet - just remember this story. From This week's Newsweek:

Beijing cracks down on unruly student Web sites.
By Craig Simons
Newsweek International
April 4 issue

It was a quiet protest. Over three hours, several hundred students gathered around a monument at the center of Beijing's prestigious Tsing-hua University. They left paper cranes, handwritten notes and flower wreaths. One taped up a computer printout reading, GIVE BACK OUR SHUIMU, the name of the school's online bulletin-board service (BBS), one of the most popular and freest forums in Chinese cyberspace until earlier this month. "You could find everything on the BBS," says one engineering student who joined the mid-March protest.

For Beijing, that was the problem. In recent weeks universities across China have clamped down on school computer networks to conform with new Ministry of Education regulations. According to students and Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, new rules call on administrators to block off-campus users and prevent students from posting anonymously to "enhance the moral and thought education of university students."

Chinese authorities have long been wary of the threat that the Internet's free flow of information poses to the regime. Beijing maintains at least 50,000 Internet police, Xiao says, who scan chat rooms and Web sites to delete or report content deemed objectionable, and runs a national firewall that blocks access to Web sites dealing with topics ranging from the Dalai Lama to human rights. Newer technologies allow authorities to peer into e-mail messages even as people are typing and to block the delivery of messages containing banned words and phrases. By restricting university BBS sites to student use, the government closes a technological loophole that allowed students to post from proxy addresses that hid their locations.
MORE IS HERE:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7305061/site/newsweek/

Privacy=Freedom
Freedom=Privacy