The Great Firewall: Since the death of Mao, the Chinese Communist Party has played a delicate game. They wisely saw that a totally controlled and closed society was doomed. So rather than fight the inevitable, they have carefully doled out enough freedom to allow some progress and keep people mollified, but simultaneous cracked down on attempts to instituionalize that freedom (Tiananmen) or other threats to the parties final say (Falun Gong). Then along comes the internet and things get real scary for them. Anyone with a phone and a paltry piece of equipment can connect to the entire world. Why not just ban internet use? What, and be prceived as oppressors? Better to stick to the notion of doling out enough freedom to keep everyone content, but not to be a threat. The result is a massive firewall for the entire country. You, good Chinese citizen, can have full use of the internet, but you must do it through the state run access point. Of course, this access point will be montiored thanks to a little help from the decadent western company called Cisco and when you want to do a search, well, our good friends at Yahoo! will be sure to filter out anything that is not proper.

Chinese xenophobia has led many other U.S. companies to play similar games, but Yahoo! was particularly eager to please. All Chinese chat rooms or discussion groups have a "big mama," a supervisor for a team of censors who wipe out politically incorrect comments in real time. Yahoo! handles things differently. If in the midst of a discussion you type, "We should have nationwide multiparty elections in China!!" no one else will react to your comment. How could they? It appears on your screen, but only you and Yahoo!'s big mama actually see your thought crime. After intercepting it and preventing its transmission, Mother Yahoo! then solicitously generates a friendly e-mail suggesting that you cool your rhetoric--censorship, but with a New Age nod to self-esteem.

The former Yahoo! rep also admitted that the search phrase "Taiwan independence" on Chinese Yahoo! would yield no results, because Yahoo! has disabled searches for select keywords, such as "Falun Gong" and "China democracy." Search for VIP Reference, a major overseas Chinese dissident site, and you will get a single hit, a government site ripping it to shreds. How did Yahoo! come up with these policies? He replied, "It was a precautionary measure. The State Information Bureau was in charge of watching and making sure that we complied. The game is to make sure that they don't complain." By this logic, when Yahoo! rejected an attempt by Voice of America to buy ad space, they were just helping the Internet function smoothly. The former rep defended such censorship: "We are not a content creator, just a medium, a selective medium." But it is a critical medium. The Chinese government uses it to wage political campaigns against Taiwan, Tibet, and America. And of course the great promise of the Internet in China was supposed to be that it was unfettered, not selective. The Yahoo! rep again: "You adjust. The crackdowns come in waves; it's just the issue du jour. It's normal."

Here's the entire story. I should point out that I don't fault Cisco or Yahoo for getting involved in this. Customers often have odd demands and, frankly, it's not for Yahoo or Cisco to try to bring down Red China. I find the Chinese strategy for totalitarian survival to be a remarkable thing that I would never had thought would work. I still don't of course, and lots of folks in China continue to suffer for it, but it's quite remarkable how long it's lasted. A good lesson in bending but not breaking.

In turns out, what China really needs is a reverse firewall. So much spam comes through the one Chinese service provider, China Telecom, that lots of ISPs simply refuse any message from them.

"Complaints to China Telecom, which we estimate receives upward of 50,000 spam complaints per day from Europe and North America, are all ignored," said Steve Linford, a member of the Spamhaus Project. "China Telecom's complaints address is auto-answered by a robot message that replies, 'It's not under our control,' to any message you send."

Heh. "Not under our control." Could the irony be intentional?

Capitol Loss: Meanwhile. closer to home, it looks like Washington DC might grant Mike Tyson a boxing license. I enjoy my little jaunts to DC but, NOTHING could make me live in that area again. Outside of the mall, the city is deadly, there is little hope of any crime being solved mostly because it's known to have one of the most corrupt and inept police forces this side of Rwanda. The mayors tend to be habitual criminals. Everything is filthy. The suburbs are moderately safer and cleaner, but count on spending at least 4 hours a day in your car to cover that brutal 5 mile commute. And when you get home you find a cramped two bedroom townhouse with a quarter of a million dollar mortgage. And don't get me started on the schools. So in a way, it makes complete sense to give an emotionally retarded, intellectually vapid, ear-munching rapist the right to make a few million dollars or so. Coming soon, the O.J. Simpson national memorial.

Attitude: I'm awfully curmudgeonly lately aren't I? I don't know why, but I hope it's entertaining.