With Australia planning to implement their own country-wide firewall to protect their citizens, they’ve produced this video to explain how they’ve drawn inspiration from the ‘impressive’ Great Firewall of China (GFW).
The GFW’s real name is the Golden Shield Project and is intended to limit the circulation of information within the country. As Deng Xiaoping put it “If you open the window for fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.” and the political ideas have to be protected by “swatting flies” occasionally.
If they go ahead with the project, Australia will join the illustrious ranks of Cuba, Zimbabwe and Belarus in using the Chinese technology. Internet filtering occurs in almost every country, but to a lesser extent. To see social media policies elsewhere have a look at this previous post: Banned Social Networks, by Country
In China social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are completely blocked, whilst Skype and YouTube seem to get banned and unbanned on a weekly basis. China does offer Baidu and QQ as in-country alternatives, and they’re excellent but not really that useful to foreign visitors wanting to keep in touch with home.
On a purely pragmatic basis it’s annoying as you’re never quite sure whether a site is blocked, the site is down, the VPN is being blocked or is down, or the internet connection is being flaky. Thanks to a VPN solution I’m still able to see and do everything, but it all just takes that little bit longer to start up and log in every time. This is particularly noticeable on a smartphone compared to in an unrestricted country just tapping the Facebook or BBC icon and getting an instant update.
Then I remember this and stop complaining:
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