Something odd’s happening to China’s net nanny. Requests to Google, Youtube and other search engines from within China are being redirected to Baidu, the big local search engine.
There’s been some speculation that this may be a response to Dubya meeting the Dalai Lama. I agree with techcrunch that it’s more likely to be eyeball piracy by Baidu under cover of its relationship with the Ministry of the Information Industries.
Baidu are the people who don’t just prevent you from seeing sites on the banned list. Any request from users for verboten sites through Baidu sees them knocked off the internet for at least half an hour. Nice bunch. Quoted on NASDAQ too. Apparently the stock went up by 1.25% when news broke. Well, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Arr.
Nanny’s generally been in frantic harmonization mode because of the 17th Party Congress. But there are ways to slip through the net:
The 17th Communist Party Congress is abbreviated to 十七大 (shiqi da) or '17 big' in Chinese. Mainland Chinese soft porn website 17da.com and overseas-hosted hard porn link site 17big.com seem to be open for business.
Ah, the Judge Dread technique. Works every time.
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