TechEye reports that the Chinese government switched off the Internet last week. According to the article, the Chinese government flipped its kill switch on the great firewall of China when it became concerned that some citizens might remember the 24th anniversary of the massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Apparently, China has decided that the best way to commemorate the massacre is by declaring 4 June “internet maintenance day” when all loyal communists spend the day updating their servers while remaining unconnected to the net. According to the author, the government switched off the Internet so that the loyal network managers would not be bothered by too much net traffic.
Those sites under maintenance include blogs and websites that might want to remember 4 June for reasons other than being a patch Tuesday. The Washington Post speculates the Chinese government’s “fool’s errand” of censoring the memory of Tiananmen Square, is due in part to last year’s Arab Spring. The article maintains that shutting down websites and censoring rubber duckies and Legos is part of Beijing’s reaction to the Arab Spring.
Despite the Internet shut-down TechEye reports that some sites were allowed to stay up. The Twitter-like Sina Weibo was working, as were the Chinese operations for MSN and Yahoo. For some reason, the dictionary website WordKu.com offered just one page: a definition for the word “encore”.
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I hope I’m not the only one that recognizes the ironic timing of the revelations of the Obama administration’s massive domestic spying campaign and the Tiananmen Square anniversary.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.