March 2010 Archives

With advancements in hardware and software, sophisticated filtering technologies are increasingly being applied to restrict access to the Internet. This happens at the level of both governments and corporations. Renesys is headquartered in the "Live Free or Die" US state of New Hampshire. In our small town of roughly 10,000 folks, we know of a local company who tries to restrict non-work related (e.g., shopping) websites from their employees. Unfortunately, someone who works there can't read about Amazon's cloud computing as a result — a small bit of collateral damage. Entire countries act in much the same way. The OpenNet Initiative keeps track of such state-sponsored restrictions and publishes interesting maps based on the level of filtering by topic. But given the open nature of the trust-based Internet, one country's restrictions, if not handled very carefully, can easily foul the global Internet nest we all live in. This blog is about one such story of Internet restrictions in China becoming visible (seemingly at random) from other parts of the world and going undetected for 3 weeks. Given the increasing complexity of this technology, the difficulty in controlling a very open Internet, and the strong desire of some to do just that, this could be a harbinger of things to come.