[dfranke]

I suspect this is motivated by performance concerns. The overhead of the centralized filtering they do is massive, and a friend living in China tells me that it hurts net responsiveness badly. Since the Chinese government already seems to have decided a while ago that it's only interested in preventing casual access to subversive material and doesn't care about anyone determined enough to bother connecting through a proxy server, it makes sense to decentralize the load by moving the filtering logic onto the client.

If I'm right, though, this presents an enticing opportunity for some vigilante freedom fighting: write a worm that disables the filtering software.

[graemep]

So how long till the rest of the world adopts the same approach. Australia is having problems with proposed filtering because of performance concerns, so this would be a solution from their point of view as well.

[netsp]

I hope you're right. Requiring censoring software to be installed on people's PC's may get people's attention. Currently awareness here is very low. The performance issues have been getting a big portion of the attention, if is to be had. This has been ammunition for the opposition to the plan on with hand but a mask on the issue with the other.

The ISPs and other opposition press the performance issues because it's easy & doesn't require value judgements. But we should be talking about (I hate to sound like an American Libertarian) the liberty issues.

[stan_rogers]

It's already got a name -- hacktivism -- and it's happening in places like the Citizen Lab (U of T) already. If you're not familiar with the Open Net Initiative, it's worth a visit to http://opennet.net to find out what's being done today.

[dfranke]

To anyone still paying attention to this thread: I'm taking back any implication that encouraging this is a good idea or that it would turn out well, after observation of all the idiotic ham-handed DDoS attacks presently being perpetrated upon Iran.