Amazon’s 3G Kindle leaps ‘Great Firewall of China’

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Simon Hua.

AFP |  November 1, 2010

HONG KONG — Amazon’s Kindle 3G e-reader is being snapped up on China’s grey market as it has an extra special advantage for customers — it automatically leaps the so-called “Great Firewall” of state web censorship.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked by the Beijing authorities, can be accessed without interference by the Kindle’s Internet browsing function, the South China Morning Post reported Monday.

Amazon says it is not able to ship the Kindle to mainland China or offer content in the country, which has the world’s largest Internet community at more than 420 million web users, the Post reported.

But a seller in Beijing told the paper he slipped them into China a few at a time after having them delivered to an address outside the mainland. He has sold 300 in the past month.

AFP found dozens of Kindles available on web auction site Taobao, China’s answer to eBay, with prices ranging from a special offer of 700 yuan (105 dollars) to 5,000 yuan.

Several Chinese bloggers are recommending the device, according to the paper, largely due to the fact it can “scale the wall automatically”.

“I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there,” the paper quoted a mainland blogger as saying.

“And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.”

The 3G Kindle uses global system mobile (GSM) communication technology, which gives WiFi coverage in more than 100 countries, including China. The WiFi-only Kindle would rely on a local Internet connection.

Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong’s electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland Internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget.

“Every Kindle device is pre-registered to a personal account, so every user’s information is clear,” he said.

“In addition, Kindle has a book-buying focus, so the censors may think these connections are relatively safe.”

The Kindle has its own network, called Amazon Whispernet, to provide wireless coverage via AT&T’s 3G data network in the US and partner networks in the rest of the world.

A 3G wireless coverage map on Amazon’s website includes numerous Chinese cities, suggesting its 3G link involves a Chinese carrier, the paper said.

Pakistan, Turkey Target Google, Other Sites

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | The Wandering Angel

By Tom Wright, Marc Champion And Amir Efrati | The Wall Street Journal | June 26, 2010 

A move by Pakistan to begin monitoring for anti-Islamic content on major websites—including those run by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.—is the latest sign that censorship looms as a threat to Internet companies in a number of countries.

The Pakistan announcement on Friday came a day after a communications minister in Turkey, which has blocked thousands of sites including Google’s YouTube, said the video site was “waging a battle against the Turkish Republic” and suggested that the situation could change if Google were to register and pay taxes.

Authorities in Pakistan on Friday said they would start monitoring major Internet search engines, including Google and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.com, as well as the e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. The move follows an action last month against social-networking site Facebook Inc., which Pakistan blocked for several weeks after it hosted a page in which users could post pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. The portrayal of Muhammad is forbidden by Islam, and the ban was lifted when the site removed the page.

A YouTube spokeswoman said it was aware of the actions announced in Pakistan and said it will work to keep its services accessible there. “Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our content policies,” she said.

She added that the company remains “disappointed” about the continuing ban on YouTube in Turkey “against a safe and lawful international service enjoyed by millions of people around the world.”

Regarding Pakistan’s decision, a Microsoft spokeswoman said, “Government decisions to restrict online content should respect the rights of individual users and be adopted through open, transparent and publicly accountable processes.” A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company “was founded on the principle that access to information can improve people’s lives, and we are disappointed to learn about the monitoring and possible blocking of our sites in Pakistan.” Amazon declined to comment.

Google and other Internet companies have helped some Asian countries, such as India and China, enforce certain standards online by removing material that governments find objectionable or violate local laws. YouTube blocks access to videos in Thailand that might be seen to insult the king—which is against the law in that country—and Nazi imagery that is illegal in some parts of Europe.

Earlier this year Google stopped self-censoring its Internet search results in China after complaining it had been hit with a cyber attack originating from that country. China’s own Internet filters now censor Google’s searches.

A number of countries in the Islamic world, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have banned Internet content in the past for being sacrilegious. But those countries have authoritarian governments that closely monitor the Internet and the media. In Pakistan, where Islamists have vied with secular-minded politicians since the country’s creation in 1947, the implementation of such bans is fraught with difficulties.

On Friday it remained unclear how the state-run Pakistan Telecommunication Authority would be able to monitor millions of links on the Internet to ensure blasphemous material wasn’t appearing on sites like Google and Yahoo.

In Turkey, Google has been the most prominent victim of a 2007 law that has resulted in the closure of thousands of websites, putting the government under pressure in recent weeks as newspapers and opposition parties have begun to cry foul over the restrictions being placed on ordinary web users.

In May 2008, a Turkish court shut down access to Google’s YouTube due to material posted on the site that was found to be insulting to the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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Earlier this year Turkey’s communications ministry extended the ban to other Google sites, a move that appeared to be triggered by a separate tax battle with the U.S. giant. As a result, Turks suddenly lost direct access to GoogleMaps and other sites, as well as to YouTube. However, many ordinary users have been able to circumvent the closures.

The opposition People’s Republican Party, usually a fierce defender of Ataturk’s honor, on Thursday attacked the government in parliament for creating what one parliament member called a “culture of censorship” in the country, including Internet censorship.

Some of Turkey’s top leaders have sought to distance themselves from the Internet closures. President Abdullah Gul earlier this month sent out a public message through his account on micro-blogging site Twitter.com, saying he “cannot approve of Turkey being in the category of countries that bans YouTube [and] prevents access to Google.”
Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com, Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com and Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

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