This is entirely unrelated, but it reminds me of a comment I saw on reddit that was very telling. Someone was talking about a colleague of his who was Chinese and had come to the US, and who, over dinner with some other colleagues, said: "I can't believe how smooth your propaganda is here in the US. In China it is crude and everyone can see through it, but here you almost miss it." To which all of the other colleagues replied: "What are you talking about? We don't have propaganda in the US!"<p>I wish I could find it, it was very telling of the climate in China (I assume, I've never been).
Most people forget or don't know that Skype was created by the founders of Kazaa and they are hackers (like us) at heart and they built strong encryption into it protecting (actually) the privacy of their users' audio conversations. Skype's encryption has been a heated issue to governments who cannot wiretap Skype for various reasons law enforcement or otherwise.<p><a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skype_security" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skype_securit...</a>
The thing to remember with China is that there is a law on the books so that practically everything is illegal. The law isn't there to tell you what you can or can't do, it's there so that if you piss off the wrong people they can come down on you like a ton of bricks "legally".
I hate making generalizations about huge entities like states, but I can't resist on this one. I think this kind of thing will ultimately trip China up, and prevent China from ever gaining a significant technological lead. The more closed their internet is, the less ideas people will be exposed to, and thus there will continue to be less innovation.
false positive? just used skype few hours ago (in china). Tom-skype actually does have a VOIP license. The original news was circling in chinese media days ago but no one really gives a $@/7 coz bans like this occurs every year
I'm reading <a href="http://craphound.com/ftw/" rel="nofollow">http://craphound.com/ftw/</a> For The Win By Cory Doctorow right now. In it some of the main characters try to join a Gold Farmers Union, and the argument of how they can effectively mobilize is that now anyone in the world can instantly communicate and organize for workers rights and fair wages. Before these communication tools only the rich had the ability to organize countrywide and worldwide, but with access to skype or other VOIP tools the workers can have the same level of organization.<p>Maybe Cory Doctorow has a fan in the Chinese Communist party and they decided to nip that particular problem in the bud.
Update (can’t believe no one else posted this as a comment): Skype denies this. <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/china-skype-ban/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/china-skype-ban/</a>