Great Firewall of China

After learning what a variety of sites were not reported banned by the Great Firewall of China site, I became a bit suspicious that what this really was, was a spam gathering site, sucking in the unwary, in the same way those "please forward this urgent message..." emails work (the last one of those I received was decrying that the new $1 presidential coins don't have "In God we Trust" - which they do).

So I did a bit of google searching and, yes, there is a firewall to save the Chinese people from visiting sites which the PRC disapproves of. There is a huge counter effort out there trying to break it, interesting reading if you google it!

At the level of local network security, the world depends first on Cisco firewall products, a company with an interesting history, but a company that is currently owned in Israel. Hence the following picture of the Golden Gate in the wall of Jerusalem - Firewalls are an old business in the Holy Land! What makes this picture interesting is that after the Moslems took Jerusalem, they bricked up the Golden Gate and built a cemetery in front of it. Why? This is the gate that the old testament says that God will re-enter Jerusalem through at the end of the ages. I suppose if you have a conception of God as possessing a physical body, bricking up a gate will, in your mind, keep the end of the world from coming...



Now I can certainly see how the PRC would be afraid that the internet would be the path of entry of ideas that would be the end of the(ir) world; but somehow, bricking up the portal, so to speak, seems, well... you know.