Do They Eat Digital Donuts Too?
Posted on August 30, 2007
Filed Under Apparatchiks, China Internet |
The Associated Press had a report a couple of days ago on the Beijing police’s new program to discourage inappropriate internet use:
BEIJING - Police in China’s capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user’s browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content.
This will start September 1st and is supposed to be in place on all web sites located in Beijing by the end of the year. Leading Chinese portals Sohu and Sina are ready to roll this out. As with their animate colleagues, the animated police will have a regular beat - they’ll pop up every 30 minutes.
Sohu developed this for the PSB. I’m not sure what the technology is, but it’s probably based on Macromedia Flash, Java, or ActiveX.
I don’t think this is going to work.
Er, did you say all websites in Beijing?
According to CNNIC there are something like 786,000 domains registered in Beijing in 2006. According to the article, all of them have to be “on the cyber beat”.
The domains don’t necessarily have to host the software on their own server, they just need to have the code pointing back to the Beijing PSB servers. Distributing and checking code on three quarters of a million servers is a lot of work. I don’t envy the animate cops on this one. Scanning and logging only go so far, some poor cop is going to have to do a lot of checking.
Would you like a supersized data center, officer?
If we assume that it does get done, there’s a whole new problem: bandwidth and servers for the Beijing PSB. How many of China’s 137 million internet users will be accessing a Beijing-based website at any given time? They’re going to need a pretty big server farm and some serious data pipes to support this.
Pop up bloomer? Nope. Pop up blinker? That’s not it. Wait! I remember: pop up blocker
Pop up ads are so annoying that most browsers have some level of pop up blocking integrated and active on installation. After sitting through two or three visits from the digital cops people are going to get fed up. Whatever the technology, whatever the browser, there’s a configuration that allows either the script that initiates the pop up to be blocked or will disable all scripts from that site.
The digital cops are going to spend a lot of time in their digital cars, eating digital donuts.
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