Cracking China's Great Firewall

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    Date: 
    3 June 2010

    The number of Internet users in China recently surpassed 400 million, according to state media. And that makes it the world's most wired country. It's also making it more difficult for the government to control all those users.

    But it's trying.

    Often those controls affect internet businesses like Google, which recently decided to stop censoring its search results--that had been the price of doing business in China. The company rerouted searches inside China to Hong Kong, where there is no censorship. You've probably heard about the Google move, but it was just one of hundreds of websites that were simply shut down last year because they didn't conform to Chinese censorship rules.

    One of those shuttered sites was started right here in a garage in the Bay Area by three young Chinese entrepreneurs. They started an online translation community for techies that would eventually push the boundaries of freedom of expression in China and bump up against that country's authoritarian government.

    Japhet Weeks has this report.