Monday, October 8, 2007

China banning RSS Feeds?


I just read an interesting
article that stated that Chinese government is thinking about blocking all RSS feeds in China. In this class we all know what a great benefit RSS is. It has allowed us to keep up with each other's blogs, as well as keep up with other important news and informative sites that we may like.

The article I read stated that China is really strict with what goes through their internet system and they like to keep a close eye on what people are doing. RSS in the past has allowed citizens to get around this. RSS usually allows the Chinese to view whatever sites they want, even if they are blocked by the Chinese government through regular browsing. This is the main reason why the Chinese government is looking to get rid of RSS.

I'm sure that all of you out there know that China is a huge country with a lot of internet users. Is it really fair to take away all these people's RSS Feeds? Like I stated earlier the blogging system in this class would not be what it is now or run as smoothly as it does if we did not have RSS. I do not think that it is fair what the Chinese government is doing because RSS is a great benefit.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I have always known that China has been really strict about regulating their internet; however, I thought most of the censorship was to prevent their people from gaining access into websites that promote a form of government different than theirs. I think that banning the RSS feeds would be unpractical because I think the RSS feeds are great in how they are a tool for organization. China needs to understand the practicality of using RSS feeds for people wanting to receive information from a variety of sources.

Paro said...

I mean it makes sense because China likes to block a lot of sites from it's public. RSS allowes us to suscribe to many sites we are interested in that we might not have time to check everyday. We want to stay updated but China doesn't want that for it's people so it blocks them. I understand why they did it, I just don't agree with the censorship they have over their people.

Lauren said...

Banning RSS feeds in China makes perfect sense. We have taken for granted our freedoms to openly browse the internet and subscribe to whatever we want. China has always been strict with their citizens and want to keep a keen eye on them at all times. It's a shame that they are doing that because the feeds can be very beneficial to Internet users.

mkeeganwatkins said...

Blocking users RSS feeds seems like a natural evolution, considering the path that China is on. The goods news , however, is that RSS is just one manifestation of the XML language, with Atom being another, and presumably countless other possibilities. And as long as China continues to be a leading super-power in the tech industry, surely its citizens will continuously find ways to battle the suppression of open information.

W. Twomey said...

Yes, this is very interesting. China is actually censoring much of their internet that makes it unrecognizable as the US version or any other country's for that matter. I did a project in Ethics that showcased this injustice and I am not suprised at all that they are banning RSS feeds. It is because RSS feeds are just another way to get information out there, which China is completely against. Can you spell tyranny?
--westonJ