google.cn is gone

Well, I guess all the Chinese know that google.cn has left China, Mainland. The government held an conference, clarifying that google's quit is a special case and the overall status of Chinese internet is still very "transparent".

I don't know anything about politics. But I do know that I cannot use youtube, twitter and many other popular web services in china. And I do know that the Chinese government is filtering out a lot of information. And I also know that there is another search engine called Baidu in china, which rates the search result not by user input, but by the money from the advertisers. Moreover, I know there is some project called GFW which will filter all the web sites in china so people can only access the ones allowed by the government. No wonder there is a writer in China who published a post long time ago saying that one day Chinese people would have only one site to read news, only one search engine to use, and only one IM to chat and all of them are controlled by government. This may not be a joke. If nothing is changed in Chinese IT industry, then all of these will come to truth....

When the government officer said that the Chinese internet is transparent. I burst into laughters--what a hilarious joke.