People have been upset since before the Olympics even began that China broke its word about providing journalists with free access to the internet, by leaving the Great Firewall of China largely intact for the games. I hadn’t heard about it since the Games kicked off until today when CBC’s ‘The National’ newscast reported that some athletes had their personal blogs blocked. Both Anna Rice and Kaveh Mehrabi appeared in the report talking about how their blogs were blocked. The report noted that Anna Rice had a background in political science, so perhaps China considered that a threat.
As an avid user of the web, I’m against any censorship of the web and oppose China’s decision to limit its peoples’ access to information. However, the moment they showed the “censored” blogs, I recognized something I’ve seen in Canada a hundred times. This is what a website blocked by China looks like. You can’t establish a server connection to the site at all so your browser just shows its default error message. Here’s what the blogs looked like in the CBC report:
That is what a website looks like when stylesheets are turned off in your browser. If you look closely, you can see those public computers have all sorts of toolbars and spyware installed. Combine that with both Ms. Rice and Mr. Mehrabi’s blogs using the same style from the same hosting company, and this story starts to fall apart. I even found this site that can do a test from Beijing to see if a website is blocked, and it verified that both athlete’s blogs are unblocked.
If you need more proof, here’s screenshots of kavehmehrabi.net with and without (below) stylesheets:
In the end, it’s great that CBC is bringing more attention to this important issue, especially considering that we’re dealing with traffic-shaping in Canada that can have the unintended effect of censorship. But if the media is going to make a big deal about this in China, they should really make sure to get their facts straight.
I still love you, though, CBC 
No wonder the style sheets don’t render, they user incorrect doctypes and some of their style tags have no type attribute. The HTML is surprisingly good though. They should learn to just use wordpress.com or blogger next time….
It’s time we got rid of the CBC as we have enough TV stations without having our tax dollars being used by a bunch of socialists!.
@Jonathan, you are so very smart! Nice catch!
@Dick Chapman – HOORAY for Socialism! You won’t be crying next time you go to the hospital and get free medical care will you?
@CBC – next time you decide to run a story like this, check with Guin, she’ll set ya straight, and she works for you.
That’s weak – doesn’t CBC have a fact checker of any sort!?