Microsoft under fire for censoring China blogs

By Chinese law, Microsoft has to censor local blogs, excising phrases like "Taiwan independence" and "Mao Zedong" from blog headlines. Civil rights advocates are apoplectic -- at Microsoft.

Let's please give Microsoft a break. They need to abide by local law in order to stay in a key global market. No one is being directly hurt by the censorship, unlike, say, what happened in Tianamen Square. Lastly, the censorship just won't work. Spammers seem to be able to get through a lot of filtering in order to sell V1agra and C1al1s, right? The bloggers will just switch to codewords, acronyms, and other techniques that easily bypass automated censor filters.

-- Peter S. Kastner