CNET: China pulls plug on two blog sites: "...Web log sites were shut because one or more personal Web pages carried opinions on a letter from a well-known doctor to China's senior leadership asking them to reassess the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. The "BlogBus" site, where more than 15,000 Chinese Web surfers post opinions and write about their daily lives, has been shut since March 11."

I was in China in the fall of 2002 and suffered a similar fate. Being labelled a dissident by some unseen entity and seeing first hand that my website was inaccessible from the Republic was a strange and eerie sensation. It was only through the help of Ben Edlelman's "Internet Filtering in China" testing tool that I was able to deduce what had happened - either I or my webhost had seriously ticked off someone in the Chinese government.

Governments like this are creating problems that we need to solve. Technology like this is a step in the right direction, but focusing on all forms of speech might be a more worthy goal. Receiving broadband content doesn't mean a lot to those that can't get their packets out.