My Way News - Some Web sites unblocked for Olympics, but not all
AP reports: "Olympic organizers unblocked some Internet sites at the main press center and media venues Friday while others remained off limits for journalists covering the Beijing games."

Off The Field - smh.com.au
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on censorship in China and I'm noting this even though Chinese attitudes towards Christianity have become much more relaxed of late, they still censor other religions and spiritual movements. Mindful of Pastor Martin Niemöller's warning, we stand with them. According to the report:

The Great Firewall of China - or the Golden Shield Project, to give it its official name - is intended to prevent, deter and detect anyone who reads, downloads or publishing reports deemed to challenge the government's hold on power.

In addition to the hardware and software - some of it supplied by US companies like Cisco - China also employs tens of thousands of human censors to trawl through popular forums and blogs, spotting and then erasing references to banned or sensitive topics.

I find it particularly shameful that American companies are doing this.

Olympic organisers agree to China blocking 'sensitive' internet sites - Times Online
The Times Online reports: "Kevan Gosper, the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) press commission, confirmed that some of its officials had agreed to Chinese demands that some sensitive sites be blocked on the ground that they were not related to the Olympics."

Comment: It is again demonstrated how easy it is for a government to control internet access. We can only assume that in the future such government control over the internet will only increase, and the capability for such control will always exist, even in countries which prize free speech. There are ways around such control, of course, but the original dream of the internet as a global information commons has been dashed.