Blackmoor Vituperative

According to Reporters Without Borders, Microsoft (along with Yahoo, Cisco, and Google — et tu, Google?) is helping the Chinese government oppress its people.

“Reporters Without Borders has been able to check that, as reported by several news agencies, when a Chinese blogger attempts to post a message containing terms such as “democracy”, “Dalai Lama”, “Falungong”, “4 June” (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), “China + corruption”, or “human rights”, a warning displays saying, ‘This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.’

Generally, “subversive” messages are displayed on Chinese-hosted forums and blogs but the banned words are automatically replaced with blank spaces.

The Chinese version of the MSN portal, along with the blog tool, were launched as a joint venture with a local state-controlled company, Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd (SAIL).”

Okay, so Microsoft is helping Big Brother oppress the people by censoring what they may read and write. So? That’s nothing new. Microsoft has always been happy to get into bed with the government, and use as much power as the law will let it get away with (such as using the police in Kenya and Brazil to prevent students from studying its code, or preventing competitors from starting new companies). I think it’s only natural that Microsoft would want to get on the good side of one of the most successful dictatorships on the planet.