"Students protest restrictions on most influential university BBS"
"Deeds Better Than Words", photo originally uploaded by maomy. [via Zheng]
Students protest restrictions on most influential university BBS, China Digital Times reports.
"From March 16, some of the most influential University BBS (Bulletin Board System) in China, including the one of Tsinghua University (smth.org), Peking University (ytht.org) and Nanjing University (lilybbs.org), have been restricted to users with an IP inside the university only. That means public users, who make remarkable contribution to the conversation, are not able to access these BBS any more."
maomy has more photos on peoples' reaction to the ban.
Update: Reactions and commentaries on the ban are proliferating in the blogosphere. Blog posts, flickr photos, furl and del.icio.us bookmarks on the topic can now be tracked via smth tag in Technorati.
Amy Gu reminisces smxh BBS and noted of the useful information that BBS has. "Where could I check all the useful information(on the other BBS including SMTH ) later?" Her friend in Nanjing was quoted as saying.
Isaac Mao calls this Red Terrorism and cautions that blog service providers in China will share the same fate.
"I wrote on CNBlog that not only BBS is dying in China as a majoy window to watch China's public voice, but also those centralized Blog hosting services. They are all very easy to be blocked or orderred to shut down by gov. I'm happy to see that more and more netcitzen and bloggers realized it and moving to more distributed blogging solutions."
In a Global Voices interview with Rebecca Mackinnon, Isaac further elaborates on what he meant by the threats that blogs are facing and some of the possible solutions he sees.
"As I know, the centralized bloghosting sites will soon add “Shui Mu Qinghua” [The name of the Tsinghua University BBS] as a blocked keyword in their self-policed system. By searching Grassland (an RSS search engine developed by cnblog.org team), some centralized blog sites has removed their user’s posts manually in last days, some links broken already."
EastSouthWestNorth has translated a few notices by various institutions that communicate a change in the BBS user policies. Also noteworthy in the translations is the latest happenings on Shui Mu Qing Hua's BBS as observed by inmediahk.
"Over the past two days, the SMTH BBS (now an intranet) has shown a trend in that more and more people have resorted to quoting Chairman Mao's sayings in their posts and comments."
