"Oh yes," says CNN. Also: CYBER CANNIBALS! GAHHHHHHHH

Short of excerpting 1984, this is the most Americanized and utterly awful lede to a China story that I have ever seen:

Do you ever get the feeling you are being watched? Closed circuit cameras recording your movements, strange noises on the phone line, phone calls that suddenly stop, emails being monitored, and private computer files and Facebook being hacked into. Oh yes, secrecy is no secret in China. Privacy is anything but private.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are being watched... in the shower? DUM DUM DUM. You should probably invest in bathroom curtains.

Here's some good ol' Cultural Revolution-era fearmongering in addition:

But it isn't only the authorities that people in China need to fear -- they may want to be wary of each other. A neighbor, a boss, a former friend... anyone is a suspect, anyone can be a so-called "cyber cannibal."

Never mind that this CNN story is about two years out of date the moment it appeared on its website about two hours ago. Never mind that others have written about this topic -- more than a month ago -- with much more objectivity and depth. Just enjoy sentences like these:

But on the web there is nowhere to hide from the prying eyes of china's cyber cannibals.

Stan Grant knows nothing about the Internet, or China, or, it appears, the shift key.

Nicely done, CNN, for confirming my belief that you suck.

You can write "shit fuck cunt cocksucker" to your Congressman about SOPA, but here's one word they don't allow

Click to expand the above. Notice that it's the word DELETE (de_leted) that gets flagged by the bot.

Derrick Sobodash, a work colleague, was trying to explain in a very rational letter to his Congressman in Michigan that the proposed anti-piracy bill SOPA would end up hurting the one industry in Detroit that's still hiring, IT. In addition, American companies like YouTube would have to hire people to self-censor, expurgating content that could potentially draw the attention of the RIAA and MPAA, and naturally companies would outsource those jobs to India and Vietnam. Derrick very reasonably explained that China keeps untold thousands employed as censors, but no such employment benefit would come to the U.S. because surely no one would want those jobs.

He wrote all this and then hit send, and an error message popped up: "We're sorry, we have found the word 'delete' in this field."

Personally, I'm sad he didn't just send "Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits" on the first go.

***

Derrick, who is more tech-savvy than I'll ever be, described SOPA in terms that made me shudder:

The American Internet will become like the Chinese Internet.

Think about it: self-censorship will become necessary, as mentioned above, as preemptive measures against lawsuits (in China, self-censorship is necessary as preemptive measures against government rebukes).

Larger companies could use SOPA to bury their competitors. They could hire their version of 50-cent armies to direct attention to potential SOPA violations. Vimeo, we'll see you later.

The amount of content that could potentially become unavailable except to subscribers is staggering. It would be as if a wall were erected. A virtual wall. A... Great Firewall. And that whole paying for content? It'd be like paying for a VPN in China.

So, yeah, contact your representative. Whether you choose to curse is entirely up to you.

UPDATE: Evan Osnos of the The New Yorker has a great post about Chinese reactions to SOPA.

Macaronic gibberish

This is real: bjblcetjsylyxgs.pinsou.com

I would love to hear the internal company discussion that led to the formation of that website. I really cannot fathom. It's like a cat named the thing.

Very interestingly enough, the URL is a dead link if your VPN is on. If it's OFF, however, the wonders of Chinese Internet gobble up that salmagundi and spit this out: http://www.pinsou.com/company/templet/tour001/?bd=108582

Still more interesting, that URL also doesn't work if you have a VPN on. Reverse Great Firewall? (I use a Mac and can't run China Channel, but if someone with that Firefox extension wants to turn on the VPN and turn on China Channel before trying to access the Pinsou link, I'd be very curious to know the results.)

If you were wondering, the site is for Beilecheng Children's Gym, located near Ditan Park (Temple of Earth).