They Won't Be Reading This in China

I can guarantee that by including just a few words. Falun Gong. Dalai Lama. Taiwan Independence. That ought to do it.

If you haven't already seen it, BusinessWeek's look at how the Chinese censor the Internet is worth a read.

Beijing has a vast infrastructure of technology to keep an eye on any potential online dissent. It also applies lots of human eyeballs to monitoring. The agencies that watch over the Net employ more than 30,000 people to prowl Web sites, blogs, and chat rooms on the lookout for offensive content as well as scammers.

That's almost twice the number of people employed by the CIA. The whole CIA. Boy that's comforting. Microsoft's entire Hotmail operation is run by 100 sys admins. Then again, I'm sure the Chinese get a lot less spam.

If you're in the Internet business in China, you're expected to help with the effort.

Virtually all Net outfits on the mainland are given a confidential list of hundreds of banned terms they have to watch for. The list changes over time, based on events such as the recent police shootings in the southern town of Dongzhou.

Meanwhile, back in this hemisphere, the U.S. Department of the Treasury won't let Cuba cross the 90 miles of water to take part in a baseball tournament. The problem, you see, is that "Cuba would reap financial benefit from having a team participate." To simplify: When it comes to interacting with communists, financial benefit for Microsoft = good; financial benefit for Cuba = bad.