At this moment China’s Internet users cannot view YouTube. The Chinese government claims that it had nothing to do with the outage but its timing with the airing of footage on YouTube of detained Tibetan protesters being beaten seems a bit more than a coincidence to the rest of the thinking world.

Google’s take on this is

Google spokesman Scott Rubin told InternetNews.com that it is still working to bring its video-sharing site back online and identify the cause of the outage.

The Internet News article goes into the specifics of this incident very well. Some highlights include:

• According to the Global Network Initiative at least a dozen countries with less than pristine human rights records have blocked YouTube access since 2007

• The Chinese government calls the videos fraudulent and does not say that the outage is due to government activity

• The CTA (Central Tibetan Administration) is accused of a propaganda campaign that coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising

All of this interesting in the context of how most of us view the Internet. With Internet access comes the freedom to do and please with it however you want. I can watch videos and interviews that are anti US government all day long if I choose to waste my time doing that. How many more police brutality videos can you see as well. No one is stopping us from doing any of this. What’s China afraid of? Is it fearful that the rest of the world will discover their human rights violations? News alert – That cat’s been out of the bag for a long time.

So back to the Internet marketing part of this. It ties back to us ever being able to truly engage in Internet commerce with a country that will shut down access to whatever it is threatened by. Do we want to do business with them? Of course, for many the allure of a billion or so potential customers may override any human rights concerns. Many companies (US government included) still do business with countries that are blatantly in violation of human rights.

So does this even mean anything at all to the rest of the world? If Google and YouTube can’t work in China will Google just abandon their efforts there? Not likely. There are too many people there.

Comments

The album, "Songs For Tibet: The Art of Peace," is a compilation of popular artists including Sting, Alanis Morissette, and Moby. Proceeds from the purchase of the album go to the Dalai Lama’s cause. However, the proceeds won’t be coming from China if their government has anything to say about it.

They’re not only blocking access to the iTunes store, but to show they’re not playing favorites, they have also blocked Amazon’s album download and CD-purchase pages.

iTunes is promoting Songs for Tibet pretty heavily. The album is even advertised as the iTunes store prepares to load here in the States.

It appears to have been the heavy promotion of this album that led to the iTunes blockage in the first place. It was not blocked until the Art of Peace Foundation (the organization behind the album) issued a press release saying that 40 Olympic athletes had already downloaded it.

As an afterthought, the blocking does not really come as a shock, but Apple must’ve been a little surprised to have suddenly had its entire iTunes store shut down in China.

As for the album itself? Let’s just say the reviews are mixed. Jeff Giles at Bullz-eye.com writes:

Among the album’s worst offenders are Sting, who contributes a useless remix of the already-crappy "Send Your Love"; Moby, whose new version of "We Are All Made of Stars" is the very definition of inessential; and Underworld, whose "To Heal (And Restore Broken Bodies)" is ultimately far less interesting than its title. The Alanis track, titled "Versions of Violence," sounds impressively polished for something that was recorded in a dressing room, but unfortunately, it finds Morissette in full-on screeching hippie mode – as a song, it’s pretty bad, but it does make you wonder how quickly Chinese Communist Party officials would cave into Tibet’s demands if they were locked in a room with the singer while she performed it.

Maybe a better strategy for the Chinese government to dissuade people from getting the album would have been to post reviews like this.

A Trojan injected into sites favoring Tibetan independence from China targeted visitors with a specially crafted download. Security vendor McAfee said the affected websites hosting this Trojan were probably hijacked to place infected web pages in view of browsers.

Once in place, the Trojan, which they dubbed Friebet, grabs software from remote servers that makes the co-opted machine capable of accepting SQL statements and executing them against other machines.

The Friebet malware can try several options to gain access to the databases backing other servers, according to McAfee:

• Bind and connect to local or remote databases from the victim machine

• Query and steal data from local or remote databases
• Insert arbitrary data into local or remote databases, including web data such as hosting a web exploit

Though web application developers may have safeguards in place against common SQL injection attacks, Friebet is a more direct attack against a backend database. Administrators should review protections for databases to ensure such malicious connection attempts cannot succeed.

Only a few days after the US State Department took China off the annual Human Rights Report list of the worst violators, which happened as a hundred Tibetan monks were being placed under arrest by Chinese authorities, China opted to block YouTube within the country.

Videos like this one from Lhasa show the protests and violence happening as Tibetans responded to the crackdown. Monks had taken to the streets to march in memory of the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

A report on Yahoo News said China began blocking YouTube on Sunday, in an apparent effort to stem the interest in videos of the protests. Attempts to reach YouTube retrieved a “page unavailable” message instead.

Though Internet companies like YouTube’s owner Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, may be able to point to the State Department report as proof of China’s improvements and broadening Internet freedom, it’s going to be difficult to gloss over this latest bit of censorship, not to mention the events leading to it.