Olympic fever at China's internet filters

Government departments, companies, sporting events and citizens are in a sizzling Olympic mood, trying to do their best to show off the best of China in the upcoming months. Not surprisingly, also China's internet filters have joined enthusiastically this wave of nationalism and that might explain a sequence of events that make sense when seen in relation to each other. What follows now is an account of changes in the internet filtering regime I have seen over the past few months popping op at the surface for ordinary internet users. As usual, they cannot be supported by confirmations or much supporting evidence, since all stakeholders involved have to stick to a high level of secrecy. I'm not claiming to have a technical background, so I cannot explain what is happening under the surface and there is only one reason to write about this speculative theory: all together they make sense

The first signal of change came when I was abroad trying to download email from a China-based server. It repeatedly failed and people close to China Telecom, one of the larger internet providers in China, explained to me that new software was being installed, making the internet overall rather instable. That was interesting information since China's filters used to concentrate on incoming internet traffic from abroad, not the outgoing traffic leaving the country. Enough to move into the alert mode. In China I discovered some new filtering issues, after the crisis in the Himalaya took off. Some of the feeds in my RSS-reader were blocked, while previously my Google Reader was an ideal way to circumvent the internet filters. Also, suddenly stories were being blocked while they downloaded after the first few paragraphs. Before that stories were blocked or not blocked, without a middle way.
Then a host of events passed my radar screen that were blamed to the double T-crisis, SARFT going after Tudou and a row of incidents like the blocking and then unblocking of YouTube and the unblocking of the BBC.
If you still only look at the double T-crisis, SARFT and blocking incidents as isolated events, you might easily get confused. Since, why would the internet filters open up for the BBC and YouTube while those incidents are in full swing, or at least could be within a few hours again. The introduction of new filtering techniques offers an angle that would tie all those events together. Especially the unblocking of the BBC news site was interesting, since it had been the only Western news organization that had been unable to get official permission to pass the Chinese internet filters, while all the other major Western news outlets got silently unblocked since the end of the 1990s.
But what if you see all these incidents from the perspective of the expected pre-Olympic scrutiny of China's internet censorship. and the installation of new more sophisticated filtering software. Blanket bans would have to be avoided and the censorship would have to become more invisible. The Himalaya-crisis (I avoid the T-word here to go around the internet filters in China) offered merely a real-life testing opportunity for the new software systems. the unblocking of both the BBC and YouTube indicates those tests were a success, at least from the perspective of those in charge of filtering information. After the unblocking of YouTube, some tests were done and a combination of minor temporary blocks and a subtle filtering of the search results, similar to existing systems for text based services.
This theory could also offer an explanation for the 24-hour outage of Tudou last week, the world leader in video hosting. Two explanations were being given, one saying it was a punishment of China's official censor SARFT, an explanation that was dismissed by the company itself. According to Tudou it needed the unannounced outage to move servers, an explanation that was dismissed by other internet experts as nonsense. It looks more that Tudou needed the time to install the new filtering software, a task inside China that is typically done by the internet hosts themselves.
It suggests, but that is as all suggestions still inconclusive, that China's filtering systems are also trying to go for images, while most previous censorship systems were basically text-based. I believe that nor relevant government departments or internet service providers are going to elaborate on that possibility, but I believe it makes sense to look at the events together, and how they fit into China's Olympic mood.

Update I: Thomas Crampton started a discussion on where to host your weblog. Could be a nice opportunity to also discuss possible changes of the GFW.
Update II: Shanghai Scrap describes the changes in the GFW for the South China Morning Post. But they have hidden themselves behind a financial firewall, so it won't affect too many people.