Internet nanny tries to find a balance

via WikipediaThe latest: according to Danwei the Chinese edition of Wikipedia is no longer blocked in Beijing. This comes after a whole stream of stories suggesting that Facebook has been blocked, or is at least in parts of China very difficult to access.
If the strategy of the internet censor was to confuse us, simple users, they would have been rather successful. There seems very little system in the way nanny if blocking or giving access to the internet.
The official story is that during the Beijing Olympics the people who have been able to secure a visa will have free access to the internet. Probably as free as the access of foreign journalists to Tibet and Sichuan, when it is inconvenient for the local rulers.
One of the golden rules within any bureaucracy - and certainly in one that is as old as the Chinese one - is that guarding their own jobs is for officials most important, even more important that fulfulling the task they were supposed to do. Any change in the system of the internet censorship will therefore create more jobs, more systems and more problems, not less. Traditional media show that where more than half of the journalists are busy in checking whether their colleagues did not make a political mistake.
So, what we see now is the testing of a new filter system. No longer based on url-blocks, perhaps based on filtering. Figuring out how it works - and getting around it for example by writing backwards of writing vertically - is going to be an ongoing challenge for the millions of internet users. Proxies will still be needed.