From the South China Morning Post, via Asia Media:
The search engines of two of the most popular Web portals on the mainland have been blocked in a sign of intensified internet censorship, with millions of users expected to be affected.
Sina and Sohu are the latest victims of Beijing’s increasing control of the internet for having failed to filter certain keywords deemed politically harmful, industry sources in Beijing said yesterday.
“Chief editors of Web portals were summoned to the State Council Information Office in the morning and Sina and Sohu were ordered to shut down their search engines after they failed an on-the-spot censorship test,” one of the sources said. The two portals had been given three days to “rectify their mistakes”, the source said. [Full text]
Also on this topic: “Challenges are Growing for China’s Web Censors” from the Voice of America. See also “China ‘net censorship: not one big brother, but many,” a brief description of Internet censorship in China written by a reader living in China, from Boingboing.net.
