therobots.org - select * from robots

It's something I never thought I'd see - a memorial service for a bulletin board.

China's cracked down on public discussion sites, as they did before with some of the blogging providers.

Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei describes the latest update:

Some arm of the sour and corrupt Nanny authority has resticted access to Internet bulletin boards (BBS) hosted on servers at Tsinghua University, Peking University and Nanjing University to students and people with university Internet accounts. These BBS were formerly available to the public.

Furthermore, all students who still have access to the BBS will apparently have to register with their real names if they want to continue posting to the BBS. The above-mentioned BBS were previously sources of lively debate about social, economic and cultural issues.

Way to go Nanny!

This may not seem like much; after all, it's just a BBS, and the students can still post. But by blocking outside IP addresses, it will effectively kill the culture of the BBS. And without any hope of anonymity, there won't be much left for the students.

On Saturday Qinghua students gathered to mourn the BBS. One student took a lot of pictures, and posted them on flickr with the name "smth dying". Check it out.