It's always fun to joke about Microsoft being an evil empire, but if this is accurate (check the back and forth on this in Scoble's comments) there's not much funny about it:
Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer. On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. ..Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government... - Rebecca MacKinnon
OK, this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right...
...I do believe in a slippery slope. If they come after you today, maybe they’ll come after me tomorrow. Gotta stop this kind of stuff while we’re still talking about you... Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree with your being used as a state-run thug...
