The Great Firewall of China, or the Golden Shield Project, to give it its full and official title, is a system blocking people within the People’s Republic Of China from accessing websites deigned inappropriate by the Chinese authorities.

The Chinese government has agreed to open the Internet for press during the Olympic Games, apparently after being pressured by the International Olympic Committee(IOC), which in turn was pressured by the International Journalism Community. The IOC announced today that the press would, again, be able to report on the Games as freely as they have in other countries, and declared the issue “solved.”

The Beijing 2008 Olympics Games are going to be censorship free, since the Chinese authorities finally agreed to allow journalists attending the Games unfettered Internet access. 253 million Chinese people aren’t so lucky.

It has been in existence in some form or another since 1998, and now stands between the estimated 256 million Chinese Internet users and websites such as the BBC, Wikipedia, and countless others that those of us living in uncensored countries have to live by.

With just a week to go to the start of the Olympics, journalists started arriving in Beijing only to find that this wasn’t the case. Internet connections were ultra slow, and ever when they were working properly, many international websites remained blocked in the Olympic Village press centre.

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