As stated before I am a german computer scientist living in China at the moment. Therefore I am especially ashamed about the current ruling parties in germany who just agreed to establish internet censorship against all expert knowledge brought into the discussion and against a huge part of the internet citizens which stood up against this bill and filed an e-petition with the biggest attendance ever for a german e-petition.
I would like to invite the german politicians to come to China to practically see how internet censorship is working. They can go to the chinese government if they want to see what it costs to maintain the Chinese Firewall and then they can come to me when they want to see how much it costs to dig a hole into it because that’s my daily business. As collateral damage of the aggressive censorship many pure development sites which I need for my programming are blocked, like jruby.org, …
I have a proxy Addon installed in my Firefox and it takes me exactly 2 seconds to view the blocked site through the proxy. Every now and then I have to search for a new proxy because the government found and blocked the one I am using but there are so many proxy lists in the internet that you can easily google for them, test for 2 minutes and have a new running proxy.
From my side it is annoying to see so many programming blogs and websites blocked but the total additional costs in a month may come up to be around 1 hour.
What does your internet censorship cost during a month? Can you really tell your electors that they have to pay millions of Euros every month for an infrastructure which can be bypassed within seconds and they will reelect you? Specially in times of a global financial crisis ???