another blow for blogs

So now, China wants all websites to register.

China orders all websites, blogs to register with govt
Straits Times, June 7, 2005

SHANGHAI - Authorities have ordered all China-based websites and blogs to register or be closed down, in the latest effort by the communist government to police the unruly world of cyberspace.

Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to 1 million yuan (S$200,000) for failing to register, according to documents posted on the website of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII)

Is this really possible? Because if it is, you just know that Singapore will follow suit. After all, the government's mantra here has always been that anyone who comments on politics must take responsibility for their words and actions. Think Catherine Lim.

Now, however, the government has developed a new system to track down and close those caught violating the rules, the ministry said.

'There's a 'Net Crawler System' that will monitor the sites in real time and search each Web address for its registration number,' said one document listing questions and answers about the new rules. 'It will report back to the MII if it finds a site thought to be unregistered.' -- AP

I really can't imagine how this is going to be effective unless they also stop people from maintaining blogs on offshore servers such as Blogger. Unless the police actively sniff out our the blog packets and track the IPs of the destination servers to detect who is posting. Would that be a violation of human rights and privacy? Does China have human rights and privacy? Would one of my nerd friend please surf in soon and explain the technical possibilies?

Soon we will all be blogging on servers that start with https://