China cracks down on Net use

It's known as the "Great Firewall," and – unlike the age-old Great Wall – it seems to go up and down. Right now, the firewall's up. Possibly timed to the National People's Congress meeting in Beijing, China seems to be in the middle of a crackdown on Net use, Wired reports. "The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that's likely low since it's based on information volunteered in user profiles." It wasn't the first time for LiveJournal. "While China has reached an accord with some blog hosting companies, including Microsoft's MSN Spaces, it has a history of blocking others, including Google's Blogger.com," Wired adds. The government .
LiveJournal announced the block Monday. Ginger Tulley, director of worldwide strategy and analysis for Six Apart, says the company isn't certain when the censorship began. But the site GreatFirewallofChina.org, which tests connectivity to popular websites from within China, first spotted the block Friday. The government also has blocked any new Internet cafes from opening this year, Agence France Presse reports, adding that the number of cafes "soared 23.4% to 137 million in 2006" and China's number of Internet users is expected to surpass that of the US in two years.