New study investigates China's internet firewall and "discovered that it’s least effective when many Chinese are online at once, and also that the idea of the firewall is often more potent than the firewall itself." Digital Trends, 13 September 2007. "The government uses the pretext of watching people to encourage them to censor themselves because they think they're being watched." Computerworld, 12 September 2007. "We found that sometimes [it takes a few hops within China to get blocked], up to 13 hops. Some paths weren't filtered at all." eWeek, 12 September 2007. "On about 28% of the paths into China's net tested by the researchers, blocking failed altogether suggesting that web users would browse unencumbered at least some of the time." BBC News, 12 September 2007. "The work will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Computer and Communications Security Conference in Alexandria, Va., Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 2007." UC David press release, 11 September 2007. "Last week, ahead of China's Communist Party Congress next month, government officials reportedly took aim at a handful of interactive, user-generated Chinese Web 2.0 sites, shutting down the Internet data servers that support them. This news comes from Free Radio Asia, which, surprise, isn't available here. That hasn't stopped Chinese bloggers from buzzing about it." SFGate, 11 September 2007. Chinese official says the "United States and other Western countries use advanced technology 'to create an information hegemony' and relay unfavorable news from China, raising the risk of social instability. These countries 'have made the Internet a very important channel to infiltrate our politics, strengthening the delivery of Western democracy and values,' he added. 'More and more frequently, they organize writers to create bad information, exaggerating things that are inharmonious with our development and raise the specter of the China threat on the international scene.'" Washington Post, 12 September 2007.