| The Stentorian For the Preservation of Liberty and Individual Freedom |
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Mainland China attempts to maintain strict control over what its people can read on the Internet. Censorware (censorship software) doubtlessly scans all Web pages and blocks those with "inappropriate content" or "forbidden speech" that includes terms like "Taiwanese independence," "illegal occupation of Tibet," "Tiananman Square Massacre," and so on. This page describes a simple trick-- a computerized version of something most children play with in grade school-- for defeating Chinese censorware.
We assume that China also has optical character recognition software that identifies words (like "Tiananman Square Massacre") that are embedded in images. We believe, however, that OCR software can operate only on static images. As an example, we wonder if OCR software could make any sense of the following:
This is, however, the first frame of the two-frame animation shown here. (It doesn't perform as it should in Netscape Communicator even though the frame rate was set at 1 millisecond. Nonetheless, you can probably make out the information it is trying to convey.)
If Chinese censorware can in fact "read" animations, separate .gif files might be combined into one animation by using JavaScript.
Another technique might be to use the OCR-proof systems that are commonly used to verify that a human and not a computer is trying to enter information on a Web form.
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