As many of you have heard, Chinese bloggers have discovered that MSN Spaces China blocks users from putting the Chinese words for “freedom,” “human rights,” or “democracy” in the title of their blogs.

The Committee to Protect Bloggers (CPB), of which Peacefire is a member, has released a set of instructions describing how to hack MSN Spaces China to allow the banned keywords to appear in your blog title.

They have also been translated into Chinese and have been verified by users in China.

I wrote the instructions after playing around with MSN Spaces China to verify what words were being filtered. The gist of it is, if you create your MSN Spaces blog using the Chinese interface, it will be filtered, but if you create the blog using the English interface, it won’t be filtered.

Even if you switch back to the Chinese interface after creating the blog, MSN Spaces will “remember” that you created it using the English interface, and won’t apply the Chinese word filter to the title. So the instructions describe the obscure steps necessary to switch the interface from Chinese to English to create the blog, and then switch back again.

For Chinese users who don’t speak English, the instructions guide them through how to create the blog in the English interface, since they won’t be able to read the buttons (so our instructions say “Click the large button on the right at the bottom,” etc.).

The Committee to Protect Bloggers promotes the cause of bloggers writing in repressive countries, by serving as a clearinghouse of information about
jailed bloggers, and publishing guides on how to blog safely and anonymously. Our full mission statement is here.

Many of us met at a roundtable group at Blog Nashville in May, where we discussed technical means to help bloggers blog anonymously, including software such as TOR from EFF and the Circumventor software from Peacefire.org.

[Bennett @ Peacefire.org]