Cybercafes in China that admit three or more underage patrons will have their licences revoked under the government’s latest effort to tighten controls on web access in the world’s largest online market.

The measure will also be applied to establishments that give rise to “major malignant cases” through admitting any number of underage customers — those under 18 — according to the rules posted on the culture ministry’s website.

Source: smh.com.au

Also read::Bad WOM in China Internet and the Post Burners Army

via NYTimes.com:

News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past.

Also read::China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated)

According to the New York Times, “The Grass-Mud Horse” is a mythical creature whose name in Chinese sounds like “fuck your mother”. These horses face a problem: invading river crabs that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, river crab sounds very much like harmony, which in Chinas cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been harmonized — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintaos regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

While grass-mud horse sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus, the beast has dodged the Chinese governments efforts to censor information over the Internet that is seditious or inflammatory.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the grass-mud horse is an icon of resistance to censorship.