Micro soft on censorship?

In case you weren't already sick of the technology giant Microsoft and its King Grand Poobah-for-life Bill Gates, now you have an even better reason to banish the corporation to the depths of capitalist hell. Seems Microsoft corporation, in a joint partnership with a Chinese government agency, has made inroads into the communist fortress of production, launching a new Chinese language web portal. The portal will allow Chinese citizens to create their own web pages and even, gasp! blogs.

But Microsoft has decided, in signing the contract with the government funded Shanghai Alliance Investment, to cave to censorship pressures on the part of the Chinese government.

Now all blogs and websites which function through MSN Spaces, a programme offering free blog space and operating through the MSN China portal, will not appear online or publish if the messages therein contain certain prohibited words.

A sampling of those words being "democracy", "human rights", "demonstration" "democratic movement", "freedom" and "Taiwan Independence" as well as some profane or sexually explicit references. Should one attempt to use these or any other prohibited words on their blog post, a message will be generated telling the user, if she already didn't know, that such language is prohibited.

Microsoft's portal launched on May 26th and already 5 million new blogs have been created, albeit without reference to certain words which will go unmentioned, nudge nudge, wink wink.

Seems a share of the profits from an estimated 87 million Chinese web users was too much for philanthropist Bill Gates to pass up on.