Jul 8, 2007
Stealth Blogging: How to Outwit China’s Censors
I just came across a somewhat unorthodox way to get around China’s Great Firewall.
If you’re apprehensive about the governement censors picking up on any of your sensitive content, you might want to consider using this wordpress plugin to set up a sort of Super Silent Stealth Ninja Blog:
Text to Image Plugin for Wordpress
What this plugin does is converts the text that you write on your blog into an image (png file), which obviously cannot be read by Chinese increasingly robot censors. So if you were to write about the forbidden 3 Ts (and no I don’t mean that chick with the 3 titties in Total Recall) or F@lun G0ng, you’d be safe from at least a part of China’s Net Nanny.
Drawbacks:
- China does still have human censors, and they just might find you.
- Your readers may have difficulty finding you via search engines, because just like the Chinese censors, google relies heavily on text-reading robots too. But if you’re confident the content is good, readers will most certainly come to you.
This is an interesting blog tweak for sure.
If anyone decides to test it out, be sure to let me know. 
(h/t to Weblog Tools Collection)
I’m guessing this plugin can be used for a plugin that will only apply this plugin to sensitive words. We can setup a vocabulary of words we think might be bad, and have this plugin applied to those.
That would be a very cool mod. And it just might work.
Maybe even whip up a quicktag plugin, used so buttons in the editor can be used as shortcuts to enter the html code for sensitive word image substitutes.
Let me know what you think.
Hey guys, I’m game to give it a go. Looking briefly at the plugin, I think I’ll work from scratch. I’ll let you know what I come up with.
Nice.
This might be a bit outta my league.
But yeah, if ya need someone to hang back and supervise plugin development, I’m your guy!