China: Google’s compromises · Global Voices
John Kennedy

Shak at Chinawhite, via Imagethief, gives us a sneak preview of Google in China: The Big Disconnect, a feature story to be published in this coming weekend's New York Times Magazine:
“Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government regarded it as illicit — so it became part of Google's blacklist.”