200 million pounds of milk products imported into North America from China. How much of it is tainted with melamine?

Tainting of Milk Is Open Secret in China:

Before melamine-laced milk killed and sickened Chinese babies and led to recalls around the world, the routine spiking of milk with illicit substances was an open secret in China’s dairy regions, according to the accounts of farmers and others with knowledge of the industry.

Melamine is deadly.

READ LABELS. These milk products may be listed as casein, milk powder, whey, lactic acid.

Oh, and thanks, FDA.

Once again our federal government demonstrates how stupid it is to entrust it with protecting us.

Just try to stop it

Three weeks ago, when the story first broke that Google would be cooperating with the Chinese government to help it censor searches, Mr. Snitch predicted that this, too, would pass:

Not that some serious stuff isn’t missing from China’s Google. Tibet can’t be Googled anywhere in the country. But this is the Internet, where things change fast. Whatever Google can’t offer the world’s largest nation is going to be seen as an opportunity for some stealthy ‘net entrepreneur out there.

Has his finger on the pulse, does Mr. Snitch. This Monday’s Wall Street Journal featured a front page article (subscription required) on the growing number of workarounds that are enabling Chinese citizens to access forbidden content, courtesy of a new class of netizen, the Hacktivist:

Bennett Haselton, a security consultant and former Microsoft programmer, has developed a system called the Circumventor. It connects volunteers around the world with Web users in China and the Middle East so they can use their hosts’ personal computers to read forbidden sites.

Susan Stevens, a Las Vegas graphic designer, belongs to an “adopt a blog” program. She has adopted a Chinese blogger by using her own server in the U.S. to broadcast his very personal musings on religion to the world. She has never left the U.S., but “this is where technology excels,” she says. “We don’t have to have anything in common. We barely have to speak the same language.”

In Boston, computer scientist Roger Dingledine tends to Tor, a modified version of a U.S. Naval Research Laboratory project, which disguises the identities of Chinese Web surfers by sending messages through several layers of hosts to obscure their path. In addition to the Department of Defense, Mr. Dingledine had also received funding from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports free speech online.

The article says that the promising of these may be Freegate, a software program that connects computers inside China to servers in the U.S.

As the product of ethnically Chinese programmers, [Freegate] uses the language and fits the culture. It is a simple and small program, whose file size of just 137 kilobytes helps make it easy to store in an email program and pass along on a portable memory drive.

The software’s creator, Bill Xia, estimates that about 100,000 people a day use Freegate or one of the other censorship workarounds he helped develop.

I like that, a lot :-)