Neowin.net

Thanks to WinBeta and our very own Ç®€åMhå©k€RéÐ for the heads up.

As we correctly anticipated yesterday, Windows .NET Server 2003, build 3718 was officially released at 6pm EST today as Release Candidate 2. Your favourite IRC channel did it again then ;o) As we released RC2, build 3718 Enterprise Edition, yesterday.

Microsoft has just released Windows .NET Server 2003 RC2 (Release Candidate) to beta testers. This is probably the last milestone for Windows .NET, and will be very important for Microsoft in the last step of preparing the final release early next year (Q1).

CPP and such will probably be starting to get RC2 in a week or so. And MSDN subscribers will probably get the download option as early as late this week, or early next week.

View: Windows .NET Server 2003 RC2 hits town!

Restricted sites fell into some of the following categories:

Dissident or democracy sites, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and "dozens of Falun Gong and Falun Dafa sites"

News sites: BBC News Online was consistently inaccessible, with only partial access to such sites as CNN and Time Magazine

Health sites, including the Aids Healthcare Foundation and Internet Mental Health

Taiwanese and Tibetan sites

Religious sites, including the Atheist Network and the Catholic Civil Rights League

The authors suggest that methods of denying access to certain parts of the web from China have grown more sophisticated, with at least four filtering methods now in operation.

But although "there is some evidence that the [Chinese] government has attempted to prevent the spread of unwanted material by preventing the spread of the internet itself, [there is] a concomitant desire to capture the economic benefits of networked computing," the report says.

This has led to multiple strategies to control access, such as encouraging internet use in cyber cafes "rather than in private spaces so that customers' surfing can be physically monitored by others".