Amazon Kindle "smashes down the Great Firewall of China"

If you live in China, you can't use lots of banned websites. The Government has installed what's known as The Great Firewall of China. It means you'd miss out on, for example, most social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

That is - apparently - unless you've got an Amazon Kindle bookreader with its fairly rudimentary internet browser.

The South China Morning Post is reporting that Kindles are selling like hotcakes on the grey market in China because they allow owners to bypass TGFofC and access banned sites. 

The Kindle gets away with it because net access is routed directly through Amazon's own servers, which try to render all websites into a format that's vaguely readable on the device.

The Kindle isn't officially on sale in China, but apparently can be bought fairly easily.