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She's a freeloader   Dear Annie: Last year, a longtime friend of my mother's passed away at the age of 94. The woman had a younger sister who was a distant acquaintance of ours. This younger sister, "Ms. Periwinkle," had a stormy relationship with her older sibling, although we don't know the details. At the wake, Ms. Periwinkle said to my mother, "I guess this is goodbye. I won't see you again." When my mother asked why, Ms. Periwinkle told her that with her sister gone, she wouldn't have a place to stay. Foolishly, my mother volunteered, "If you return, you can stay with me." Well, the lady showed up the first week of June and has been staying with Mom ever since. Ms. Periwinkle has broken untold dishes, figurines, Mom's sewing machine and more. She's a sweet lady, but she is rough on the hardware, contributes very little toward expenses, and helps herself to anything and everything. She doesn't lift a finger to clean, but she makes frequent efforts to prepare food we do not find palatable, leaving incredible messes for others to tidy up. And whenever I take my mother out to eat, Ms. Periwinkle tags along and expects me to pay for her meal. Mom doesn't want to hurt the woman's feelings, so she refuses to ask Ms. Periwinkle when she intends to leave. Any suggestions? -- El Paso, Texas Dear El Paso: You probably have an idea now why Ms. Periwinkle didn't get along with her sister. She's a freeloader. Ask your mother if she would like your help getting Ms. Periwinkle to leave. If so, inform Ms. Periwinkle that you are buying her a ticket home and the bus/train/plane leaves in one week. You also will come by to help her pack and take her to the airport. Don't take no for an answer. The cost of her ticket is a small price to pay for peace of mind and intact crockery. Dear Annie: My wife and I went to a local boxing event last week with some friends. During the evening, the gentleman in the row in front of us handed my wife his cell phone and said she should say hello to the person on the line. She did, and it turned out to be some guy in a different section who thought she was cute and called his friend who was sitting in front of us. My wife actually stood up and started waving at this guy. When she did that, I reached up and tugged on her elbow, asking her to return the cell phone to its owner. I admit I was jealous, but I also worried she was giving these guys the wrong signal. There was no way for the guy on the phone to know she was married. She turned around and snapped at me, saying, "I'm just having fun." When we got home, I said her behavior was not only rude but could have led to a confrontation. She accused me of being possessive and said we won't be going out together until I get over my jealousy. Now what? -- Disgruntled, Loving Husband Dear Husband: Your wife enjoyed being the object of flirtatious attention, but her behavior was inappropriate, risky and disrespectful to you. Her judgment was poor, but the incident turned out to be harmless, so unless she makes a habit of such behavior, we say let this one go. 2005.04.07  A thousand filters bloom on Web      In 1949, when George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel "1984," he gave its hero, Winston, a job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes the tubes down a chute. Beside him sits a woman in charge of finding and erasing the names of people who have been "vaporized." And their office, Orwell wrote, "with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department." It's odd to read "1984" in 2005, because the politics of Orwell's vision aren't outdated. There are still plenty of governments in the world that go to extraordinary lengths to shape what their citizens read, think and say, just like Orwell's Big Brother. But the technology envisioned in "1984" is so - well, 1980s. Paper? Pneumatic tubes? Workers in cubicles? Nowadays, none of that is necessary: It can all be done electronically, especially if, like the Chinese government, you seek the cooperation of large American companies. Without question, China's Internet filtering regime is "the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," in the words of a recent report by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The system involves the censorship of Web logs, search engines, chat rooms and e-mail by "thousands of public and private personnel." It also involves Microsoft Inc., as Chinese bloggers discovered last month. Since early June, Chinese bloggers who post messages containing a forbidden word - "Dalai Lama," for example, or "democracy" - receive a warning, "This message contains a banned expression‎, please delete." It seems Microsoft has altered the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, at the behest of Chinese government. Bill Gates, so eloquent on the subject of African poverty, is less worried about Chinese free speech. But he isn't alone: Because Yahoo Inc. is one of several companies that have signed a "public pledge on self-discipline," a Yahoo search in China doesn't turn up all of the (politically sensitive) results. Cisco Systems Inc., another U.S. company, has also sold hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to China, including technology that blocks traffic not only to banned Web sites, but even to particular pages within an otherwise accessible site. Until now, most of these companies have defended themselves on the grounds that there are side benefits - a Microsoft spokesman has said that "we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships" - or on the grounds that they can't control technology anyway. A Cisco spokesman told me that this is the "same equipment technology that your local library uses to block pornography," and besides, "we're not doing anything illegal." But as U.S. companies become more deeply involved in China, and as technology itself progresses, those lines may begin to sound weaker. Over the past couple of years, Harry Wu, a Chinese human rights activist and former political prisoner, has carefully tracked Western corporate cooperation with Chinese police and internal security, and in particular with a Chinese project called "Golden Shield," a high-tech surveillance system that has been under construction for the past five years. Although the company won't confirm‎ it, Wu says, Cisco representatives in China have told him that the company has contracts to provide technology to the police departments of at least 31 provinces. Some of that technology may be similar to what the writer and former businessman Ethan Gutmann describes in his recent book, "Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal." Gutmann - whose account is also bitterly disputed by Cisco ("He's getting a lot of press out of this," complained the spokesman) - claims to have visited a Shanghai trade fair where Cisco was advertising its ability to "integrate judicial networks, border security and vertical police networks" and more generally its willingness to build Golden Shield. If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: a few days ago, Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, of the House Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions - such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology. Beyond legality, of course, there's morality. And here the judgment of history will prove more important than whatever Congress does or does not do today. Sixty years after the end of World War II, IBM is still battling lawsuits from plaintiffs who accuse the company of providing the "enabling technologies" that facilitated the Holocaust. Sixty years from now, will Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo be doing the same? Anne Applebaum is a member of the Washington Post's editorial page staff. - Ed (Washington Post Service) 2005.07.22