Order the book:
҉ (Combining Cyrillic Millions) is a Cyrillic character used to represent one million. It is also associated with bi-directional text and backwards writing, which is useful for languages that read from right-to-left like Arabic or Hebrew.
Why it is blocked: Perhaps its ability to control the direction of text and reverse the order of your characters* is an indictment of the CCP’s doublespeak? Or maybe it’s due to technical limitations with regards to the site, e.g. fear of pranks and hacks? Guesses would be appreciated. [Status - 2/28/12: blocked]
Update: A Tumblr user writes: “This is called 菊花文. It was mainly used for obfuscation or censorship circumvention, with online converters like this http://tool.52hxw.com/028.html.” Another writes, “This sign is so similar to the symbol of Fa Lun Gong or it could be possibly used as the sign online.”
Fun fact: ҉ and 屄 (cunt / bī) are the only one-character words that I’ve found blocked on Weibo.
*[҉Type Here] Copy and paste the text in brackets into Notepad or just about any other text field and start typing before the ҉ (confirmed to work on Windows XP and 7).
