BEIJING, Aug.15 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government is testing a new technology in China that could soon give the country's 300 million web users another way to access information blocked by domestic filters, the weekend edition of China Daily reported.

    The "feed over email" (FOE) system being tested by the U.S. would allow people living in China to access blocked information via encrypted news feeds sent to foreign email accounts.

    "The system will provide an easier channel to circumvent web filters," Ken Berman, head of IT at the U.S. government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, was quoted by China Daily as saying.

    Berman said the agency that runs Voice of America, a government-funded international broadcasting service, has been running trials of the new software for six months and expects it to be available for widespread use by the end of this year.

    "These things are only successful if there is a certain critical mass of people who use it," said Berman. "This is hard to predict."

    The technology would pose another challenge to the country's long-term efforts of keeping violent, pornographic and other improper information away from its Internet users, the paper said.

    "From a security perspective, this is nothing new," said Thomas Parenty, a China-based IT security consultant and former U.S. National Security Agency programmer.

    The U.S. seems to be basically trying to tackle the problem of getting past Internet filters by using encrypted email as the transport mechanism as opposed to using web proxies, which has been the traditional approach, he said.

    Hu Yong, a founding director for China New Media Communication Association, said, "Chinese netizens have been using proxy servers to access blocked information for a long time. FOE is just a more convenient tool."

    Officials from the Internet affairs bureau of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology were not available on Friday to comment on the news, the paper said.

    Earlier this week, the ministry announced they had abandoned plans to ensure that every computer sold in the country had the controversial Green Dam content-filtering software installed.