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The Chinese internet may or may not have 30,000 "web police" monitoring the Mainland's every click. But whatever their number, China's cyber thugs are really, really good at annoying the hell out of Shanghaiist. It seems now the screws have been turned on Yahoo! News, which was the only game in town since Google News was blocked way back when. Yahoo! News doesn't appear to be totally blocked in Shanghai -- sometimes it will load, but really, really slowly -- but it's pretty clear that someone's been messing with it, because up until a couple weeks ago it worked just fine. Others have noted that Yahoo!-owned Flickr has been a bit finicky of late, as well. Yes, there are ways around most of these problems -- but it's so fucking annoying. The internet in China -- definitely not a "harmonious society."
UPDATE: A running dialogue on the Flickr/China issue can be found here. Of course, if you're in Shanghai that page might take quite a while to load.
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By far the most annoying part of living in China is the inconsistency and opacity of internet service. I can't believe companies are willing to establish offices here with intermintent internet access, let alone that Yahoo! (love that awful exclamation point) and Google support it (not to mention Microsoft, who are in love with control themselves).
Chinese friend, just back from Hong Kong, said "I'm amazed. Before I went to Hong Kong I never knew what the internet could be like."
Control not only scares me, it works.
Funny thing is, Yahoo News still works pretty much perfectly over GPRS on my phone.
well yeah... back when i was living in beijing i just gave up on news altogether and had friends living abroad email me regular updates. it's even better when they get you to pay 8 kuai/hour and then it takes an hour for your damn email to load. grr.
Hi Dan, I hate to bring it up, but what assurance do you have that this site won't eventually be blocked?
yes well... I left the USA over its fascsit society. If China really wants to move into the future these self-proclaiming "conservatives" with comb-over hair in Beijing really gotta get over themselves!
I will NEVER return to America as it stands under the illegitimate usa gov today. Will China be my home or will they continue trying to keep overyone in sheepledom?
i am pretty sure the flickr issue isn't a political issue but rather a network issue.
take a look at this:
http://flickr.com/photos/hirefrank/29677898/
and this:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/topic/61272/#comment483187
Frank I agree w/ your analysis after more study. It's very spotty, and non-flickr.com sites work fine.
Thanks for keeping up on this.
Hah.
We got it good over here.
I was just visiting home - Cape Town, the internet situation there is abominable - even local sites were timing out, let alone US ones.
I'll take fast connectivity and the odd site being blocked over bare connectivity any day.
Some sites aren't necessarily blocked btw, i've noticed a few times that tcp settings make a difference between what you can see or not. Messing with MTU and black hole detection does make a difference.
I could also mention something about the state of the overloaded DNS servers too, but its usually easier to blame it on blocking rather than incompetence.
google cache et al and flickr are blocked for certain ip ranges.
Not all isp's here use the same blocks - cable and adsl can and do have different things blocked at different times.
I have more in depth discussion on this in the technical forum on the shanghaiguide.com site on occasion.
Now Mr Washburn - where's your ICP#?
Lawrence - www.shanghaiguide.com
flickr responded to my email about this issue.
details here: flickr.com/photos/hirefrank/29677898/#comment8231729
I see they gave you the standard its not our network problem..
I think its probably Sprint in this instance - looks like the anaheim gateway?
Usually a router will drop packets like its going out of fashion if its overloaded. A look at stats on the router will give an idea. Usually its all CISCO equipment on the backend, so fairly standard setups.
Lawrence.