According to tests done by www.greatfirewall.biz, the download speed of Gmail in China has plummeted to an average of 34 kbps. That's 45 times slower than QQ's speed of 1514 kbps. Or if you'd like your fractions another way, Gmail is now operating at 2.2% the speed of QQ. For most of you, this will just be confirming what we've all been experiencing for weeks now. more ›

Twitter may be blocked in China, but it's not like that ever stopped anyone who was genuinely determined to jump over the great firewall. Many of you follow us on our Twitter and while we always knew the Twitter community here is active and growing, we recently stumbled onto a website that gave us some hard proof of it. more ›

In the event that you don't feel like forking over the money for a vpn to skip around the pesky censors, you may want to wrangle a Kindle 3G off a friend/kind stranger because a few giddy net users have discovered that Amazon's reading device is able to access banned sites in China without a problem. more ›

I'm not sure why yet, but it seems like a whole bunch of sites that were otherwise inaccessible behind the GFW have suddenly gotten a free pass again. Most notably, video sharing site Vimeo, Twitter client Hootsuite and news site VOA News. Word is that a whole bunch of previously blocked English porn sites are now up and running too (though I have no idea which ones - honest!). Unfortunately, the big three - Twitter, Facebook and Youtube - are still nixed. Oh well, that's what you got a VPN for anyhow, right? more ›

Don't take our word for it, bust out your favorite Twitter client or, if you're old school, try their website. And it seems that Flickr has returned from maintenance purgatory as well. Some people are reporting less than full normalcy and functionality, but at least it's coming through. more ›

Everybody would like to know! Starting from last night, Youtube.com has been having intermittent issues all over the country - yet, because some people can't get on while some people can, it's hard to say whether we've all been great firewalled again (which happened last time around politically sensitive dates) or whether it's just some strange China-only technical glitch. more ›

Image by Roger Wo more ›