Results tagged “gfw”

So says a recent survey by Chinese tech blog Kenengba, who conducted a user survey that mapped the backgrounds of people in this country and asked them why they took all the trouble of trying to get around the GFW to churn out 140 word messages. He received about 1,000 responses. more ›

"As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history." more ›

So here's a picture of censored keywords and blocked websites in our lovely lil' country from Information is beautiful. All good and pretty, except there's a couple problems: more ›

"China's Internet is open... China has tried creating a favorable environment for Internet. China welcomes international Internet companies to conduct business within the country according to law. China's law prohibits cyber crimes including hacker attacks." more ›

We're sure that by tomorrow morning, there will be an even bigger slew of news out about Google's recent move (including if they actually are talking to the government, we hear they are at least). But for tonight, here's the latest news on the matter. more ›

At around 7AM local time, Google updated their official blog with an entry titled "A new approach to China." It states that around mid December, Google discovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure" coming from within China. And this, they asserted, was the last straw for their operations here. more ›

• A regional newspaper photoshopped out the label “路政巡查” [Road Administration Patrol] from a vehicle that had hit and killed a 16-year-old in order to distance the accident from the government. People were pretty displeased when they found out. [Chinasmack]
• China has pretty darn good coverage even in its rural areas. Estimates hold that 99.86% of the country's administrative villages have telephone service, 91.5% have internet. [Xinhua]
• In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000, according to Robert Fogel. [Foreign Policy]

Remember all that clamor last year over the shoddy cybernanny, the Green Damn Youth Escort, that the government wanted installed on all new computers? After the software was proven to be both insecure and blatantly stolen, the government shelved the product indefinitely, which we're assuming is code for "we're just going to forget this happened entirely." Speaking of code, Cybersitter LLC, who created the code Green Dam allegedly stole, didn't forget as easily: the company has brought a case to court in America naming several Asian computer companies and the Chinese Government as conspirators in stealing and disseminating their software. With $2.25 billion in calculated losses, it's a doozy of a case... though, it'll be interesting to see what sort of authority a California court can impose on the Chinese government. more ›

This Is Our Internet, taken from meme.yahoo.com/dingding. more ›

As we take a look back at the last year of our reporting, Shanghaiist brings to you a list of the most important news events of 2009. Whether they be political, cultural, or social, these were the things that happened that changed our lives and perceptions of the world around us, for the better or worse. more ›

Google and Yahoo have long been lambasted for the censorship policies they employ in China to appease the CCP, particularly when Yahoo handed over email information to party officials in order to convict a Chinese journalist. Now critics have shifted their attention to Microsoft's Bing search engine. more ›

If there's one thing that we at Shanghaiist would like to thank the Net Nanny for, it's that she's totally reunited Chinese microbloggers with the one big happy family that is Twitter again. You see, previously, everyone was distributed across a plethora of local microblogging services, but now with the demise of the two kingpins of the Chinese twitter clone world, Fanfou and Jiwai, everyone's just decided to collectively show the GFW their middle finger by signing up for a VPN and rejoining the conversation on Twitter. more ›

When invited to post thoughts about "which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place!" on a website dedicated to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chinese twitterers replied en mass. In fact, looking on the site right now, it seems that there's barely anyone else besides Chinese twitterers commenting on how much they hate the GFW. more ›

The latest Facebook Global Monitor report released by Inside Facebook has revealed, rather unsurprisingly, that China heads the pack of three countries that actually lost more active users than it gained for the month of September (the other two being Iceland and Cyprus). When Facebook was banned in July, the social network had one million monthly active users. That figure collapsed to half a million in August, before shrinking further to 41,000 in early September, and now as of the beginning of this month, only a measly 14,000 remain. Totally authoritative anecdotal reports suggest that these 14,000 diehard Facebook users comprised mostly of smart Shanghaiist readers who know where to get their VPN and other desperate expats who just miss their friends back home. more ›

• Prepare to fight China, Qaeda figure tells Uighurs [Washington Post] "A prominent al Qaeda militant urged Uighurs in Xianjiang to make serious preparations for a holy war against "oppressive" China and called on fellow Muslims to offer support. Abu Yahya al-Libi, in a video posted on an Islamist website on Wednesday, warned China of a fate similar to that of former communist superpower, the Soviet Union, which disintegrated some two decades ago."
• Inside the Ring [Washington Times] "China's most senior military intelligence official, a veteran of spy operations in Europe and cyberspace, recently made a secret visit to the United States and complained to the Pentagon about the press leak on the Chinese submarine that secretly shadowed the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in 2006. Maj. Gen. Yang Hui said senior Chinese leaders suspected the Pentagon deliberately disclosed the encounter as part of a U.S. effort to send a political message of displeasure to China's military."
• A Beautiful Life: Mean Streets and Meaner People [NYTimes] "It takes nerve to award Bai Ling a singing role in a serious drama, but nerve may be the one thing “A Beautiful Life” does not lack. Set among the mean streets and meaner people of downtown Los Angeles, this laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders. No wonder Ms. Ling’s breasts are the most animated objects on screen."

Remember that whole weird internal fight that unfortunately brought down our new favorite VPN? It seems that enough has passed (aka lawsuits have been filed) for Freedur to launch version 2.0 of his product, now available for download on Freedur.net. more ›

And several of the other GFW-themed shirts available at their store. more ›

Months after Twitter was blocked and Chinese Twitter clones Fanfou, Digu, and Zuosa (apparently Zuosa is still alive) were felled by the mighty hand of the CCP censorship army, Internet portal Sina has started its own "microblogging service." more ›

It's been a while since we've seen any netizen Chinese character creations - the last instance was in May during that whole Grass Mud Horse fiasco - so we're liking this new Hecaitou post (translated by the unfortunately blocked China Digital Times). more ›

Official media said yesterday that a recently released survey found that only 5% of youth were actually against the Green Dam, according to the SCMP. But take a look at the survey: 1,000 pupils around China, aged six to 13, were asked whether Green Dam Youth Escort was a good thing. Pollsters had to then explain to the kids what the internet, filtering software and pornography (aaawwwkwaaard) were. Of the respondants, only 14% actually offered a vote of support, most had no opinion since they're kids and this has nothing to do with anything kids care about. Of all the silly methods to try to win support for the wildly unpopular Green Dam initiative, this has to be the silliest. more ›

This irks us almost as much as that really terrible opinion piece on Xinhua that poked fun at Facebook's "gloomy" status in China without ever mentioning that the service has been blocked. Guess who's on Facebook (and fellow blocked social networking tool Twitter)? The World Expo. more ›

Looks like someone in the censorship bureau has an itchy trigger finger and Andrew Sullivan's The Dish has become the latest casualty. Yep, the rest of The Atlantic is completely unbanned, including James Fallows' corner - which is where most of the publication's China-related content is stored. We've mulled over it, but we have no idea why this one got GFWed. The most recent post is about Balkanization, hardly something China feels strongly about. The last post on China was a discussion of Jim Crow-like laws which diverted into why white faces get hired as English teachers more. Its jump off point: James Fallows' (who, we repeat, is unblocked) picture of a "No Uyghurs should apply" sign at a Xinjiang restaurant. We guess it just goes to show that anything and nothing can get you blocked here. more ›

While some of our readers are lucky enough to live in far off lands of fast internet and access to that thing called YouTube, the many of us here in China are stuck behind the ever-present and always annoying Great Firewall. So how do we at Shanghaiist still have access to our favorite timewasters websites like Facebook and Twitter? Does it have something to do with our obvious awesomeness? Well, yes and no. more ›

The crackdown on Google in China seems to have had little effect on its internet traffic. After dropping to 29th place on Friday, Google.cn returned to its original position of 21st place yesterday. While this is still much lower than Baidu (which has remained a stable position in the top 10), it's not bad for a site that's been consistently targeted by Chinese authorities - including campaigns complete with fallacious name-smearing interviews and fudged statistics, as well as a firewalling of several of its auxiliary services. Source: SCMP (paywalled) more ›

Remember how the internet got uncomfortably, ridiculously slow last night? The Great Firewall might be to blame for that too. While we just got a couple of annoying connection difficulties, several parts of Guangdong province were completely cut off for nearly four hours. China Telecom, southern China's main ISP, said it was due to glitches that have now been fixed, but would not comment on the scale of the disruption. But two IT analysts said the breakdown could have been the result of an upgrade to the GFW. In which case, we say FU GFW. Source: South China Morning Post more ›

Floating around on the Chinese interwebs right now is the very creative Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens 2009. It is an apt description of our mood right now following the mysterious disappearance of all Google apps in China [h/t Rick Martin, @mranti @fumi] more ›

It looks like sometime earlier tonight, almost all Google services stopped working in China. Now, at least Gmail's back up, but anything on the google.com domain is still inaccessable, though Google.cn and Google.uk are still able to be used. According to Herdict, Google works only one out of every six tries, and the blackout seems to have affected all parts of the country. Nobody's sure why the government has decided to hate on the G-ster, but it's got to be insane how many businesses and people this move affects. more ›

Resistance is futile: they've already started installing Green Dam internet filtering software in schools. The censorware is, according to its proponents, help in the eternal battle against smut and other morally damaging materials. Although we have our doubts as to how many Chinese students really have the time to scour smut at school, we are old enough more ›

The Chinese government has been drawing a lot fire these last few days after it was revealed that they would be requiring that computers manufactured or imported in China have "Green Dam and Youth Escort"—an internet filtering software—preinstalled. more ›

Yesterday, an MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) directive was leaked to Rebecca MacKinnon of Rconversations that stated that as of 1 July, all computers for distribution in China must have the net nanny software "Green Dam - Youth Escort" pre-installed. The Shanghai Daily reported today that schools in China had already received this directive last month. This news comes after the social media crackdown last week and reports that Twitter and Flickr have been unblocked in Shanghai. more ›