Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been spotted on vacation with his girlfriend Priscilla Chan in Shanghai. more ›

Evan Osnos of The New Yorker does a wonderful job summing up Chinese reactions to the controversial and much-debated Stop Online Piracy Act which many have likened to China's "Great Firewall": more ›

Andy Greenberg of Forbes thinks so. He writes:

In recent months, administrators of services with encrypted connections designed to allow users secure remote access say they’ve seen strange activity coming from China: When a user from within the country attempts to reach a server abroad, a string of seemingly random data hits the destination computer before he or she can connect, sometimes followed by that user’s communication being mysteriously dropped. more ›

While we are not usually the types to let the cat out of the bag regarding which VPNs we use, which awesome sites remain unblocked, and other GFW related goodies (for the obvious reason that the more it's advertised the more quickly it'll get shut down), this cat has already been hauled out by another site and is screaming so loudly it'll probably get noticed anyway. Update: Short lived indeed! We are sorry to disappoint you latecomers, but it appears the site has already been harmonized. more ›

Aw man, before some of us even realized we could purchase wall-jumping services on Taobao, the practice has now been banned! According to a statement by Taobao, they no longer allow the consumer-to-consumer sale of VPNs or IP proxies, or any other software/service designed to scale the Great Fire Wall. Here's a rough translation of their statement, via Penn Olson: "VPN software, or any service that helps to access overseas sites, to jump over the wall, is prohibited from sale on Taobao. Now banned products include VPNs - domestic or foreign (including games) - IP proxies, and VPN software. All those are covered in the new restrictions, so please remove the relevant VPN products from your stores. We encourage members to report all types of contraband/illegal goods. We will deal with your concerns promptly. Thank you for your support and cooperation of/with Taobao. Taobao is more exciting because of you!" And now your internet browsing is less exciting because of Taobao. more ›

The best swimmers in the world are in Shanghai for the FINA (Fédération International de Natation) championships. Some of them, like Michael Phelps, were in Beijing for the Olympics. Back then, Facebook and Twitter were allowed. more ›

Or so our most recent efforts have revealed (on multiple browsers, on multiple computers, just to be sure.) When entering plus.google.com, instead of getting the uphill January molasses-on-a-snail Gmail speed, now it's just the immediate and dreaded but polite suggestion that maybe we should reexamine our web connection, site address, or logic in moving to China. In other words, it's straight-up blocked. Clever move, China. After media had a field day mis-reporting the blockage last week, I wonder who's willing to swallow their pride and give the same headline another try? I can see it now: "Google+ blocked in China! ...no really guys, this time it is!" more ›

The Washington Post is reporting that Google's shiny new attempt at an answer to Facebook, Google+ (in "field trials" right now, probably just to make it sound cooler as it remains "invite only") has already been blocked in China! more ›

Grindr, the gaydar-in-your-pocket mobile app that's taken the international gay community by storm is now back online in China after an extended period of being blocked by the Great Firewall. more ›

These are cool. PINLE's (品乐) Taobao store has loads of slightly contentious shirts, all priced at 45 to 55RMB, and all pretty cool. We particularly like the Iniernet Explorst error message shirt and the 拆 shirt (pronounced chāi, meaning "tear down", and made up of lots of other characters like "communism", "culture" and "serve the people!") more ›

In this humorous little clip, Australian channel ABC explains to its curious viewers down under all the inner workings of this wonderful thing called the Great Firewall of China. You see, the Aussies themselves have been thinking of erecting their own little Great Firewall, and what better than to turn to the Chinese for some inspiration? more ›

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 ›

In her latest blogpost, feminist, sociologist and sexologist Li Yinhe drops her usual serious, scholarly tone and describes the frustration that she faces working around the Chinese internet censorship regime's restrictions. The Net Nanny, she says, is driving her absolutely bonkers:

Yesterday, I found myself suddenly unable to send emails, but had no problem receiving emails. After looking through my email settings multiple times, I could find absolutely nothing wrong and as a last resort, I decided to call up the 263.com customer service. On the other end of the line was a polite male voice, who requested that I give him the error number, which I did. The troubleshooting took no time. He asked, "Can you see if your email has the following three English letters -- 's', 'e' and 'x'?" I was flabbergasted beyond words. This was a business email discussing the publishing of the works of renowned German sexologist Erwin J. Haeberle in China -- of course there was the word "sex" in it. Be that as it may, we finally spotted the reason, and I was able to send the email as soon as the word "sex" was deleted from the email. more ›

Gmail has denied any faults within their own system after their services in China have been constantly disrupted for weeks now. We've heard rumors that the strategy is to slow down or even block Gmail every 15 minutes, in order to convince users that it's a problem with Google, not the firewall. Sure, you all say, we aren't dummies, we know what's happening. Okay, but can somebody please tell that to Google's shrinking share in the Chinese market, and somehow convince them, yet again, not to move their business elsewhere? more ›

Former journalist, founder of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club, and president of the China Speakers Bureau, Fons Tuinstra, opines:

In the never-ending debate on the filtering of the internet in China, one political dimension of the feature is the need for many stakeholders in the Chinese bureaucracy to know what the outside world is reporting, not only about them, but also about Libya, Japan or whatever issue might be sensitive today. more ›

If any of you haven't been having problems with your internet connection, your VPN, or your Gmail over the past few weeks, then consider yourselves extremely lucky (and send us your VPN info plz.) Since those pesky flower-related non-protests began happening a month ago, inconveniently coinciding with the legislative sessions, things have been haywire all across the interwebz in China. Is this temporary? God we hope so. more ›

This post promises to make you laugh uncontrollably for about five seconds, then descend into the pits of despair. more ›

It's a miracle! LinkedIn appears to have been unblocked by the GFW after barely 24 hours. This could have to do with the disappearance of several postings related to the "Jasmine Revolution" by a user named "Jasmine Z" (were they deleted by LinkedIn, we wonder?). A new group called "Jasmine Voice" has been set up by another "Jasmine J", but with a grand total of just TWO members, "Jasmine J" appears to be talking mostly to herself. more ›

Ridiculous as it sounds, LinkedIn has most likely been blocked because of postings related to the "Jasmine Revolution" which (barely) took place in 13 cities across China over the weekend. more ›

Sometime yesterday -- nobody we've spoken to knows when exactly -- the Net Nanny pulled the plug off LinkedIn, and access to the professional social network is now no longer possible without the use of a proxy or VPN. more ›

"I have six VPNs on my home computer. But I only try them to test which side wins: the GFW or the VPN." more ›

Earlier today, Fang Binxing (方滨兴), president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the grand architect of the GFW, signed up on the Chinese microblog Sina Weibo, but not for long. The amount of vulgarities and curses that overwhelmed his page as soon as his account was opened forced him to delete his tweets just three hours later. Check out China Digital Times for a sample of comments that led him to swallow his own bitter pill. Fang's fate reminds us of the microblogging misadventures of General Mao Xinyu (毛新宇), the grandson of Chairman Mao. With just one tweet on Dec 4, Mao managed to attract over 46,000 followers, but Sina editors eventually had to delete all the comments that inundated that tweet. He has not been heard from since that fateful day. more ›

Touching scenes you won't find anywhere on Chinese television or even on the internet. Videos like this one and many more of the city's outpouring of grief have been deleted on Tudou, Youku and other video-sharing sites. more ›

One of our favorite web comics, xkcd, has updated their map of the internet if it were represented as a planet and - lo and behold - there's an entire section dedicated to the Chinese internet. Love the details like a "Ma Le Ge Bi desert" and "Grass Mud Horse Bay" - somebody's been reading up on Chinese internet issues! The entire map can be found here. more ›

Some server error has severely pranked the mainstream international media. Google declared itself blocked in China for all services except for Gmail sometime early this morning. Strangely enough though, everyone actually in China was still able to access everything they'd been able to access before. more ›

The Google problem is officially over! While Google itself announced being able to obtain a new ICP license for China two weeks ago, last night, the authorities finally issued a statement of their own confirming the fact. more ›

So what has the whole Google China debacle taught us? In an article on The Diplomat adding to Rebecca MacKinnon's excellent analysis on Google's ICP renewal, it's shown us that the Chinese government actually has three ‘narratives’ for its Internet strategy: it's "completely free," it's censoring its citizens and oops, wait a minute, we meant "protecting" its citizens. more ›

"Right now, China can disconnect parts of its Internet in times of war. We need to be able to do that too." more ›

Yesterday morning, Changchun (长春) became a sensitive word on QQ. The best thing about it: Not only is 长春 a city - making it "The first Chinese city to ever become a sensitive word in China" - it's also the name of the current CPC Propaganda Chief. more ›

News from China's Twitterati has revealed that social networking sites FourSquare and Mashable have both been caught by the net nanny today. It seems FourSquare, in particular, was used by Twitterers to set their location to Tiananmen Square for its 21st anniversary. This crackdown comes in contrast to the slew of previously blocked websites suddenly becoming available earlier this week, including Twitter client HootSuite, Vimeo, bit.ly, Xmarks and the Voice of America news service. Having been surprised that such a sensitive era would have made for some minor cracks in the GFW, the seasonal censoring we were anticipating seems to have come. more ›