The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 Chinese websites. Each one carried a message of protest against the government's repressive policies, encouraging citizens to join Anonymous and stage their own protests. In English, with no Chinese translation. more ›

Ever wondered what exactly the Chinese government is censoring? Well, thanks to a study by Carnegie Mellon University, we now have a better idea of the words and phrases The Great Firewall forbids us from using is heroically protecting our impressionable minds from. 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 ›

Users of Shanghai Telecom's fiber optic internet were surprised last week when they found their internet speeds had been upgraded overnight from 2Mb and 4Mb, to 10Mb, 20Mb and even 30Mb! Though the upgrade is free, some entrepreneurial conmen (and women) cashed in on the opportunity by showing up on people's doorsteps asking for "upgrade fees" from unsuspecting residents! 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 ›

On behalf of the outlawed benevolent spiritual group/black renegade cult Falun Gong, the Human Rights Law Foundation has filed a U.S. federal lawsuit against Cisco Systems, claiming they corroborated with the Chinese government in monitoring the activities of dissident groups. more ›

Breaking, kind of hilarious news! Fang Binxing, the principal of Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications and the guy thought to be behind the infrastructure of the Great Firewall, was giving a lecture at Wuhan University earlier today and was allegedly pelted with eggs and a shoe. 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 ›

Woohoo! It looks like the Net Nanny has decided to let her hair down for a bit. Two of the world's most popular blogging services Wordpress and Typepad can now be accessed on this side of the Great Firewall. 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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

Try searching for anything inane at all on Google.cn or Google.com.hk (otherwise known as the "new home of Google.cn") and you will now get a connection reset. We tried searching for "shanghai" and all we got was the white screen of death. more ›

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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 ›

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 ›

The number of China's Internet users have reached 360 million, says ChinaTechNews - a pretty darn sizable market that has attracted considerable attention (and you know, a thousand internet-addiction camp proprietors). more ›

Is it just us, or does it seem like China's just blocking websites for fun now? Just when we thought that the National Day security crackdown had passed us by without (much) damage, we wake up today to find our favorite video sharing website that isn't blocked in China, Vimeo, is now...blocked. O, China, how will we find viral videos that aren't on Youku or Tudou now? At least you've got some good options for leaping over the GFW. more ›

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 ›

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 ›

• Will this stop the pandamonium? [Daily Mail] "It is a desperate cry - or rather a very loud trumpet - for attention. These elephants were painted black and white to look like the pandas who have stolen all their fans. The elephant is Thailand's national symbol, but the country has gone panda-crazy since the birth of a female panda cub to pandas Lin Hui and Xuang Xuang at Chiang Mai zoo in Bangkok."
• Who’s Who Among China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Advisers [WSJ] "China Investment Corp., the country’s $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, has finally unveiled its long-planned International Advisory Council, which The Journal wrote about Monday (Call us petty, but we can’t help noting - given that that one of council’s stated missions (In Chinese here) is to advise CIC on “increasing transparency” - that it took four days from the group’s first meeting for CIC to disclose its membership)."
• Work resumes at Shaoguan toy factory [Danwei] "The fight at the Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province that has been called one of the causes of the current unrest in Xinjiang made the cover of today's New Express. A major fight broke out at the factory on June 26 between Han and Uighurs workers, leaving two men from Xinjiang dead, but according to today's paper, which features a big cover photo of smiling Uighur women working at the factory, production has resumed."

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 ›

So after a night without Google, it seems like the block is slowly rolling back and people are finally able to access their gmail around the country once again (though, at this moment, Shanghai users are still reporting problems). But why did it happen? According to the Guardian surmises that it was a "warning shot" over Google's "porn filters" (we quotemark that because it seems like Baidu, which has equally lax porn filters, is "safe"). Chinese netizens think it's to distract attention away from the Green Dam. If that's the truth, one can only wonder who's brain child this could've been: distract from controversy over web blocking by blocking the web? Good going. more ›