Results tagged “greatfirewall”

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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)

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

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.

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]

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.

Chinese microblogging site Fanfou (饭否) is now temporarily unavailable for "server maintenance" and according to a note posted on its website (see screenshot), will be back up by the morning of June 6. From now till then is four days, so this sounds like some pretty massive "server maintenance" going on, but make of it what you will. Meanwhile, it's business as usual at other Chinese Twitter clones Digu, Zuosa, Komoo and Taotao.

With China "commemorat[ing] something that never happened with prolonged online moment of silence," as someone cleverly put it, now's a good time to get stocked up on as much Great Firewall scaling advice as possible. Just a few weeks ago, we detailed some ways to climb up outta heah for free.

• What do you notice in this view of Kunming? [James Fallows] "Every roof as far as you can see has solar-thermal panels for hot water heating. More to come shortly on China's general environmental/climate situation, but I think this vista is different from that in many US cities — among other details you might notice, in the prevalence of the panels."
• Smoking kills - but few aware [People's Daily Online] "One-third of doctors in the country do not know smoking causes coronary heart disease, and nearly four in five do not know passive smoking can cause sudden infant death syndrome, a report revealed yesterday. Also, three in five smokers do not know that smoking causes heart disease, and four in five do not know it could lead to a stroke, the national tobacco control office of the Ministry of Health said in the report."
• 'Oldest pottery' found in China [BBC News] "Examples of pottery found in a cave at Yuchanyan in China's Hunan province may be the oldest known to science. By determining the fraction of a type, or isotope, of carbon in bone fragments and charcoal, the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old."

Youtube, Blogspot, Tumblr, Livejournal, Xanga, Wordpress, Friendfeed, Flickr, Microsoft's Live.com and yes... now Twitter too (noooooo!). A little bird tells us that apparently you can still read and post to twitter from another very popular social networking site which we won't name in hopes that it won't get blocked too. We bet you can guess what it is. Otherwise, going through a proxy and searching "#twitterblock" should help you find ways to get around the ban as well. Oh... how could we forget - Bing.com is also blocked (man, Microsoft can't catch a break here can they? Wonder what kind of guanxi google has that they don't in this country). If there was ever a time to get a VPN, now is it.

Did hell freeze over? Because somebody was actually able to win a censorship case against the Chinese net police... in China! Hu Xingdou, an economics professor who discusses politically sensitive topics on his blog, unsurprisingly had it shut down for “hosting illegal content” by his ISP Beijing Xin Net. Surprisingly, he decided to fight back, suing them in April. Even more surprisingly, a judge in Beijing has now ruled that Beijing Xin Net was wrong to close his blog. The Daxing district court said the company had failed to prove that it had contacted Hu about the “illegal content” before shutting down his little part of the web, and therefore owed him the 1,370RMB fee he had paid for two years of services. Okay, so it's not exactly a victory for free speech, but it's at least a step towards not being shut down willy nilly anymore. Source: Ars Technica

If you've lived in China a while, you start to think of the Great Firewall as simply a fact of life: a cultural quirk sometimes and a major pain the ass others. But if this latest YouTube/blog/Wikipedia ban's got you flummoxed (and you're too cheap/poor to get a VPN), check out some of our favourite free ways to get up and over the Great Firewall.

Have you been missing laughing babies and sneezing pandas? Haven't seen Star Wars kid in too long of a time? Or you just wanted to feel plugged into the international video-trading scene again?

According to several media reports, Xinhua has come out and said that separatists and supporters of the Dalai Lama had "fabricated" a video showing Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after last year's riots. Though Xinhua didn't explicitly state the video, it's probably this one. Google has said it doesn't know the reason for the block, but "We are looking into it and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible." So... we guess we won't be getting the 'tube back until either Youtube takes down the videos or Google finds some way to filter specific content from China IPs. Great.

Ugh. Most of you have already noticed by now, but Youtube's been Great Firewall-ed for the second time this month. Unlike the weird half-assed blocking in early March though, it looks like this time the video site is down. completely. everywhere.

The Net Nanny makes all of our lives a little more annoying, providing hours of infuriating slow and often inaccessible browsing.

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.

For all of you outside of China right now who have no idea what the internet is like over here and are curious enough to meet the Net Nanny face to face, here comes the ultimate Firefox extension for you, the China Channel Firefox Add-on. Here's the description of the add-on:

Experience the censored Chinese internet at home!

Continue reading "Download the ultimate Great Firewall Firefox extension"

The New York Times reports that a Canadian human-rights activist cum researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has discovered that instant messaging (IM) conversations over the Tom-Skype network were being blocked, tracked and recorded on a cluster of eight computers located in China.

Andrew Lih reports on some websites newly accessible in Mainland China leading up to the Olympics. They include: BBC Chinese, Wikipedia Chinese, Radio Free Asia and Apple Daily HK newspaper. Lih is quick to point out that "there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal." Lih's bet on when unblocked sites will be reblocked? "8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony." In other web censorship news, the press commission head of the International Olympic Committee said he smells a conspiracy regarding the controversy surrounding inaccessible sites in Olympic media center: "I have to accept that I appear to be the fall guy and may be the fall guy." Are you a disgruntled Olympic reporter? Try this.

http://pic.tom.com/

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, an estimated 2 million closed circuit tv-cameras or CCTVs for short (oh the irony) will be installed over the next three years in Shenzhen. The surveillance experiment is part of the heroically named Golden Shield Project (Patriot Act, anyone?) which also gave birth to another of our favorite censorship models the Great Firewall.

China's bloggers have always gone to extreme lengths to share information and criticism. But after the Weng'an riots this weekend, bloggers have had to become especially crafty when distributing information on the riots and their aftermath. In addition to burying coding inside search phrases that hide the words from online censors and taking a screenshot of written text, the Wall Street Journal reports netizens on Tianya.cn now flipping sentences to read right to left instead of left to right, and vertically instead of horizontally to get past all the usual keyword blocks. Sinobyte suggests that this new method might be better than most, since Chinese is an ideographic writing system "probably easier to read in odd inversions than most alphabetic languages." Sinobyte further explains that since Chinese words are split into meaning-based units, reading reverse text is more like reading the English word "bass ackwards" instead of "sdrawkcab ssa."

It's finally happened: Anonymouse.org, the proxy service that many of us use to access blocked websites and surf the Internet anonymously, has been blocked by Net Nanny. Shanghaiist first noted it at 10:30PM last night Shanghai time, along with the block of ComedyCentral.com. While the decision to block Anonymouse is self-evident (okay, sort of), we're not completely sure why ComedyCentral got the axe. In the mean time, Shanghaiist suggests using alternative proxy services ProxyChina or Hack520.