digg_url = 'http://digg.com/world_news/CNN_website_blocked_in_China_as_the_Net_Nanny_strikes_again'; Two days after Danwei reported the unblocking of Blogspot, it looks like the Net Nanny has struck again. Nobody we've asked seems to be able to access CNN.com right now. One guy at the office on China Netcom was able to for a while, and then started getting the connection reset. The latest block could be a result of the recent Jack Cafferty saga and perceived biased reporting on the part......

An Associated Press video on the Taiwanese Presidential elections Just in time for Easter, YouTube has come back from the dead after an absence of around a week. As we reported last week, the block was most likely due to certain sensitive content, a move that has left some people questioning whether Google/YouTube were involved at all. Unfortunately, its resurrection doesn't appear to be fully complete — some video clips don't seem to load......

International news channels such as CNN and BBC are also getting routinely blacked out. While we think this is a really poor way to deal with all the shit that's going on, we have been there many, many times, and survived. Time to turn on your VPN again, people! And if you still don't know what it is, let me tell you it's the only way to maintain your sanity here. Shanghaiist highly recommends the......

We've been here before so don't get too excited, but it seems that blogspot sites are once again accessible in Shanghai. Photo from China Daily Good news for Olympic athletes who have recently been (sort of) granted permission to blog (but not podcast) at the Olympic games by the IOC. Any media-savvy athletes however, will be registering their own domain names in order to avoid a blanket ban. We notice that www.LiuXiang.com has already been......

There is no end in sight to the good news. Not only is Youtube blocked, but Blogspot is also back behind the Great Firewall, now that the 17th Party Congress is over. Nobody has to put up with this sh*te really. Grab your VPN now, and enjoy the Internet as it was meant to be. Picture from slider22......

OK, we all know about the Great Wall, the Great Firewall and the Great Green Wall. All that is old news now. Get this: China is now building a 6 million yuan, 40-kilometer (25-mile) long, 1 meter (3.3 feet) high wall around Dongting Lake in Hunan Province to guard against the 2 billion field mice that have been on the run from the flooded Yangtse River. Already, the mice have destroyed about 520,000 hectares (1.3......

Learn more about this project This is a simple chasing game we developed in Scratch to celebrate this summer's street dramas between cyclists and Shanghainese traffic attendants. You are the bicycle trying to keep away from JingJing the famous Net policewoman, who is trying to serve you with a fine for riding on the wrong side of the road. You can move the bicycle in different directions by pressing the different cursor keys. Scratch......

It seems that the TIME Magazine China Blog has been blocked by the Great Firewall of China (GFW), or "GFW-ed" to use the industry nomenclature. The blog normally covers a full-range of issues, including topics and analysis that local media wouldn't touch with a 10 meter 棍, and as a rule, TIME tends to "err on the side of free speech." However, evidently the blog took things a step too far for China's censors, when......

China's schools overcharged 1.7 billion yuan in past five years "A massive 1.7 billion yuan (about 217 million U.S. dollars) of unwarranted school fees have been charged to unlucky parents since 2002, the top corruption watchdog said here on Thursday." How long can Great Firewall of China last? "Where Manchester’s worker dissidents of the early 1800s had the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley to urge them to 'rise like lions after slumber', China’s modern......

Thanks to a tip from vadaga, Shanghaiist learned that now you only have one option to login to your existing MySpace 麦斯贝 account page in mainland China - use of an anonymising proxy. At the time of writing, any attempts Shanghaiist has made to access its existing myspace account using myspace.com are met with time-out errors and the classic connection error response caused by the Great Firewall of China. Users can still view their myspace......

So a writer from The Gazette, a popular Montreal newspaper, was in China recently. And he was awed by the same things that most writers who haven't been to China recently are awed by: the shiny skyscrapers, the intoxicating energy, the pirated DVDs. But the writer's trip to China also coincided with the "most exciting Quebec election in decades," and he desperately wanted to follow the news from back home. And thanks to this thing......

You likely know that access to the great China news resource China Digital Times is blocked in Mainland China. So, you may not know that on Monday they published an audio interview with Howard W. French, the New York Times bureau chief here in Shanghai. It's part of their ChinaCast series of podcasts, "short and informal conversations with journalists, business people, artists and others doing interesting work in China." For those of you not stuck......

Starting sometime before last weekend, users of LiveJournal (affectionately called "LJ" by its users) were unable to access the website in China. LiveJournal is an American based website owned by the blogging software company Six Apart that allows users to be part of an online community and create blogs, journals, or diaries called "livejournals". LiveJournal issued this statement in response to inquiries made by the community of LJ users in Beijing called beijingchina: "Thank you......

As we all know, there is no internet censorship in China. However, if you've attempted to access one of the estimated 19,032 websites that are inaccessible in China, then you may have experienced some frustration to that end. It's not simply those of you who have been deemed a cultist, separatists, splittist, or attempt to read illicit material from rogue, upstart news organizations, but China's filtration system is a dynamic, evolving beast that smothers forbidden......

Everyone knows about the Great Firewall in China. After a few months here in PRC, people just learn to live with it or find ways around it. In recent days, we have found our internet mobility further limited by yet another layer of unwanted security, one that is perhaps more local in nature. Let us explain: Since about a week ago, sites such as Fidelity.com, Engadget.com and Seekingalpha.com are no longer accessible to us at......

Blogs are the next target of internet censorship in China. (Weren't they already?)Ever wanted to know how the Great Firewall works? Well, a group of researchers at Cambridge found out and an Andrew Lih translates this into laymen's terms.Mysterious men mercilessly killed 200 trees -- but it was all a misunderstanding.A woman is sentenced to a punishment of planting 13,620 trees -- we suppose another 200 wouldn't hurt her, too much?But sometimes even money can't......

Ever think of stealing one of those "TAXI" lights on the top of Shanghai cabs? You're not the only one.Surprised our resident Zhang Ziyi stalker fan hasn't posted about this already.A crack in the Great Firewall?Shanghai has plans for your "electronic waste.""The Chinese are much more adventurous than Europeans and Americans when it comes to sex toys."Is the Da Vinci Code to blame for Tom Cruise's China problem?"China in dire need of saving its hutongs."......

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, has taken a lot of heat lately for its complicity in suppressing free speech in China. What ever happened to "make money without doing evil"? But “things aren’t always as they appear”, as the saying goes. The smart folks at Internet Censorship Explorer have found a backdoor in Google.cn that allows users to get around the Great Firewall. Is it a feature or an oversight? We’ll let the conspiracy......

Gadget blog Engadget brings us the latest news on Skype in China: China's got some businesses to protect -- landline phone businesses, that is -- and it sounds like no Skype VoIP licenses (enabling, for example, SkypeOut calling) are to be issued for another two years over there per government intervention. That's bad, but what's worse is apparently China Telecom's declared the software "illegal" (we assume that claim carries over to other VoIP software, too......

Gothamist posts on the capture of a NYC perv thanks to Little Brother and a camera phone. They also scour the city for vodka martinis and Shamrock shakes and spot the friend from the Wonder Years at a city law firm. New York police think that Littlejohn is their man. Houstonist is no stranger to megachurches or stripmalls or mega-strip-churchmalls. The children of Houston are under assault by unknown forces as this week a playground......

The deflector shield is now fully operational. Google just announced that it will be complying with the Chinese government's requests to censor its search results. Recall that in 2004, the mainland Chinese version of Google News was already censored. Now Google, has a new address -- www.google.cn -- and whereas before you could get the results of a search on Tibetan independence but not open the link, now, it seems, you won't even know it......