Results tagged “netnanny”

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.

Looks like public opinion against the Green Dam Youth Escort software, including the non-stop foreign media coverage and the numerous internet petitions, has finally convinced the government that maybe it shouldn't make the install mandatory. And good thing too:

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.

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.

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.

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

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/

Since Monday, we've been having problems accessing Facebook here and thought we were the only ones having that problem. Tuesday, we began to hear from friends of ours all around China complaining of the same problem, on the Shanghaiist Contribute page and among the China Twitterati. And then this piece by the WSJ's China Journal appeared, devoting five full paragraphs to Facebook's mysterious outtage. God forbid the day when we have to turn on our VPN just to throw a vampire at a friend, or smuggle liquor on Mob Wars!

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.

BBC, Wikipedia and Blogspot continue to be unblocked for now.

Since Net Nanny lifted her ban on YouTube, we have been catching up on the some of the vids that we missed during the year-long ban...okay, it wasn't that long. Looking for any excuse to waste time and avoid Christmas shopping, we watched every episode available of the first season of Project Runway Canada (the other PRC in our lives). It's the Canadian version of the very popular (especially among the LGBT crowd) American show,...

Yes, that was our reaction when we saw these pictures, but sorry to disappoint all you Facebook whores (that includes ourselves!) out there, the image on the right is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com (校内网). It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies (though one wonders how they would do it with a name like that because "校内“ literally means "in school").

We have just got into audiobooks. It's a great way of getting hold of new reading material without having to wait weeks for it to clear customs. They are great for summer holidays, because audiobooks can be downloaded from the Internet to your MP3 player without taking up any extra baggage space.

It doesn't just end there. Yahoo is also inaccessible now it seems, although both Yahoo.com.cn and Yahoo.cn are still working as usual. Has it been GFW-ed? Is the inaccessibility of the two websites related?

Yesterday afternoon, Shanghaiist noticed on its Twitter stream that some China-based users were having problems accessing the newly redesigned (wonderful in fact) Danwei site. Blocked blogger, The Weifeng Radish, noted it can only be accessed by an anonymising proxy. Prolific Shanghai blogger and journalist Fons Tuinstra over at The China Herald popped out a post musing about their situation.

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...

August 1 was a strange day here at Shanghaiist. Our site was normal and accessible to pretty much the entire world, including China ... except for most people living in Shanghai. This was, obviously, somewhat of a concern to us, seeing how the majority of our readers are in Shanghai and all of our active contributors live in Shanghai -- thus, we were unable to update the site for you yesterday.