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 ›
That's right. The Internet in China is really more like a massive intranet. Hal Roberts of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society writes that 96% of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within China. Also: "The extremely high proportion local web traffic in China may be the result of the success of the Chinese government in blocking the international sites, like Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, that are generally the biggest destination in other countries. Or it might be because Chinese people like to read content written in Chinese by other Chinese about Chinese topics run by Chinese people. It is likely some combination of the two factors. But the end result is the same. The most direct battleground in the fight over control of the Internet in China is local — it’s happening on the local Chinese services that are the source of almost all Chinese web traffic but are required to censor content by the government." [Read more here]
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?
The last few weeks have seen supermarkets across China emptied of salt, and the Net Nanny tightening Internet restrictions up one notch.
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 ›
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 ›
Tech entrepreneur and founder of various social media aggregation services Zheng Yun offers the following advice for anyone with a China website who wants to prevent it from getting shut down. His tweets were compiled by Wan Feng and translated by ChinaDigitalTimes:
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.
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.
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.
Well, this had to happen sometime. In the fallout to the video of US Ambassador Jon Huntsman spotted at the "Jasmine Revolution" protests in Beijing, Chinese internet censors have taken to filtering search results for the Chinese name of the ambassador.
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.
We want to take a moment to congratulate Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, founders of file-sharing service Dropbox. Guys, you've made it! China's Net Nanny considers your website such a threat to the People's Republic that she has decided to ban it! That's right! Dropbox.com is no longer accessible and file-syncing and sharing is no longer possible here in China. Not without a VPN anyway.
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.
"As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history."
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.
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.
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.
