The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIIRC) issued its first blacklist of websites containing "harmful information" on Monday. The websites were found to be spreading "low and vulgar content," according to Danwei, and had been previously sent orders to delete the illegal content, but the demands were not heeded. In an effort to "shame" them, the CIIIRC decided to expose the names of these websites on its blacklist. The sites include: http://club.qingdaonews.com/ http://bbs.cjn.cn/main.html http://et.21cn.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......

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......

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......

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......

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. We have to give credit to Chaterhouse and Garden Books for improving accessibility to hard copy English language books, although it's still not......

We were tipped off by Shanghaiist contributor Micah in the Contribute page that Flickr is possibly no longer working in China. We've done numerous checks with various people and it appears that while Flickr has definitely not been GFW'ed, one can no longer access it with Firefox even with this add-on. The only thing we see is a blank screen, although the Flickr favicon does actually show up. Both Internet Explorer and Safari are loading......

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. What I think is happening that the filter systems has been partly automated and triggers off......

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. The strange behavior started......