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 ›
Ridiculous as it sounds, LinkedIn has most likely been blocked because of postings related to the "Jasmine Revolution" which (barely) took place in 13 cities across China over the weekend.
"I have six VPNs on my home computer. But I only try them to test which side wins: the GFW or the VPN."
We read on Gizmodo earlier today that Google had just integrated it's Skype-like Google Voice function into Gmail. The article also said something that made us perk up - that calls from a US IP to another US or Canadian number would be absolutely free. Since our VPN changes us to a US IP anyhow, we decided to give it a try.
I'm not sure why yet, but it seems like a whole bunch of sites that were otherwise inaccessible behind the GFW have suddenly gotten a free pass again. Most notably, video sharing site Vimeo, Twitter client Hootsuite and news site VOA News. Word is that a whole bunch of previously blocked English porn sites are now up and running too (though I have no idea which ones - honest!). Unfortunately, the big three - Twitter, Facebook and Youtube - are still nixed. Oh well, that's what you got a VPN for anyhow, right?
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.
The latest Facebook Global Monitor report released by Inside Facebook has revealed, rather unsurprisingly, that China heads the pack of three countries that actually lost more active users than it gained for the month of September (the other two being Iceland and Cyprus). When Facebook was banned in July, the social network had one million monthly active users. That figure collapsed to half a million in August, before shrinking further to 41,000 in early September, and now as of the beginning of this month, only a measly 14,000 remain. Totally authoritative anecdotal reports suggest that these 14,000 diehard Facebook users comprised mostly of smart Shanghaiist readers who know where to get their VPN and other desperate expats who just miss their friends back home.
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.
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.
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.
