Wikipedia Ublocked
Chinese readers, go ahead and check it out. I accidentally opened a Wikipedia link [about grey goo, nonetheless... lol] without using Anonymouse first and whattayaknow, it opened :-)
Treyopia.com, however, is still blocked. It amazes me that my site was singled out like that. It amazed me more that whoever blocked it didn't realize it was DNS forwarding service and failed to subsequently block the host, http://trinarian.blogspot.com, too.
Internet blocking was one of the biggest concerns I had about coming to China before I left. It hasn't been an issue though. It's amazingly ineffective. There seems to be two levels of blocking, which is curious. The first level is partially blocked, meaning you can easily get around it with a proxy like Anonymouse. Wikipedia, Technorati, and Blogspot are/have been in this catagory. The second layer of blocking is in effect on BBC, where proxies don't help at all. I'm guessing the first layer, the loosely-blocked material, exists to draw red flags when users are trying to access "potentially subversive" material whereas the second-layer of blocking is considered outright subversive. Like the incideous rebels at the BBC.
The irony in that is that I read scathing articles about China frequently on der Spiegel, the New York Times, and blog entries. The English-language sites just aren't that restricted. On the domestic front, I've heard that if you query Google or IM the name of a certain religious cult that was supressed a few years back you automatically get logged off.
Tags: Treyopia China Chinese Great Firewall news current events Firewall blocking Wiki Wikipedia banned blocked unblocked unbanned censorship
3 comments:
That is so awesome. I keep hearing of sites like this slowly becoming unblocked. What do you think this means?
It was probably technical, honestly. When blogger became unblocked it because they changed the IP address of their server. IP addresses are the numbers [192.168.0.1, for instance] that are the underlying architecture of the internet. When you ask your computer to pull up Google.com, for instance, it goes to a DNS [Domain Name Service] database and pulls out those numbers.
What it really means is that the English-side of the Great Firewall is crap. It wouldn't seem so when you hear about the number of people working it, but no one really seems to be watching the English end of the web. Chinese sites are still being ruthlessly blocked [a popular academic forum was the latest victim].
I really just don't think the Chinese government cares what we're looking at back home. The more free we feel the more we send that vibe stateside. The "dangerous" sites in English are just gibberish to 95+% of the population. The educated fluent English-speakers are probably already familiar with some of the accusations anyway.
It amazes me why people here in America get so ruffled when you are the voice of dissent (as if that means you are unpatriotic). As they say, dissent can be the utmost form of patriotism. Those who sit quietly and blindly follow are all the more unpatriotic. We have all this information in front of us yet we are too lazy to seek truth out or approach things objectively. I don't know why I got on this rant...Keep up the posts. Who actually censors these things? I mean, is there a position on a job board somewhere for it?
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