China Blocks Typepad, Prompts Weblog Blackout

dcm writes "As U.S. Ambassador Richard Williamson prepares to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Commission to censure the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) government for increasing 'repression of its people using the Internet, democratic dialogue, religious expression,' the regime continues to block discourse.On Friday, China began blocking access to Typepad, a paid weblog hosting service in San Mateo, California. The communist regime previously blocked access to BlogSpot, Blogger's free hosting site. Yan Sham-Shackleton filed a report on the Glutter weblog, mentioning China is '...now using blocking software to stop information from leaking into the county via personal sites, an increasingly vibrant China Internet community, and a place where users are slipping in banned information. Some sites in the blogging community are turning black in protest of this event while others are reporting the incident.'"

Comments

Re:Technically impossible

[LostCluster]

However, it's very trivial to firewall out specific sites so long as you have control of all paths between the user and the site. The Chinese have such firewalls installed at every ISP that leaves the country.

As long as FTP works,

[TheLoneGundam]

They can send their info to some FTP server and their US friends can copy it to Typepad. If FTP gets blocked, there's always e-mail.. and if I recall (can't find the link) there was actually a service that you could e-mail your FTP requests to. (wow, wish I could find that again, it was a list of about a zillion different services which were e-mail enabled)

Re:Chinese Technology?

[DR SoB]

It is blocked by the main routers the government owns, which route all internet traffic. It simply checks the TCP header for the destination IP address, if it is bound for a blocked subnet, the packet is dropped.

How to get around it, well the CIA didn't like those commi's blocking information, so they set up Anonymizer ( www.anonymizer.com ) that would allow a type of encrypted proxy so you could get around that. CoDC also set up some sort of browser that could get around it, but I didn't really investigate it much (Same guys who made Back-Oriface)..

It gets worse

[The Bungi]

If you want to take a look at the pervasive, active content blocking by the PRC, take a look at this.

The breadth of censored content there is simply amazing.

Re:Holding Back The Inevitable

[STrinity]

"Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing."

I really don't care to take pointers on democracy from a guy that's been dead for 2 millenia AT HIS OWN HAND because his government told him to drink the kool-aid. Gimme a break.

And I don't care to take pointers on anything from a guy who doesn't know the difference between Plato and Socrates.

i have been reading a lot about china lately

[Britz]

And I would like to share a few things to anyone who is interested:

First of all: China is changing a such a rapid pace that no Cisco routers that are used to block a couple websites will have any major impact.
We are talking of about 100 million people rapidly moving up the social ladder. The communist party just aknowledged that they have to do something about the rest (more than 900 million btw), many of them on the way trying to get on board with the first group.

That said I would like to share some insight into history. Even though we know oppresive regimes are bad and the usual American only pokes at Communism with a 9 foot pole the regime served the majority of the Chinese people pretty well in the past 40-50 years. The cultural revolution was a major setback and the party says it was very wrong. Apart from that they had some great success at poverty reduction during the 70s and 80s.

Compare that to what You know about India, which has had a stable democracy during most of that time or South America which has been under US influence since the infamous "Teddy".
IMHO India lags behind China on the rights of the woman (in practial terms, theoratically all Communist coutries should be heaven for women, which never was) over all for example. I am sure You will find more.

At the moment the US govt. is using the "human rights tool" to apply pressure to China on the international diplomatic level. You know it, they know it and everyone else knows it too. (Saudi Arabia and human rights ... US allies ... )

Still we have an issue with free speech in China, since a corrupt govt. that has nothing left to justify its hold on power (they promote market economics for heavens sake) is trying to keep the country out of major shakeups. Remember what happened to Russia after the change? Live expectency is still going down there. Anyways, there are people in the party that try to move towards democracy, but that is not easy and they don't want civil war.

That said the most important problems that China is facing at the moment are corruption and trying not to loose the 900 million people on the way to wealth and prosperity. That is what the party is saying. IMHO the biggest problem is for the officials to stay on top of this huge moving mass that China represents at the moment. And it is gaining speed.

Exactly because of that the central government is trying to promote free speech to get more accurate reports from the various parts of China, since the official channels are slow and always change facts around so the local govt. looks good.

Re:What's wrong with this picture

[duck_prime]

[Iraq gets punished by U.S. for naughtyness, China doesn't] Am I the only one that sees a double standard here?

Not so much a double-standard, but a realization of what is possible. When the US sees drastic human-rights abuses in country X, certain questions have to be asked before any intervention is made:
1. Should we intervene? That is, are the Xites being really, really offensive?
2. Can we intervene? That is, does X have a massive nuclear arsenal? (Note: China does, Iraq didn't but wanted one)
3. Is our interest being served? That is, does attacking X serve national strategic goals? Does X have it in for us in some way?

Your mileage may vary on how to answer these questions for Iraq and China, but my readings suggest that the US executive branch does think this way.

In a Platonic world of Good Smiting Evil, question #1 and #2 would be the only ones considered. But in our world question #3 must also be considered. Note also that the extent to which #3 outweighs #1 is the distance we are into the Gray Area (tm).

China's internet censorship not as bad as it seems

[toogreen]

Hello there, I am a Canadian and I'm now in China teaching English and doing some freelance web development. I've been in China (Shanghai) for about 9 months now and to be honest it is VERY rare that I can't access any particuliar website. I remember just when I got here I did have some problems with a very few sites but then they seemed to have really cooled down lately about it since now these sites are easily accessible. Same thing with Google, they un-blocked it long time ago. I just tried both of the supposedly blocked websites (blogger and typepad) and I have absolutely no problem accessing these sites. I don't know where this information came from but they surely didn't block it for me! ;) I'm also pretty amazed by how easy and cheap it is to go online here (compared to Canada). I'm on a very fast cable connection, with no restrictions or quotas at all, and I pay about US 14$ (splitted between me and my flatmate). In Canada I have to pay over CDN 35$ for a cable connection that gives me like 6 gig max of downloads and a crappy 15k/s upload speed limit... Anyways I just thought I should share that information with you guys as I feel sometimes we westerners tend to bitch a lot about China and its government without really seeing how things really are in the real world. China is under very heavy and fast transformations right now, as much economically than socially, and I think Shanghai is probably the best place to actually see that LIVE in front of your eyes. Shanghai is definately opening up to the world and its a pretty cool and fun place to live in (and party!) nowadays. You should see how fast skyscrapers are growing like mushrooms around here, it's quite unbelievable. And I haven't said anything about the amazing transportation system and its modern facilities... I still can't believe they can put these flat LCDs and huge plasma screens about every 5 meters in the metro, when I can't even afford one of those myself (Grr). Oh btw, I saw those terminals reboot once or twice, and yes it runs under Linux ;) The cultural changes are there as well, as the younger generations seem not to differ as much as westerners anymore... But at the same time it's a bit of a shame cuz with McDonalds and KFC invading China (There's a famous street in Shanghai, Nanjing rd. where there is a McDonald's or KFC about every 100 meters!) I see SO many very FAT youngsters, which is something almost impossible to see amongst the 20+ and older generations... Too bad, I guess the amazing fact that chinese woman are all very thin and healthy looking will be something of the past and to remember... sigh! ;) There's a lot more to say but oh well, that was just my 2 cents about China...