China Telecom Blocking Skype Calls

Retrospeak writes "According to a Reuters report China is starting to block Skype service in Shenzhen, an affluent southern city of China. Local Chinese media report that China Telecom has plans to eventually block the service throughout its coverage area nationwide. Could this have something to do with the fact that China Telecom charges close to $1 per minute for calls to United States and Europe?" From the article: " A China Telecom spokesman had no comment on the reports about the Shenzhen blockage, but gave a broader view. 'Under the current relevant laws and regulations of China, PC-to-phone services are strictly regulated and only China Telecom and (the nation's other fixed-line carrier) China Netcom are permitted to carry out some trials on a very limited basis,' he said."

Comments

Re:Sad Future of Broadband Access in other countri

[dominion]

This is just another example of why I am glad to live here in the United States of America.

You know, it's fine if you want to be glad that you don't live in China, but you should at least recognize that being better than China when it comes to human rights is kinda like bragging that you're not the stupidest kid on the short bus.

In Soviet Russia...

[FlyByPC]

...Voice-Over-IP blocks *you*!

Re:How is it identified for blocking?

[mcrbids]

Yeah. I work in the media revision department of the Chinese Federal Govornment.

We block the signals by running iptraf on a 486 Linux box connected to the China -> California gateway. Iptraf, as you may know, is ncurses-based, so we have a REALLY BIG SCREEN on it so we can see all the connections going on.

Then, we have a bunch of short, four-eyed people on ladders in front of the screen watching the connections. Whenever someting nefarious happens, they scream out port numbers to one of our typists who furiously type in commands like

iptables -A input -p tcp -s 1.2.3.4 --sport 18390 -d 4.3.2.1 --dport 8080 -j REJECT;

Every morning, we flush the tables, ensuring we have plenty of work to do that day...

Just so you know, Slashdot is usually on our ban list, so anytime, one of the foureyes is going to notice m!@#!@#913899!# !# { 192.168.1.1: PACKET DENIED }