Slashdot Mirror
China Now Blocking RSS Feeds
Phurge passed us an Ars Technica link covering China's newest internet-based crackdown: RSS feeds. Real Simple Syndication has apparently been a fairly foolproof way to get around Chinese government censors in recent years. As long ago as August, though, access to feeds has been curtailed by the Great Firewall. "More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with 'feeds,' 'rss,' and 'blog,' thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites — including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica — useless ... there are a few workarounds, some of which may be simpler than others. Some of our readers in China tell us that web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, (sort of) help provide access to RSS feeds. One reader says that if he has the aggregator set to display the full post (or however much of the post is made available) and clicks through to read more, everything is just fine."
Change RSS to LSS and we'll call it even.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
China blocks access to a service. People find a way to get around it.
Uh, don't you get it? It is relevant to the US. You've just witnessed the Fairness Doctrine in play. You can split hairs but thats whats in the current US government politic right now. It's highly relevant.
No, there is no ??? or profit step. The Chinese government already has better ways to gain money. </preemptive strike>
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That's all feed:// URLs use, innit? A fake protocol always seemed bogus to me. You already have a MIME type.
-mkb
All China really has to do in order to control information flow nationwide is to deregulate the media and force them to compete vigorously against one another. They'll be so cost-pressured that they can't really do any journalism; instead, they'll end up so short-staffed that all they can do is publish the stuff that the government wants them to publish.
Barring that, the internet will simply detect the censorship and route around it, just like it always does...
I can't help thinking that those girls must be getting underpaid.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I doubt chinese government's efford. For a normal person will almost never visit sites other than in Chinese. Those who does however will always find a work around.
By far the best evidence of a civilised country. Ever.
God, root, what is difference ?
Queue the people saying there is no firewall...
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... not {politics for nerds}.
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btw I've been under the shadow of the Great Firewall since China has internet. This is just normal case. Something is not being smart enough in the GFW API the Communist Party bought from you Americans. Perhaps somebody's LAN got trojaned and tried to slashdot a moderately sensitive (pardon me) site and the GFW got soooooo exited by the event
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
While its interesting to find a workaround to the great firewall of China, one has to remember that it is illegal for a Chinese citizen to violate the Firewall. Furthermore, if you, as a foreigner are visiting China, it is just as illegal for you to bypass the Chinese Firewall.. If the authorities find out, you will likely face severe penalties. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it to read Slashdot or Ars RSS feeds, while you are on vacation in China? Perhaps you should wait till you get back, so you dont find yourself rotting away in a Chinese Prison.
I thought Socialism was about the ideal of giving power to the people rather than an elite oligarchy. What the hell happened? Censorship usually comes from an insecure and weak oligarchy desperate to maintain privilege.
Why all the trouble blocking rss-this or blog-that? Deploy the backhoes and goatse your infrastructure!
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
China will have to choose between having the internet and being a world power using the tools of the 21st century, or becoming isolated from the rest of the world on all levels. The internet is becoming the primary infrastructure for a new future. The idea of becoming or staying economicaly and politically viable without it is naive and foolish. It would be like trying to become a economic and military power in the 20th century without an industrial base to build anything.
No. Our economy would collapse.
Balance (in million USD)
2007 (July)
Export to CHINA: 35,325.6 Import to USA: 176,630.9
LOSS TO USA:-141,305.3
Now a days there are plenty of sites that allow you to add your own RSS feeds on the site. Find one that's not blocked and setup the RSS feeds on it.
Amnesty International
...if there are people in other countries talking about the "great US firewall" that we aren't even aware of?
More proof that building closer economic ties to China will bring freedom and democracy there.
I was in China for the last couple of weeks and was actually rather surprised that I was able to access Slashdot there. With all the stories here about the Great Firewall and Chinese censorship, along with ways to circumvent them, I figured Slashdot would be blocked. Now I'm starting to wonder how widespread and effective their censorship efforts actually are. I did see a news report there about the plan to have little cartoon characters popping up on users' screens if they are found to be searching for naughty things. I remembered hearing about that on /. a while back as well.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
no we can't, favored trade status and all, we have a very supportive relationship with those Godless oppressive commie bastards
Mo
They could always set up websites that work like http://www.siliconnews.net/ they integrate many rss feeds into one web page. I also believe http://naviwire.com/ is launching soon providing the same service but over a broad spectrum of topics other than technology
...if they keep this up. They'll just step up trade with bogus regimes like burma and the sudan and saudi arabia and such places where they can get natural resources and the leaders share a similar "overlord" political philosophy, including using the intarweb.
They are rapidly nearing (or have crossed, I think they have) the point where they won't need US or western europe as customers. Think on the ramifications of that one for a bit. They have their own billion + plus people (an internal market larger than the US and the EU combined) and the entire developing world (some more billions) as customers or soon to be customers now,and that's a LOT of people, all of whom are hell bent for leather on becoming "consumers". China now needs raw materials now, energy and raw materials and that's it, they are slowing down on collecting pretty pictures of dead presidents and kings and bureaucrats that drop in value daily, they are converting them to real stuff of value as fast as possible now.
China spent the last two decades buying up all the advanced machine tools and garnering the expertise to use them that they need to become fully self supporting, as you can see they are in most manufacturing now from the simplest doo dads to the largest ships and planes. They bought entire factories, had them disassembled, and shipped over there. Stuff like that, that and "allowing" western business leaders to voluntarily pay to move high tech over there. Who wouldn't have taken buhzillions in free stuff, and get a check for taking it? That's what they were after, short term trade back trinkets as they built up their major infrastructure, and now..they have. That's part of what they have been doing with all their surplus cash, buying the juicy high tech stuff that was difficult/expensive to develop in house (country) for them, and with the rest, they are buying up very long range and huge contracts for raw resources, all over the planet. Now that they got to that point and are expanding....well....business as we know it will be rapidly changing.
They, and our snakeoil salesmen business leaders, suckered everyone. They get a century's worth of advancement in 20 years,and less than 1% of the western populations got stinking freekin ridiculously rich on the con, and everyone else (the dumb natives who swallowed that fairy tale) got some cheap beads and trinkets and wound up holding all these debt IOUs. Sweet deal for the fatcats all over! And the natives think all the debt is wonderful!
In other words, and to get to the point and here I will disagree if I am reading your post correctly, they have already "chosen", there's nothing more for them to "choose" how they will run their net and access and media and so forth, what you see is what you get, and it seems to be working for them for the most part. They nailed the west hard by walking off with the important work, so now there's no lever to use against them, because we never insisted on any credible quid pro quo towards freedom and democracy (still no alternative political parties allowed for instance) as this huge transference of wealth and technology was happening.
Their own population can only be customers if their population has expendable wealth. You could have a googleplex of destitute dirt farmers and not sell one iPod. The only economic system that has ever produced a large wealthy middle class is capitalism. So long as China continues to allow capitalism to be the dominant mode of production and so long as they are competitive they can use their population as customers. If this changes then it collapses.
The reason the world's capital is flowing into China instead of the USA is because the USA has become a weak place to invest your money. High tax burdens, complex tax and business codes and laws, a broken tort system, and an ever-growing socialist mentality and welfare state. Big money that knows no country goes to where it can grow the fastest. China, for all of it's problems, is a better place to grow your money.
And that, IMO, is the real reason China's economy is growing. Not because they stole our technology. It was pretty free for the taking anyway. You don't see other 3rd world nations being able to run with our technology to modernize themselves. It's because China changed it's mode of production to capitalism, and for all of it's problems is in many ways more capitalist than the USA is.
What I'm saying is that the USA finally has competition in the global market place. It's not that they stole our tech. You'll never be able to prevent that anyway. If you have a free society then the information will flow. If you do not then innovation will never happen. Catch-22. So forget regulating information. It'll never work. The only solution is to out-compete them. You can only do that allowing capital to grow faster in your economy than theirs. We are losing our status as economic super-power more due to our own decisions than China.
If America lost $-141,305.3, then technically they would gain $141,305.3.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
I think the fact is wrong. China is not blocking all RSS feeds. Some are blocked, though, including the Slashdot RSS. However, the CNET RSS is still accessible.
Also, the phenomenon I observed seems to indicate the IP address of a related site is completely blocked. It is not like keyword filtering at all, which will involve RESET packets and some obvious browser actions.
I have also found that rss.slashdot.org and feeds.arstechnica.com share the same IP address, whose name is feeds.feedburner.com. I would rather think the problem is that this site also hosts some anti-Chinese Government information, and is the home of many RSS feeds.
So, while I regret that many RSS feeds are not accessible, it seems not true that China is blocking all rss URIs.
Thank fuck for that then. Look where' your god has taken your country.
The Party has never favored self-serve information aggregate sites like FeedBurner or LiveJournal, or Wikipedia...
One bad page and the whole server (physical server, not a single virtual site) got censored.
One of my adblock filters in the past had been *blog* simply because it removes all the cruft from blog sites,leaving only html(ads are already blocked) which i can access directly.
I don't use it currently and moved to more specific filters.