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China Blocks More Internet Services
Dave writes "China continues to block more and more popular services. This week they blocked iTunes and YouTube, and now it's TringMe, a popular VoIP 2.0 service. From TringMe's Blog: 'We received close to hundred complaints from our China users that TringMe services is not accessible from yesterday. We have found after our investigation that TringMe is blocked by Chinese government. Earlier China blocked Skype and now they are turning their eye to TringMe. TringMe is extremely popular in China and we have a large number of paying customers in China including a Chinese social network with 3 million users using TringMe's API & services.'"
Yikes! They got slashdot!
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Perhaps the western world should block China from the internet.
If you can still use it this way, it's not really blocked.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Back to normal now that the Olympics are over. Honestly, did anyone expect otherwise?
The UK is doing its best to censor the internet any way they can. Londonâ(TM)s St. Pancras International has been censoring alternative news websites through their wi-fi for at least a month. While I see plenty of news articles about Chinese censorship, I didn't see the UK censorship anywhere else.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
China blocking more and more software that would allow communication between the billion-and-change people inside the country, or between people in China and people outside China, may be business as usual but it's going to deal this company a blow by terminating three million accounts.
Should we not consider anything that is 'business as usual' to be news? If that's the case, why not just drop any news coverage of the telco immunity deals, domestic spying, or abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo and similar facilities? Those are things that seem to be happening with disturbing regularity lately.
Does this mean music people paid for will no longer work because it can't connect to the iTunes DRM server?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Good citizens stay indoors while the proud national military is out arresting the fools who would wish to harm our proud nation!
This is China. Do you think they don't have contingency plans for things like that? More importantly... how are they going to coordinate to do this without attracting enough notice to shut it down before it begins?
They would just send in their troopers and the people would be forced back to work at gunpoint.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
...what the hell is VoIP 2.0?
Now with all-new Buzzword Compliance Module?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Just hope that the Chicoms haven't already bought your bullet.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Did you ever think that the reason they do this is so when shat starts hitting the fan in China, no one will be able to cry out because they will have no communication with the outside world?
I dunno...Just a thought.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
tbh we all saw this coming when they loosened the restrictions for the Olympics.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past and who controls the internet controls past,future and present. o tempora o mores...
Ever to excel
China has a long record of purging intellectuals and counter revolutionaries.
They've reduced that tendency though eugenics.
The idea that the Chinese are going to stand up in droves just because horrific injustices are heaped upon them is laughable.
The US is starting to train it's people to the same sheepish standards.
Grass roots resistance is dead but the media war can be won.
Read some McLuhan if you want some effective weapons against this.
http://cultofjim.com/scripture/understanding_media/
The Chinese government now is arguably less oppressive than it was under Mao, and the Chinese people are experiencing greater economic growth than they have for decades. Why on Earth would they want to start a revolution now? Compared to the way it was, China is a utopia these days.
> If you can still use it this way, it's not really blocked.
Isn't that like saying that if you can pick the lock, the door wasn't really locked?
I mean, where exactly do you expect them to find out which IP they're supposed to put into their hosts file?
notice the related stories...
Firehose:China Blocks More Internet Services by tringme (1352127)
looking at tringme's profile, he joined....TODAY! What a coincidence. Who cares if it's banned in China, he just wants to spam his service to slashdot.
Not saying they would, but the easy answer is the exact same statement. The people there have learned that there is something better, and they can learn to desire it. Why would they willingly allow themselves to be forced back under a more oppressive regime if they could help it?
Let a country completely wall itself off and you end up with North Korea, where the general population's world view in no way resembles the actual physical reality.
And this is different from religious America how?
And I remember thinking that the U.S. was going to isolate itself from the world economically. The U.S. has been focusing on "removing a dependence on foreign oil" and finally starting to force importers to accept our exports (mainly thanks to a weaker dollar I'm told). International economic inter-dependency is part of what keeps countries from going to war, as long as there is balance.
But to read this article, China will be secluding itself more and more in the name of censorship. Thankfully, the only kind of war that will spark is civil. Fortunately, they have already been through a civil war in the last hundred years, so maybe, just maybe, they won't let it go that far. We all know that people don't like being oppressed. And if the billion or so people in China decided that they didn't like the state anymore, there are enough ants in that population to take over the grasshoppers.
Where is the utopia you describe? Young people too tired and controlled to think for themselves. Crowded, dirty, and polluted cities where people go hither and yon with very little idea of what they are living for. The chinese have grown up with nothing and now that they have something they are unable to learn courtesy or the slightest of polite gestures. There is an army base in every city and town. Is this necessary? I think not. The Chinese are over taxed and taught what to say and think. They have no idea of what a true opinion is. Ask a young person what their hobbies are and you will get one answer, playing video games because they have so little time for relaxation or introspective that to sit for a few private moments in front of a computer screen is like their utopia. Utopia my hindquarters. I don't know which China you live in but it isn't the one I live in.
China, please block your citizens from using Western MMORPGs. We'd like to go 5 minutes without some RUD U RIKE TO BUY PRATINUM? spam being sent to us.
Flash-based VoIP... this is the service that was used to get around the VoIP restrictions on the airplane Wi-Fi on American Airlines. If China ends up blocking all Flash traffic, there's going to be maaaaaaaaaany pissed off office workers...
http://phweet.com/
Not saying they would, but the easy answer is the exact same statement. The people there have learned that there is something better, and they can learn to desire it. Why would they willingly allow themselves to be forced back under a more oppressive regime if they could help it?
Helping it tends to involve a significant chance of dying. If they die in the current government, they miss out on a lot more than if they died under the older government. People won't revolt unless the current government is unlivable. The Chinese may not have many rights, but they can pretty consistently get food on the table, and in the end, that's all that really matters.
Besides that, anyone that's familiar with history would know that revolts just produce different governments. They might be better, but they might be worse. If it's anything like China's older governments, it'll be worse.
Of course, knowledge will make a small difference. If it wouldn't, China wouldn't bother with the Great Firewall. I think that's just to stop the occasional riots, rather than to prevent full-scale revolt.
Have you noticed how, since the Bush administration started passing bills legalizing torture, warrantless wiretapping, etc., there are constant "news" about the "lack of freedom" in China? What an amazing coincidence...
I can confirm that both youtube and iTunes are both accessible in China (Shanghai and Beijing) as of the time of this message.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
There is no one here to be surprised. Please move along.
FairTax baby!
According to TFA, they found evidence of blocking using the China firewall test service. (http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html)
Then it has been unblocked already.
Seems more like a DNS error
Gosh, every week I discover popular sites I've never heard about - thanks to "China blocks..." headlines. I need to make Chinese govt to block my site...
Well, you *could* set up a proxy server that filters out Slashdot stories that you don't like, and run your web access through that!
It's been tried before. The Tiananmen thing wasn't just limited to a pedestrian square in Beijing.
I've been living in a rented apartment in Beijing, using a cable "broadband" internet service for about 6 months now. Skype has never been blocked during this period, that I have noticed. I have Chinese people from various parts of the country on my "buddy list" (or whatever it's called) in Skype, and they are regularly online.
So if Skype is blocked now, I certainly can't see any signs of it, and if it has been blocked in the past, I have not noticed it.
iTunes Store was unblocked (at least where I am) several days ago. I'm not sure if the Tibet album is still available on there or not, I haven't looked for it.
BBC News in Chinese was unblocked in the lead-up to the Olympic Games and still is. When I first came to Beijing, Wikipedia in Chinese was blocked, but it is currently accessible.