Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Others Blocked In China

An anonymous reader writes "Two days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square 'incident,' several high profile Internet sites have been blocked in mainland China. These include Twitter.com, Flickr.com, Live.com, and Bing.com. While Internet blocks are common enough in mainland China, blocking such high-profile sites is unusual. In addition, blog reports suggest even state-owned television broadcasts are suffering multiple instances of muting lasting several seconds (again, not unusual for some foreign stations broadcast over cable, but unusual for local state-owned media) suggesting state security, online or through other technology, has tightened significantly, perhaps in anticipation or discovery of protest plans."

Comments

Retaliation

[siloko]

That's it, I'm going to block China

and nothing of value was lost

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish the US would block Twitter too.

Re:and nothing of value was lost

[gnick]

I don't know about blocking Twitter, but my faith in humanity would take a big step up if it went under because everyone decided to ignore it.

In fact, I'm so frustrated over the matter that I'm going to go blog about it on my MySpace and Facebook profiles!

Re:Psychics?

[twidarkling]

Yeah, there are multiple editorial failures in this summary. And in honour of the story being about China, I vote that the punishment be summary excecution!

Re:Psychics?

[teh kurisu]

I was wondering how the Chinese had the foresight to block Twitter back in 1989.

Re:Is this done manually or automated?

[machine321]

Configuration files? This is China, where labor is cheap. They have people manually inspect every request as it goes past the firewall.

Re:More widespread?

[AndrewNeo]

It's just your government 1984'ing your ISP. Don't worry about it.

Re:More widespread?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I'll shut that trojan down. I thought you weren't home.