Slashdot Mirror
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."
Seriously, almost no Chinese use those sites. Twitter doesn't even have a Chinese language version, and has barely begun to grow in China (though it may, there are already several Chinese clonewares out). Nobody ANYWHERE in the world uses Bing, and the Chinese use QQ, Sohu, Xinlang, or other IM/Portal/Blogging services instead of Live/Blogspot. Flickr is the only one Chinese might even notice, and there are plenty of alternatives.
The only Chinese that use these (now blocked) services are educated, and probably have decent English, and know how to get around these blocks. The vast majority of Chinese users use other websites, or have alternatives. The contrversial stuff has always been hosted on non-Chinese websites for obvious reasons, and people who want to see it are well aware of how to get around the blocks.
Far more telling was the 7 hours of downtime Xiaonei went through yesterday for maintanence. They've already been shutting down certain Xiaonei groups and blocking users for doing political stuff, I wonder if the maintanence included any updates to help with censorship?
Youtube is already blocked
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...