Slashdot Mirror
China Starts/Stops Blocking Google
shekared was one of a number of readers to write in to tell a similar story. He says "I'm an American currently living and working in Chongqing, China. As of 9am (UTC +8) China began blocking google.com, gmail.com, google analytics and many if not most other google sites other than google.cn. Internet speed for connections outside the mainland have in general have come to a crawl. Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press. Using an open proxy or VPN for connection to hosts outside of the mainland continues to allow access to google, as does connecting directly to a google.com IP address.
As of 6pm (UTC +8) access to gmail and google.com have returned to normal."
Dear Sir,
We know who you are, we were just conducting tests and installing tools to enhance your dedicated internet connection.
Now that you have made this public, could you come to the local authorities station right away so we can settle things up ?
If you do not come, we will have to go get you at your work place and we would like to avoid this embarrassment for yourself. We also have enabled airport and border checks for yourself so you won't be allowed to leave the country before we meet.
Regards,
Liu Cheng
Security officer,
Republic of China
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'm posting from China. At least slashdot still wo
I find it interesting that their little "trial run" of blocking Google comes so soon after Bing decides to filter out anything sensitive (you know porn, skeletons, pandas) to China. So if we've got on big player playing ball, let the other one know what will happen to them if they don't. Another motive could be a a display of defiance to the West's requests to stop with all the blocking and blocking software? Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's many factors.
My work here is dung.
it sounds like a simple case of a misconfigured great wall of china. of course, ill stay tuned for the round-the-clock coverage from CNN on this critical human rights violation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It seems to me that google is one of the sites on the internet that make china's censorship work much more difficult. It's not hard to imagine that they'd like google gone for good. Unfortunately, google is a very real part of a lot of people's lives.
Is it possible that this (and other similar actions) are attempts to see if they would be able to get away with blocking google for a longer period of time, and not cause a mass uproar?
As an American working in China you should realise that you have forfeit your American rights and are now living under Chinese law. As such the Chinese can block your access to whatever they choose. And, amazingly, they also have the right to block access to services provided by American companies.
This is not news, nor should it be news. China is a sovereign nation and can do as it pleases within its own borders as long as no international laws are broken; and I'm pretty sure that denying access to Google does not fall into that category.
Listen to my latest album here
I have a great idea! Let's show our support for Democracy and condemn the actions of the fascist dicatorship with a big shopping spree at Walmart. Maybe if we give these guys 500 billion dollars a year, they will be nice to us and freedom will reign and shower everyone with joy!
This is my sig.
I'd block them too. In fact the practice of blocking google analytics isn't unheard of at all outside of China. It only wastes bandwidth and google/site owners have too much information on your surfing habits already. All these statistics/advertising things just slow shit down and don't really do anything for you.
im traveling in china for the last 6 weeks and the state of internet connections here is very random.
domestic sites, like the immensely popular QQ and baidu, are always _very_ responsive.
google sometimes gets a slow down to the extend that it is nearly unusable (that really help people here to move over to the super fast and slightly more chineese friendly baidu).
the main thing is the randomness, if it is connectivity/ congestion issues, or some conspiracy: no-one knows.
Just elect the Chinese version of Barack Obama, and your problems will be solved.
I'm not sure to laugh or cry
Based on the short story summary, this could be as simple as the DNS server you use having an issue, not some grand blocking scheme. /. front page to provide OMG weekly/daily updates on what is currently blocked and not blocked in CN?
We all know blocking in CN happens, do we need the
They just changed something.
International connections slow to a crawl on any politically sensitive event(most likely green dam filtering in this case). Any major news source that carries said political news(say hello google news) will slow down to a crawl, or not load at all. The major news doesn't carry this because it happens at least a half dozen times a year....
Give them a week with no google, no gmail, no google maps, and see what kind of reaction the chinese government gets. Then say they can have their google back when they agree to stop blocking it.
Is it possible they're merely testing to see if they can pull a full-scale blockade of Internet communications, if they ever have the need? I know if I was running a tyrannical government, I'd be looking to avoid the problems that Iran's government is having. You can't block them after things go bad, but if you do it *quietly* shortly before, you might have a better chance. Possibly.
After living in China for a while, I got the distinct impression that there was the "Great Wall" as well as local level monitoring and filtering (at least for foreigners). A couple doors down, there were always random people coming in and out of one of the apartments, and it would get quiet when my internet was being used. I had trouble accessing some sites, so one night I set everything up with encryption and Tor. The next morning, all of them were extremely distressed-looking and bleary eyed (the first time I saw them like that).
Circumstantial evidence to be sure, but that combined with other things makes me think that there are two levels of monitoring/filtering in China, a possible reason for regional inconsistencies...
Chinese version of Barack Obama
We did. They was reagan and W.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In China, you don't have the opportunity to elect someone to run the government...
No, you have no rights to choose your leader (even false hope is not given)
People, please wake up. Stop doing business with China. Stop outsourcing, stop buying clothes from China.
Cut them off from any business, tell anybody about it, tell the store you're shopping at, tell and vote with money.
20$ on China being the first country in the 21st century to make encryption illegal. Things are only going to be worse, not better.
by Anonymous Cowardon Thursday June 25, @05:40AM
Advice for Google and Bing. GTFO of China. The Chinese will not allow foreigners to control massive industries like search. Their approach to foreigners can be summarized in the following words:
Thanks for your technology!
Thanks for your money!
Now we own you, bitches.
The above incident sent a clear message to Google: We can and will shut you down.
I mean, going by the median they apparantly just can't get pissed off when somebody treats them like trash.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
making google unreliable is a subtle argument for chinese citizens to depend upon chinese competitors to google, such as baidu
http://www.baidu.com/
does the outlay of that page look familiar to you?
for example, if my gmail account in china is unreliable- due to no fault of google, but unreliable nonetheless, that means i would tend to use some other email provider for that vital service. for baidu, all you have to do is have a fellow nationalist stooge in the government hit the flicker switch on google's traffic every now and then. since china is filtering everything anyway via centralized national authority, that's not hard to arrange
its a subtle and effective form of protectionism, something which the usa and other trading partners of china have noticed a severe uptick of recently, due to the global economic climate. which is especially hypocritical, since china, as a major exporter, is always complaining about protectionism
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/economy/24yuan.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Chinese Govt WANTS that. They are busy pushing Baidu, and about to push Baidu into western world. Right now, Baidu controls ~65% of chinese search, while Google is only ~25%. The reason is that Chinese gov PUSHES Baidu and creates rules to help them. For example, Baidu copied Google's 'Im feeling Lucky', so the gov told Google to no longer allow it because it was leading to too many porn sites, but did not do the same on Baidu. What was interesting is that a study was done, it showed that Baidu had either the same rate or possibly more of porn. The big difference is that Baidu will not lead to anti-gov stuff while google might.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the IP works, then routing to the Google servers obviously works. It sounds like an intermittent nameserver problem. China's DNS servers are having difficulty resolving names in a reasonable time. There could be any number of reasons for this, it's not necessarily that China is blocking Google.
WOOOOSH!
How do you know it is not a DNS issue from your ISP? You can still access it through IP, don't you. If it is filtering, I doubt it can still working that way. Because it is in China, so any technical issue must be government doing evil.
Sorry for being cynical, but I always get the feeling that if there is something authoritarian to participate in Microsoft is first in line. Examples:
- Windows DRM
- Windows Media DRM
- Zune DRM - incompatible with Windows Media DRM
- Windows Advantage - when it works
- Site blocking
- HDCP
- Paying Zune royalties to the media industry
- Others?
Sure, Microsoft did not come up with all these solutions, but they have shown zero signs of trying to resist. In fact I get the opposite feeling.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The BBC is covering it here, and adds that China has accused Google of spreading pornography. This comes as China is requiring all new computers to come with "Green Dam" filtering software.
-- Joren
Thats funny, so just use alternate DNS servers and you are home free.
Pretty lame if you ask me.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm posting this from China.
Google was off and on all today. Youtube is still blocked, 1 or 2 months since the last /. article about it, thought one proxy easily deals with the issue.
Other random factoids of note from a Chinese computer (not from a hotel; they use different censorship deals for Hotels than private residences).
The New York Times site is fully functional
Wikipedia works on everything except articles specifically talking about Chinese badstuff (IE you can visit the Chinese page, the PRC page, not the page of a certain Square).
Bittorrent will rarely use non-Chinese peers
The Sinfest webcomic is blocked.
4chan is not.
About 3/4 of the porn sites I know off the top of my head are blocked.
The french and japanese wikipedia articles for the Square incident aren't blocked.
When are they going to learn that the flow of information can't be stopped?
Shame on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft if they continue to bow down to the dictators so they can make money in China!
in communist china leaders choose you?
Why doesn't anybody suggest the obvious first guess, the reporting guy had a local dns problem, either his office or his provider accidentally misconfigured something.
Doesnt have to be this of course but I usually assume that the risk for human errors are larger the lower in the food chain you go, and the redundancies also are fewer, so instead of assuming all of China lost google, why not start by digging and looking around how spread the issue is first?
In 90% of all cases you find the problem in the first or second step if you search bottom up for net issues.
The Chinese governments approach to internet censorship is hardly random, but a heavy handed approach meant to blind just those citizens who aren't savvy enough to get around "The Great Firewall." Many of the other foreigners and even Chinese I know do not bother to employ VPN or proxy setups unless the government is currently blocking certain content or specific domains they are interested in (ie. youtube since March). Keyword based filtering, blocking entire netblocks, domain names, and messing with DNS are all within the usual bag of tricks the government employs. While I was able to get to the google.com main page via an IP address, most google owned sites outside of google.cn were blocked, unable to locate the domain via Chinese based DNS servers or incurring TCP resets at random. Forcing my DNS to my VPN provider's servers did solve the problem, but again, most people within the PRC don't bother to keep a list of proxies or have a paid VPN account, let alone know how to implement these solutions. Even forcing your DNS outside of the mainland, you're still at the mercy of the governments packet snooping, resets, and IP blocking. So while you're now able to connect to google.com via an IP address, you're still hoping the government hasn't begun blocking those IP addresses or started implementing random resets based on search content. The government filtering, censoring and blocking is very quick to adapt to methods of getting around whatever it is they're intending to accomplish.
I submitted the original story to inform rather than question the PRC governments right or ability to implement censorship. This is not a political matter for me, but rather an annoyance. I realized rather quickly just how much I depend on google (and how much I might need to change that). Google is the default search engine within my browser, my main email address of 7 years is handled through gmail, and I've become accustom to asking google to settle any fact based arguments that come up throughout my day. Whether or not I search for objectionable content via google is besides the point (I can get all of the same content out of China's dominant search engine, baidu.com), it was simply a shock not to be able to get to ANY google property.
On another note, this comes just days after the PRC government demanded that google give them more control over what is displayed on google.cn and/or remove all 'pornographic' content which appears within search results. If this was a move to point out how quickly the government can eliminate google's estimated 48M users within the PRC, it certainly worked on me.
that's cronyism, corruption, nepotism, protectionism
capitalism implies the notion of fair competition. manipulations of the system, like the three issues above, or monopolies, impede capitalism, they don't enhance it. of course these manipulations can develop organically out of a capitalist system. well, a dictatorship can develop out of a democracy organically too, but that doesn't mean a dictatorship is part of a democracy. it means that systems can devolve and morph over time into something else, a developmental step away from a previous state
the recent global financial meltdown results mostly from manipulations of the system that allowed for an unfair accumulation of capital at the expense of weakening the entire financial system. for example: loaning undeserving people large sums of money with no vetting of their worthiness simply to generate business. this is making money at the expense of maintaining the trust necessary for the world of finance to work. capitalism can break down like this, and does, all the time. it explains every bubble and bubble popping throughout economic history
there are a myriad ways capitalism can devolve, thats why you need a strong regulatory environment, to keep the players in line. the bush administration gutted and gagged the SEC and other regulatory agencies in the mistaken belief that financial players can police themselves. well, they were in fact punished alright for committing certain financial sins, but the problem is, we were punished too, those of us not in the finanical world, and we didn't do anything to deserve that. additionally, the "punishment" included the weakening of the entire system, not just bad players. you need strong regulation in the financial world for capitalism to function efficiently. the idea of the free market as something that can proceed without any government intervention is pure bullshit. you may call me a "socialist" now. zzz
but besides all of that: no money has to change hands between baidu and the government. simple nationalistic pride can be the motivation. baidu doesn't even have to be involved in fact for this to occur, just an ultranationalist in the government acting out of simply pride and fervor
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.internetfreedom.org/Products-and-Services
^ Above software packages are free for Chinese & Iranian citizens.
+1
China is going to do whatever they want and there is not a damn thing the rest of the world can do about it. Stop reporting every time google goes down, srsly.
I have to support our China based sales office from another country. I've had to move our email hosting 3 times already this month because the hosts we have been using get all of their services slowed down to a crawl. Yesterday, I just finished testing routing it through gmail and I was just preparing to deploy it to our China office. Now I read this ...
I think the Chinese government must be testing some form of restriction with a lot of different hosts around the world.
I've been having problems connecting to google services in Nanjing for the past month or so. For a while, I was using gappproxy to access unaccessible sites. For a while, it worked to access youtube, but that stopped, always giving me an "an error has occurred" in the video window. Then, just a day or two ago, when accessing google through gappproxy, I get a message from google saying that I look like a spam request. Same thing happens if I try to access google through tor. Whatever the case, it now makes accessing google through those two proxies impossible. I wonder whether google is attempting to block access to those who circumvent the great firewall...
Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press.
Major coverage? In mainstream press? When Michael Jackson has just died?
Not that I am a great fan, but let's face it, a lot more people know and care about MJ than about whether China blocks one or more aspects of Google. And even without big news stories and things happening in the world, a story about a minor, technical upset in a foreign country is hardly Earth shattering any way.
As for the poor Chinese, who can now no longer access Google's mixture of real search results with undisclosed, sponsored ones and propaganda - they have other ways of getting news from around the world. Foreigners travel to China, Chinese travel abroad; they are hardly left without contact to the rest of the planet, and of course they hear news from abroad at least that way.
It's a tempest in a teacup, frankly - some people seriously need to take off their blinkers and shake off the cold-war thinking. The world has changed while you were spaced out.
All this governemnt censorship tells me we need to reinvent and re-deploy uccp.
This may not have been limited to China. I had the same problem in Melbourne, Australia for a while today. Attempts to reach Google sites returned a URL not found error. Perhaps the problem was a Google server malfunction rather than a censorship attempt jointly conducted by the Chinese and Australian governments.
"China Starts/Stops Blocking Google"
"China briefly blocks Google" would've done. Honestly, the quality of English in Slashdot stories these days is deteriorating below 5th grade.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.