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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."
Republic of China is Taiwan, not mainland China.
They are both Republic of China, one is the Peoples Republic of China, the other is the Democratic Republic of China. They both call themselves "The Republic of China" internally. The Democratic Republic is normally the one to have the descriptor dropped in the west however.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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....
Not gauging response. Sending message.
"We can destroy your business in here on whim. Now, be nice and play by the rules."
And people wonder why Google turned evil while ago and cooperates with censor-states.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
They already had another big player. Baidu is the largest search engine in China, Google is a relatively minor player in the Chinese market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What the hell are you talking about? There is no "Democratic Republic of China". It's just the "Republic of China". And mainland China *does* refer to itself as the People's Republic of China internally.
Internally, the PRC's official name is pronounced: "Zhonghua renmin gongheguo" (sadly /. doesn't seem to work with Chinese characters). That "renmin" bit means "the people", whereas thee other two words mean "China" and "Republic" respectively. In English, they usually just call themselves "China" these days, even in official documents like a Chinese visa, but when they use the full name, they always put the "People's" bit in.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Have you tried to buy non-Chinese products lately? I have, when purchasing power tools and hand tools. So far, I'm 2 for 5 at finding the right product IN ANY PRICE RANGE that's not marked "Made in China." The metal Vise-Grips were made in the USA and the hedge shears were made in Mexico, with parts from Taiwan and Vietnam. The corded electric drills were all from China. The routers were all from China, except one professional-grade model far beyond what I needed. The wet-dry vacs were all made in China.
You're correct.
A Chinese passport says "People's republic of China" (PRC), and a Taiwanese passport says "Republic of China" (ROC)
Supermarkets in China will often have imported goods under the label "Chinese Taiwan"
Let's leave the details for diplomats, our government overlords, and deranged Chinese nationalists to squabble over.
by Anonymous Cowardon Thursday June 25, @05:40AM
Google is a real part of YOUR life. Most Chinese haven't even heard of it.
In any event, google.cn is apparently still available.
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
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.
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.