41% of Chinese Websites Shut Down In 2010
BinaryMage found a pretty shocking bit- apparently the Chinese government has shut down 1.3 million websites in 2010, an incredible 41% of all sites behind the great firewall. The usual reasons (pornography) are cited, as well as the reminder that China blocks Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube from its citizens. Anyone behind the firewall know if Slashdot is currently blocked? I've heard it varies.
I am in P.R. China and I have never had trouble accessing Slashdot. In fact, it is so reliable that it is the site I typically check if I want to see if the internet connection is working.
Slashdot is not blocked in China, but citizens are forced to use older browsers that choke on Slashdot's excessive CSS and Javascript goodness. The result is an experience - not unlike my own - that makes Slashdot increasingly too annoying a site to visit.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
"Anyone behind the firewall know if Slashdot is currently blocked? I've heard it varies."
==> Now it is...
Just spent 36 days in china.
Youtube would work maybe 1 or 2 clips, before you had to change connection.
Facebook, would work for an hour or so and then be offline for an hour. Keep bouncing up and down.
Slashdot is partly accessible like others 59% web sites in the world, but the speed is very slow.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Usually no. It has been blocked a couple of times in the last few years, but that usually only lasted one day, or half a day. The fact that /. was blocked was probably a mistake in filter manipulation. It's not blocked, because probably the firewall admins waste their days away, lounging here too?
"... and they dumped pigs..." - exert from Carry I stopped at the word pigs even though it is mid sentence as well.
Those Christians are always trying to force their ways on everyone. In a more enlightened atheist society this would never happen!
Oh wait...
Wikipedia says it's the French name for China. The Grammar Nazi in me was saddened to hear that.
Anything happen when you search Tiananmen in the Slashdot searchbox? It used to time out the entire domain for me.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
there were were 41% fewer websites at the end of 2010 than a year earlier.
This does not mean that 41% of the sites were shut down by the government. In fact, nowhere in the article does it say the websites were "shut down" at all. There are many other reasons websites go offline, like people getting bored of maintaining them, their not being popular, their failing to make a profit or break even, etc. Sensationalistic reporting, now on slash!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Live from a Yangtze cruise, SlashDot is good to go.
This is not what the article says. Read it carefully. At no time does the article specifically state that the cause of these websites shutting is to do with the government. It does mention various things about laws, juxtaposition to statements about websites closing. A causation is never stated.
The BBC are somewhat infuriating at times with cheap journo tricks. Slashdot shouldn't be encouraging it, we're meant to know better.
Sounds like a problem with your browsers spell checker?
I haven't read the BBC article but have read this in the local Hong Kong paper today.
Lots of sites closed, but the opinions vary on why. The state-sponsored bodies in China claim it is because most of those sites went bankrupt, while others (mainly foreign human-rights activists) claim it's the government forcing them to close. Fact is lots of sites closed, yet the total number of pages available is a whopping 90 billion. Yes that's like 70 pages for every Chinese citizen. And many more if you only count Chinese Internet users.
Some web sites are for sure closed by the government, mainly for pornography, but also sometimes for political speech. Though it seems the Chinese actually enjoy quite some freedom on-line.
And Twitter not available from within China, who cares when you have Weibo? Most Chinese can't read English anyway. And no Google? Well they have Baidu.
Yes it's censored, but no they don't miss out on too much functionality either. It's not that the Chinese can not do those things by themselves, and they do it in Chinese catering to Chinese users. It may be an American viewpoint but all the time I hear "no YouTube, no Google, no Twitter" as if that's the complete Internet?! I'm happy there is more than those few sites. Much more.
And on the importance of Twitter in China... how many non-Chinese will ever look at what's going on on Weibo?
For make glorious nation; we, the People's Republic of China have decided that it's best to protect the people from the people. The people know better than the people what is right to view, read, listen and also which thoughts are good. The people are making sure the people are not harming the people.
The best thing about this is that the people have chosen what the people want to do and how they should do it. So say the people.
- The People's Dictatorship of the Time Travelling Republic of China.
Assuming Amazon doesn't filter you out by IP address, people living in China can register an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu micro instance which will be free for the first year if you are new to Amazon EC2, and install OpenVPN on it and then use the OpenVPN client from their own machine.
I'm a US citizen but I use it all the time b/c it prevents content from being blocked when I'm overseas, and makes my IP address appear to be USA (N. California in my case) so that I can watch online content that is refused to people outside the US.
An additional benefit to OpenVPN is that it doesn't look like VPN traffic b/c it works via SSL/TLS and looks a lot like normal http traffic, making it less likely to be noticed at all. Most VPN's that are IPSEC, which makes them very obvious and easy to block.
There are a couple things that make it look slightly different from normal https browsing traffic:
1. UDP protocol - this is the default and recommended as most optimal for performance, but you can choose TCP instead if you like.
2. Port number - default is 1194, but this you can easily change to 443 with no issues.
3. Traffic "shape" - The "shape" of the traffic will of course look different than normal https web traffic, The most obvious thing is that you will have a lot more traffic (all of yours) going to a single web server in the USA that is not actually servicing web requests on port 443. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that PRC probably is not set up to notice/block this. As far as I know, it requires somewhat sophisticated heuristics to detect (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't know how the clients are for Linux or MS Win, but for OS X users, Viscosity works great and is super simple to use.
The server is relatively easy to configure if you are comfortable with Linux and bash, but if you get stuck just check out some more howtos and you can figure it out.
Good luck!!
How the heck would you expect them to post on here saying so?
Durr.
Just tried it here from Kunming with the results:
Stupid Slashdot not respecting my pre element...
True, but being a grammar Nazi does not prohibit me from correcting typos
Chine is french for China, maybe he wanted to be smug!
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I wish the Chinese government were at least partly as zealous about shutting down forum spammers.
Almost think that the takeaway from this article is that 41% of websites in china are porn,
Tiananmen is a symbol of China and features on the Chinese national crest and is certainly not blocked. Tiananmen Square is where Chairman Mao's body rests and the site of a monument to the people's fallen heroes, it is not blocked either. There is however a particular date 22 years ago that if you mention in any way, the domain will be inaccessible for the next 10 minutes.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
FREE?!!!!
I'll take two!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I stopped reading at "bet".
.. and yes, I did. I just didn't have time for those last two words. I have stuff to do. Important stuff.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I don't for a minute believe your fairy stories. It's like claiming you will be snatched away if you say the name Candleja
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
consider her two books, "Stalin's Cows" and "Purge"
he was sentenced to prison (in part) for running a website about the poisoned baby milk scandal.
its not hard to explain why that happened. there was no boredom involved.
a few weeks ago.
it was about how some people got 18 months in prison for industrial espionage... what were they spying on?
the size and shape of the ipad 2. they were going to make cases for it, before it was released.
im glad the chinese communist party caught these horrific criminals and put them in jail.
Well, apparently CmdrTaco took your corrections. If I didn't miss something, the only difference now is "bit-"/"article -" (missing space after bit BTW, and it should be an em dash "—", not an hyphen-minus "-").
However, you didn't correct what I believe is another grammatical error :
"Anyone behind the firewall know" : Shouldn't that be "Anyone behind the firewall knows" ? Or is that a valid ellipsis with an interrogative form : "(Does) anyone behind the firewall know" ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
"Anyone behind the firewall know" : Shouldn't that be "Anyone behind the firewall knows" ? Or is that a valid ellipsis with an interrogative form : "(Does) anyone behind the firewall know" ?
I think it could be argued either way, in which case I was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt :)
Yahoo Confirms Beijing Blocking Flickr 163
what is the status of flickr, btw? is that viewable in china?
I bought some item from china and it was defective. had to email them for an rma; and it seems currently the 'fashion' to have to take a picture of the item (??) before they'll allow an rma. not sure what that's about - a photo could be of anything! but to them, its some kind of 'proof' (go figure!)
so I pointed the guy at my flickr page where I took a photo of the defective item. he claimed he could not see it. I uploaded to my personal non-commercial non-ad, non-controversial site (just all hand coded in html using vi; nothing 'big' at all about my site) and he could not see THOSE photos, either. he insisted on my using photobucket and I had to spend time creating an acct there just to post a photo.
wtf??
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Is China blocking Slashdot? I'm sure it is now.
What causes this?
Are they blacklisting single videos on youtube? But why does changing the connection solve this? Are they listening in on your connection and modify blocks individually just for your session?
Why would they block a site (facebook) and then unblock it an hour later? The content is most likely unchanged.
Are they using a rand() to decide on blocks?
No, it snot
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Wikipedia is another somewhat popular site that is blocked. They also seem to have some way of determining that a user is using SSH to connect to a SOCKS proxy. I could tool around on my server all night, but as soon as I started browsing the connection became so slow it was unusable for any purpose, and yes, DNS lookups were being done through the proxy.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
The real truth is that they wanted control over the internet, and now they have it.
2 years ago, China was a spammer haven, as domain registration was cheap, and USA based spammers (which still is the source of 99% of spam) registered a gazillion odd spam domains. The powers that be decided to change that.
They changed the law.
First it only affected new domain registrations, you needed to provide real info for those registrations.
Once they had that down, then they extended that to only Chinese people or Chinese organizations could register chinese domains.
Then they started enforcing ICP registration for domains - each domain in china requires an ICP licence, or it can't be hosted.
For bonus annoyance points to do a ICP registration the website must be shutdown till the licence gets issued.
Then they extended that to no ICP licence, no domain - if your domain doesn't have an ICP licence, bam, its put in suspended state at the registrar.
Now they're rigorously enforcing ICP registrations to the n'th degree.
They've been cancelling those left right and center for no real reason, forcing people to resubmit.
Currently an ICP submission requires that you have an ISP licence, as only ISP's can submit ICP's for their hosted domains.
Each ISP has to verify sites as follows. Have the owner or representative for the site provide fill in 3 forms, make certified copies of business licence, copy of their ID, and take a photo of them in the ISP's office. These are scanned and submitted to the local Telecom authority throw the ICP backend registration system. The user is then assigned a login and password where they can check their ICP licence at the MII official website.
Its been a major fucking pain in the ass for us recently as they've been arbitrarily cancelling perfectly good ICP licences without notice or reason. The Telecom bureau for each region does publish blacklists, but guess what - the cancelled ones don't appear.
If you host a domain with a cancelled licence (which unless you literally check all your clients licence stuff daily, you have no way of knowing about currently), then the Telco will also do fun lets call you at 6:30 on a Friday evening, and tell you that you have 30 minutes to remove that domain, or they shut down that ip address (shutting off hundreds of clients). What fun.
Its gotten to the point that I'm moving all my non .cn clients oversea's because we can't keep up with their bullshit.
They keep changing the rules, they don't have a decent mechanism in place for tracking stuff, and there is no fucking warning if they arbitrarily cancel a licence.
Thats pretty much it in a nutshell.
Lawrence at computersolutions.cn
I move that we promote censorship to a crime against humanity. It is torture and starvation of the mind, and disgusting on every level.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
In fact, they unlocked a lot of porn website! Nobody has a real answer about why they did that... the only logical reason I found is that the great firewall was overloaded and they preferred to allow some of these websites and continue to block political websites! ;-)
Keep people busy so they don't think to do other things!
flickr is fine. photobucket is blocked though, so thats weird!
This is because China stopped allowing undocumented domain registration. Registering a domain in China now requires a national ID and a business license. GoDaddy then stopped registering ".cn" domains, probably a good thing.
/. and other news sites should provide the option to end-users to switch to an image mode where instead of text articles they will see text embedded in images in place of the articles instead. This way, there's no way to filter by the words in the article. In addition, all URL links should be masked with a URL shortener. This would solve censorship in many countries, so information can flow freely. The online press should seriously consider implementing this. It could usher in a golden age of freedom of information.
You mean April 15, 1989?
C'mon, the FBI and DHS are copycating this exact same domain seizure and shutdowns.
Seems like some of our elected officials seems to like what the Chinese are doing.
Great, now people in China can't read this story about China. Thanks a lot jack-ass!
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I stopped reading at "Re:".
I mean, it's the next logical step after NRTFA and NRTFS.
Interesting, but it seems you are searching and writing in English. If slashdot was in Mandarin, would it then get blocked?
That kind remind me of "The Lord of War"
Yuri Orlov: Democracy? What have you been drinking Andy?
Andre Baptiste Sr.: Heh, you have not seen the news. You know, they accuse me of rigging elections. But after this - [holds up a newspaper with the headline "U.S. Supreme Court Reverses Recount Ruling"] - with your Florida and your Supreme Court of Kangaroos, now, the U.S. will shut up forever!
That's the nitpicking park. Obviously a typo.
Typos are excusable in hastily written emails or posts to internet forums, not as fucking news headlines on a serious web site.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Anyone behind the firewall know" is correct. "Knows" would be wrong. As you say yourself, it is an elided interrogative. There is no possible way that "knows" would be correct.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
April 15th was the hillsborough disaster. He (intentionally?) got the date wrong.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Oh... In that case I'd like to rescind my previous comment and offer the AC a high-five. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to brush up on history.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Chinese govt. want the people to see only those things which govt. want them to and not the ones which people want to see
I am curious, one site I admin get's extremely little traffic from China - I'm theorizing it's either due to it not being in China's version of search engines, or it's outright DNS or IP blocked. Link is www.witts.ws. What do you think?
I really was expecting some weird porn site when I clicked on it; however, I was willing to try and see if yous was a legitimate question. For all following, it is a legitimate site.
Back to your question, Yes, the site loads fine. However, you are relying on youtube for your video and youtube is blocked in China. So, where you have video, I get big white blocks that say
This webpage is not available
The webpage at http://www.youtube.com/embed/qPuH3DqP5tQ?rel=0&hd=1 might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
Here are some suggestions:
Reload this web page later.
Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset.
This is the standard message I get in any youtube embed.
As far as why you are not getting many hits, Your website really isn't that interesting. It is not clear what you are selling. If it is a "plain old religious website" the message is not clear. If you are selling a product, that is also not very clear. Possibly the videos make a presentation. However, as it stands, thee is a good reason you do not get many hits.