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.

Comments

To answer your question

[RobertinXinyang]

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.

Re:To answer your question

[operagost]

I guess if the opposite was true, we wouldn't have heard from you!

Re:To answer your question

[jacksonyee]

I've been a daily Slashdot reader since 1997, and I've been exploring China since March of this year. The only time that I've ever had Slashdot blocked was with the Falen Gong article a couple of months back. Apparently, there was a url keyword detection routine which filtered the page out. Every other page has loaded just fine. Fortunately, since I have a shell account on a U.S. server, ssh -D [port] got around it quite nicely.

I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the country, but here in Kunming, if you run a website, you have to have it registered with the police, which means that someone is probably periodically checking on your site to make sure that the content is considered appropriate and "harmonious." It is definitely a big brother approach, but considering the situation with the cameras in London, Homeland Security in the U.S., and the filtering in Australia, I really can't see an open web besides perhaps a couple of the European countries. To be honest, it reminds me an awful lot of the early gated communities like AOL, only this time, we're dealing with government rather than corporate interests.

Youtube, Dailymotion, Twitter, Facebook, and other such sites are blocked on a constant basis requiring a VPN or SOCKS proxy to get around. It's a bit of an annoyance, but most people around here simply use the native Chinese versions and don't notice anything of the outside world. It's only us foreigners that really know what's going on.

On the one plus side, China Telecom has a 3G mobile data plan with a 100 hour per month limit. I haven't found a data cap on it yet, and I used 17GiB last month watching Stargate: Universe. It's 500 yuan for the adapter and 400 yuan for six months, which works to ~67 yuan, or slightly over $10 per month use. Take that, AT&T!

Whenever I finish exploring here and get to Europe, I'll get a chance to see how all of you fancy Europeans have been haggling us Americans about our data plans and cell phones for years. ;-)

Re:To answer your question

[gad_zuki!]

>It is definitely a big brother approach, but considering the situation with the cameras in London, Homeland Security in the U.S., and the filtering in Australia,

Cameras in public spaces or being searched before getting on a plane have nothing to do with state enforced censorship. I'm not sure why so many Chinese find it believable that their limits of expression are normal and fit in with the West. They don't. Its just propaganda to make you feel better and not to try any pesky revolution or uprising.

Not blocked

[water-and-sewer]

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.

Re:Not blocked

[killkillkill]

It's the same experience on new browsers as well.

Re:Not blocked

[Lord Lode]

./ is annoying in new browsers too. I can't click a link anymore without the page doing a random scroll-jump instead. Same for middleclicking, or trying to moderate something, or anything else that requires clicking any of the 3 mouse buttons on ./.

Furthermore it often shows an eternal "loading" spinning thing at the bottom.

Re:Not blocked

[Samantha Wright]

It's not actually link-clicking that's causing what you describe. A post with collapsed parents will expand the parents one by one (and jump uselessly) when anything within it is clicked. You'd think that would be obvious enough a UI design disaster to avoid, but apparently they really are brain-damaged here.

Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in China

[poity]

Anything happen when you search Tiananmen in the Slashdot searchbox? It used to time out the entire domain for me.

Re:Chine

[Chrisq]

Wikipedia says it's the French name for China. The Grammar Nazi in me was saddened to hear that.

Not really, the French have a history of accomodating Nazis.

Re:Pr0nography??

[royallthefourth]

In a more enlightened atheist society this would never happen!

Only according to a typically immoral, decadent liberal.
In a socialist society, both men and women will have respectable employment and not turn to work in pornography to make a living. The reification of private intimacy to marketed commodity is the very height of alienation; on the other hand, it still exists outside the market as a homemade expression of individualist nihilism, the consistent self-indulgent stamp of the culture industry that has appropriated and homogenized everything in its contact. Sex is replaced with watching sex. Social bonds break down as partners become as interchangeable as the URL in the browser. It is the another illegitimacy in the wake of Enlightenment subjective rationality: that only the method by which free speech is achieved may be debated, while the objective remains as a dictator.

Not to suggest that China has much communist credibility remaining these days...

Re:Quick experiment for you /.ers currently in Chi

[donscarletti]

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.