YouTube Partially Unblocked In China

hackingbear writes "After China unblocked certain sensitive keywords in search engine baidu.com last week, YouTube is now partially, quietly unblocked. Users inside China can, without bypassing the Great Firewall, visit the site, search for sensitive keywords, and see uncensored results and comments. The videos themselves, including those not related to politics, remain blocked, however. Given that the Chinese government likes to make major changes in gradual, experimental steps, it is unclear what this round of Internet loosening will lead to eventually. At the meantime, many netizens in the country express their welcome of the moves as a good start through microblogging."

Comments

Not for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't reach it from my town at all. I don't get a 'connection terminated' message anymore, but it never loads.

Re:Not for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as anon for the simple reason that I am currently in Kunshan, China. I can report that www.youtube.com alternates
between "The connection has timed out" and "The connection has been reset". The sequence is:

1. Upon first visit to the website the "The connection has been reset" pops up instantly.
2. All subsequent retries become "The connection has timed out".

IMHO I do not think that it is so much the politically sensitive things that are the problem but the good old fashion protectionism.
Give it time and as soon as the local video website are large and thrive, then the foreign websites will most likely be partially
accessible with many "The connection has timed out" and "The connection has been reset" to show the average Chinese user
that the foreign websites are terrible.

A cynical "foreign devil"

Re:Not for me.

[Yvanhoe]

Sssshhh, we are talking about the filthy commie censorship here, not the moral and understandable capitalist one...

Re:Not for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here in Shanghai, with ChinaNet FTTH. mtr shows that the IPs are null-routed (or blocked with -j DROP):

Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. 192.168.2.1 0.0% 14 1.1 1.7 1.0 4.1 0.9
2. x.x.x.x 0.0% 14 3.7 23.8 2.8 258.6 67.7
3. x.x.x.x 0.0% 14 5.7 4.3 2.4 10.5 2.1
4. x.x.x.x 0.0% 14 4.2 16.9 4.2 101.8 27.9
5. 61.152.86.58 0.0% 14 5.7 5.8 4.7 7.7 0.8
6. ???

(sorry for obfuscating the IPs and posting anonymously, but it's forbidden to talk about censorship, and I don't want to get in trouble as I do all of my earnings using Internet ...)

Ooops.

[Formalin]

It turns out someone at party headquarters plugged in the wrong patch cable, after all.

Not

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in Beijing. YouTube is not accessible from here, using http or https. A bad prank or a slip up of the Great Firewall network engineers which has probably been patched up by now.

Re:Not

[sdk4777]

In Shanghai, the connection also times out.

bait

[shentino]

I don't think this is so much a loosening of restrictions as it is a honeypot operation to entice people to get caught with redder hands than before.

Re:bait

[AHuxley]

Yes it shows you have news from outside or are trying at random times to get the service.
What the system expects is everybody to feel so watched they don't even think about trying.
News like this from "outside" just makes people glow on the networks. You join a list and a count starts.

Re:bait

[Yvanhoe]

Except, from what I have gathered, a wide spectrum of light opposition exists in China. There are lines you cannot cross, but talking about corruption, talking about pollution, is tolerated for instance. I doubt that people merely looking for information would be bothered a lot. They already have a hard time preventing people from posting opinions, I doubt they are willing to spend the resources to go after the people reading them.

There are voices in the Chinese communist party to ditch censorship totally, or to make it what it was first supposed to be : a counter-pornography filter and to remove political subjects from the filtered list.

China is not North Korea, it is possible that this move is the real thing.

Proof that the Chinesd gov't has a sense of humor

[Jeremi]

"Oh, you want to try YouTube? No problem! Here you go -- videos are all blocked, but you can read YouTube's high quality comments sections as much as you like!"

It's beyond perverse...

Chinese government just did a power move.

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Ever see any youtube video comments? Some of the stupidest things you'll ever hear are on youtube comments. Chinese citizens will think the rest of the world is populated by idiots and they'll beg for isolationism.

Confirmed, not unblocked

[LS]

It is currently still blocked (posting from Beijing).

Re:Confirmed, not unblocked

[ShanghaiBill]

It is currently still blocked (posting from Beijing).

The censorship policy in China is pretty much a local affair. My experience is that censorship in Beijing is stricter than in Shanghai. Censorship tends to be even looser away from the big cities. So when you see these announcements about "site xyz is unblocked in China", it is usually really just a change in one locality.

In the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar:

[Gravis Zero]

IT'S A TRAP!