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China Blocks Google.com, Gmail, Maps and More During 18th Party Congress
DavidGilbert99 writes "In an extraordinary move, the Chinese authorities have blocked access to Google.com, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and many more Google services as the Communist Party of China holds the 18th Party Congress. The blocking of these sites was reported by Chinese web monitoring site GreatFire.org, which said, 'Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website.' The latest move in a long line of disputes between the Chinese government and Google, it is unclear yet whether this denial will be temporary (like a similar one in 2010) or permanent."
Saying that anything is blocked or filtered is just a daily way of life there. It would be like reporting on someone receiving a speeding ticket.
It's really none of your business unless you live there. You have no right to judge.
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it will be really good for business as the chinese people become more and more backward, thanks to the gutless dictators in the communist party.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.
What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.
I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.
I got a catholic block.
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
Their communists. This is business as usual. We don't necessarily need a report every time they censor someone.
"The Chinese 18th Party Congress was cancelled after attendees were unable to find where it was located without using Google Maps."
Now let these companies stand strong, don't budge, and the people will become restless, they will become angry, and they will revolt against their government. Irony. The thing they are trying to prevent will cause a spark that will lead to their downfall.
Except for those by loyal party members.
Aren't they all using Baidu anyway?
Unless they can't read Mandarin.
Whatever path is was after a long are inherently aashole about.' One AT&T and B3rkeley 4.1BSD product, community. The
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The ones who actually do something are either in the ground, in prison, or at the business end of an AK-47 in a "fun-time all-day (and all-night) exercise party" in fields or factories, or, if lucky, simple unemployed. The ones who care but don't do anything are, well, not doing anything, for fear of ending up in the first group. That's why Internet access is useful, it allows them to speak out with less fear of getting caught.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
Truly care? That's a mighty high assumption that communism is best battled with emotion.
It's also a rather twisted view of communism to think that it gives a shit about feelings, opinions, thoughts, or emotions too.
Extraordinary. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. In fact, the more you use it, the more ordinary it becomes. Google has been blocked before — you even say so in the summary. China blocks major western properties it considers disruptives during important national events (like the party congress, or the Olympics) when sentiments are running high and adrenaline is pumping to minimize the chances of an incident that could endanger lives or detract from the party message. If it's happened before, it's happening now, and it will happen again, I'd call that business as usual in China. It's ordinary... By definition.
In China gathering immense amounts of intrusive personal data about people is a governmental monopoly.
and ended up meeting at Disney Land Hong Kong.
I wonder...
Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader Wen Jiabao
Tibetan Protests Erupt in Western China
The Communist Government of China Massacres Thousands at Tiananmen Square
Are they trying to incite revolution?
I think you mean Type 56. China does not use the AK line, they have their own copies.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Slashdot has never been blocked in China. It just isn't popular enough here to matter.
Yeah, its that way in Texas too. Rick Perry doesn't even bother to block Slashdot.
...the interwebs surf you.
Most of my Chinese friends are on hotmail and use MSN messenger. I don't know why its so popular there. They also have a very strange chat program called QQ, that seems to me to be full of spyware, and has been very difficult for me to uninstall from a couple of laptops.
I am not living in China, But I am a chinese and a member of the communist party. I think it is suck. I do not understand what are we fear for ?
I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The Chinese are no different from anyone else. They are happy to tolerate authoritarianism as long as the authorities deliver the economic goods, and the CCP has been extremely successful at that (greater than 10% annual growth for 30 years straight). It is no different anywhere else. The Arab Spring was not about democracy, it was about economic stagnation.
Until the Chinese economy has a major recession (which it will eventually), the CCP has nothing to worry about.
Is this regional, or nationwide? There's a lack of understanding in the western media about the Great Firewall. They treat it like a monolithic linksys router with which daddy can turn services on and off.
Control / censorship of the Internet in China is at the very least city by city, and probably ISP by ISP. The conversation we are having here is stupid bordering on moronic.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
That's been my only experience with it, was that QQ was on some Windows laptops that were messing up badly, and when I tried to uninstall it, I had a real fight on my hands. There weren't a lot of English instructions online about how to deal with it.
I lived and worked in China for years. Baidu is fine for Chinese searches(98% is non tech searches) but if a person is doing technology searches Baidu sucks. I can understand the reasons for blocking gmail and other interactive communication, but blocking tech searches on Google will only harm the advancement of technology.
If the ISP knows that a is the primary user, they usually are not as strict, But you have to go to the ISP office to complain.
... government searches you!
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The problem with that sentiment is that it isn't only the Chinese who are inconvenienced. There are something like 150,000 - 175,000 expats in Shanghai alone right now and who know how many more in other parts of China - you can be sure a reasonably large fraction of them are Google users. Those are the people who expect and have a right to open communication with the rest of the world. Yes, you can use a VPN but that can be a real pain when all you want to do is quickly check for the closest Starbucks on your mobile phone or jot a 30 second message off to your wife apologizing about not being able to call tonight because you are going out to dinner with a client or customer.
China's government works hard at keeping anyone in China ignorant about anything bad that China may be doing politically or otherwise, world news and western corporation websites like "map quest" or "Google" and any website they might actually learn the truth about stuff going on in the darker side of government functions.
if you want to even access sites like youtube or facebook you have to hack through the so-called "great firewall" of China which evidently isn't that great because whenever they plug a security hole the local students just get the latest "update" a week or so later and they can access what they want.
supressing information especially in the internet will always backfire..........eventually
I was just feeling very hyperbolic at that moment. But any little thing added to the pile will help people pay attention, and dammit, people like their googling.
The same could be applied to the United States and its own blocking provisions. The only difference is that the USA rules the rest of the world through fear and imperialist aggression, so I suppose you might understandably mistake it for the rest of the world entirely.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Does anyone else see the awkwardness between the #1 location for manufacturing computers, and internet capable devices, blocking the #1 first-stop (and probably one of the largest destinations as well) on the internet?
How have we allowed ourselves, as a world, to get into a position where China builds, literally, everything electronic these days?
What we going to do if/when they decide to go into lock-down mode due to governmental decision, or revolt? Taiwan isn't a fall back any longer because many manufacturing plants there have closed or become specialized--and anyway if China locks itself down you better believe they will be including Taiwan. Japan? Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, etc--all make their products in China. South Korea is ramping up for certain products, but they still rely heavily on China. There is virtually nothing electronic made in the America's any longer, and what few items are, are really just assembled here with the majority of the components (and certainly all of the passive components) coming from China.
If they lock down the rest of the world is going to be put into a tail spin, it will be chaos for months or years just trying to return to normal. It would be even worse than if every oil producing middle eastern country suddenly shut their taps--with oil at least there are sources located in Russia, South America, North America, etc... but manufacturing electronics and other necessary small parts? Those are essentially "single source" now for the entire planet from China.
Scary, scary stuff...
Will be Blocked...................
What is the chance the Chinese Communist Party Congress was just an excuse? That the blocking was a test of the Chinese Internet Invasion Defense System? To test how successful communications blocking can be expected to be in a real event situation?
Would we, in the United States. Britain and other nations where major parts of government IT tech energies are focused to getting into the people's computers, to be able to access their data to determine each one's private activities, interests and attitudes, recognize something so alien to our authoritarians' tunnel-focus as defense against propaganda channeling, misinformation intrusions, and even officials' 'official' (meaning above the law) malware and spyware implantations, and chemings, scammings, mining, phishing? Do you suppose the Chinese might be aware they may be able to piggy-back on our paranoid-of-their-people nations' home population intrusion systems, so they may be able to obtain for free all that our "domestic espionage" agents gather from us, along with what our electronic peeping-toms generate, themselves. All of which they may be able to make use of, themselves...
They are happy to tolerate authoritarianism
Fear is a great motivator too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_21967140/googles-review-by-ftc-nearing-critical-point
China: still garbage.
The whole country and everything in it should just be replaced with an iPad-making assembly line of robots that belch strychnine gas.
Fear is a great motivator too.
Get some perspective. As an American you are four times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned by your government than a Chinese citizen. I have seen little evidence that Chinese people fear their government. I have seen plenty of hot and loud political arguments in restaurants, on the subway, etc. Unless you are an overt troublemaker, nobody cares.
Get some perspective. As an American you are four times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned by your government than a Chinese citizen
As a Chinaman you are ten times more likely to be executed by your government. When they kill you they take you away in a van and your family never sees your body again. Many have speculated that this is so that they can break you down for your organs, which have signifcant resale value. Look up "chinese death van", and "black market organs" and read, read, read until you stop saying anything this dumb.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are wrong. I am in China, all is well. We are happy the glorious party of the workers is maintaing glorious order and prosperity!
...comrade AC.
Panhandling westerners beseeching China for financial bailouts seems to deem it fit to bitch about the hand that feeds.
What's the term? PARASITES! Yeah that's it!
I just came back from China. This decision is fucking ridiculous. Accessing information is the biggest pain in the ass over the internet there. Even if the information is available, its impractically slow. I get pretty good results with a private VPN (about 100 kbps up/down), but it is really frustrating. This is a country capable of great things, anyone who thinks shutting them off to parts of the internet does more good than harm, needs to go visit China .
I work for a US company in shanghai. We're also a Google apps customer, so basically Google is our office app provider. The company basically became cloud addicts around 2008, there is almost nothing installed on local computer most everything from office apps and crm, to weird custom analysis tools are cloud based regardless of if they are developed in house or paid services.
I guess you could say we're in the weird niche of 'financial services' and are a JV with a chinese company. It's a very unlikely set up, but the locals had no choice at the time and our core IP is hiding on a Rack space server somewhere in the cloud slightly out of reach. (sure - very slightly).
As you can imagine we have some pretty awesome vpn arrangements, both leased professional services (Taiwan based) to in house tunnelling links set up within our own offices here and HK, Japan, and back home. The 3rd party VPN links are very fast but not 100% reliable. They are openly advertised and sold on this basis here within China, so it's not like the government doesn't know about them (one of them essentially functions as an ISP).
I'm to understand this is acceptable to the government as long we block a list of sites (all social media and sharing stuff) so the local workers can't reach them. (so i'm told)
Our IT team spends a lot of time monitoring this setup and has a number of fall back positions. It's very cool and hasn't 'not worked' ever as far as I know, a leased service goes down, the slower in house links take on the slack. We notice the speed and bandwidth drop, but we can still work.
About a month ago there was a sudden hiccup and the entire thing collapsed. Took about 2 days to get back. Work ground to a halt for most of us. GMail and Google search all still worked ok, but all the Google apps fell apart and went offline altogether. Since then, one of the 3rd parties managed set up some kind of workaround and it's been running fine from that since. No idea what it is. But if it fails, we're done, even our in house tunnels are still borked after a few minutes of being established.
At home I have some paid vpn service, I usually switch it on an off as I need it, but through forgetfulness I switched it on 2 weeks ago (to a exit point in singapore) and haven't switched it off. It's still working a-okay.
Married a local, most of my friends are chinese, and aside from co-workers who need good access to the outside world for working, everyone is 100% happy with baidu, qq, youku, etc, etc for their daily internet life. Couldn't care less and probably haven't noticed. To be honest with everyone, these home grown (and copied) things are getting as good as or better than anything available from the states. Have a look at webQQ for example..
This is the point. about internet controls it barely touches on most people in a noticeable way. when it does it's often laughed off as 'bad rp' and people just get on with life not really caring. if pressed most people will say its fine because it helps keep harmony.
What is getting on the nerves of the locals seems to be this shit with the taxis in beijing, cops being everywhere in every city all the time, brothels being closed, and the guys who will probably (100% probably) be elected are kinda sleazy compared to the incumbents.
Gmail and google news have started working again in Shenzhen - they are slow though. I hate being teased by communists. I am changing VPNs about once a month though, they are aggressively blocking the active ones now.
I think you'll find that because the AK is open source it's actually a branch........
Why congress continues to allow this unchallenged attack on the US economy is disgraceful. We are living in the 21st century where IT communications technology reigns and China is able to block our exports while we sit and do nothing. Obama is a pushover in this area, and China knows it.