Slashdot Mirror
Why Is Dropbox Back On the Chinese Market?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dropbox has renewed access to the Chinese market for the first time in four years. But why? The Chinese government first blocked access to Dropbox in 2010, most likely to prevent people within China from sharing data via the cloud. Now Dropbox is back online in China, albeit at slower speeds. Despite repeated queries from Slashdot, however, Dropbox has declined to comment on why China may have dropped the in-country restrictions to its services. "We still have nothing to share," the company responded after the third email. Dropbox isn't the only foreign cloud service available on the Chinese market (although Google Drive remains blocked): in late 2013, Amazon announced it would open an Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in the country; at the time, the Amazon Web Services Blog alluded to the "legal and regulatory requirements" that this new AWS region will obey. So questions remain: Did Dropbox know it would regain entry to the Chinese market? If so, did it need to agree to certain conditions before the Chinese government would "flip the switch," as it were?"
Drop box has survived public humiliation and questions about its security and yet... Get this.. It still survives to this day.. Everything slips off drop box like it is Teflon coated.
Dropbox is waiting for a real tech site to contact them.
I'm in Guangzhou right now using Guangzhou Telecom (a region "branch" of China Telecom) with OpenNIC DNS and I can't access dropbox.com (CONNECTION_RESET, which is a typical GFW sign).
Look, we all know the answer to this.
For Dropbox to get access to China, they have to allow the Chinese National Security Commission unfettered access to their resident's Dropbox accounts.
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
they gave the chinese gov full access to their (chinese) user identities and file access. i would not be surprised if their china gov approved system is completely contained within china.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The answer is obvious and pretty simple, both Dropbox and Amazon likely give the Chinese government complete access to everything that passes through those servers in China. That's the only way the Chinese government would allow them entry.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Near the end of January I noticed that I didn't have to connect to my VPN for my home computer Dropbox to sync. But it's on and off. When it's on, the speed isn't throttled; I get the same slow speed I get to any US server (although my 50 Mb/s connection to APA is generally better than anything I get in the USA).
At work, of course, we have a privileged connection to the outside world, because we're one of the largest non-Chinese companies in the world, and we give a lot of money to China.
the West shuts out any mention of Tibetan terror attacks or ethnic violence against the Han and Hoi people of Lhasa
Perhaps I should notify my ISP... your mention of Tibetan terror attacks and ethnic violence seems perfectly visible here.
This question is very easy to answer if you know why dropbox was blocked in the first place.
Get this:
* I was living in China, happily using Dropbox.
* Suddenly Dropbox tells me it can't connect.
* Did some digging with tcpdump, traceroute, etc. You know. Nerd stuff.
* Turns out that our of Drop boxes entire IP range, only 1 IP was blocked.
* This IP happened to be the login or authentication server that the client occasionally connects to.
* As it happens, the SAME IP was used for Dropbox website.
* It seemed likely to me that the website was the target of the block, not the login server for the client.
* So I check the Dropbox forum on its website (using VPN) and what do I see there: SONG TEXTS OF TIBETAN NATIONALISTS
Yes, so Dropbox was blocked because some nitwit decided it was a good place to post some pro-tibet/anti-china texts. How do you get unblocked in China? Remove the offending text and change your IP address (or wait a really long time.)