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DuckDuckGo Now Blocked In China
wabrandsma sends this news from Tech In Asia:
Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo is now blocked in China. On Sunday DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed to Tech in Asia that the team has noticed the blockage in China on Twitter. DuckDuckGo had been working fine in mainland China since its inception, aside from the occasional 'connection reset' experienced when accessing many overseas websites from within the country. But now the search engine is totally blocked in China. ... [T]he GreatFire index of blocked sites suggest that DuckDuckGo got whacked on September 4. DuckDuckGo joins Google in being censored and blocked in the nation. Google, after years of being throttled by China's Great Firewall since the web giant turned off its mainland China servers in 2010, was finally blocked totally in June this year.
When countries like China (and North Korea, Middle Eastern countries, etc) start blocking something, it is a clear indication the authors have been doing a very good job. Better than a hundred reviews. I will switch to duckduckgo today.
Sysadmins for big companies have access to VPNs. The Chinese government is okay with breaching the firewall for the sake of making money. Corporations usually have access to rather expensive and approved VPN connections (such as the place I work for). They allow you to access e.g. Facebook and the IP also shows up as China based. My personal VPN at home is illegal, much much cheaper and usually shows a US based IP.
Most Sysadmins don't speak much English though, but there are many Chinese IT books available. They're MUCH cheaper than books in the US, although some are just direct translations from the English Help file to Chinese.