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Great Firewall of China Blocks Edgecast CDN, Thousands of Websites Affected
An anonymous reader writes: Starting about a week ago, The Great Firewall of China began blocking the Edgecast CDN. This was spurred by Great Fire's Collateral Freedom project, which used CDNs to get around censorship of individual domains. It left China with either letting go of censorship, or breaking significant chunks of the Internet for their population. China chose to do the latter, and now many websites are no longer functional for Chinese users. I just helped a friend diagnose this problem with his company's site, so it's likely many people are still just starting to discover what's happened and the economic impact is yet to be fully realized. Hopefully pressure on China will reverse the decision.
I had to block ALL of china's IP addresses due to constant and incessant hacking attacks. They have so many bad actors this can only be a good thing.
Only true pressure would be if companies having their manufacturing in China moves elsewhere.
Already happening quite a few moving from china to SE-Asia, and even a couple popping up in Africa.
Om, nomnomnom...
As most websites are no longer self contained, but require numerous dependencies to other websites for data, content, analytics and js libraries, China's gated internet will become more isolated from the rest of the world.
Perhaps Hong Kong may face similar issues with regards to net access and online freedom in the near future? There has been talks about that recently.
Maybe web developers will need to write a "China mode" for front end sites, in addition to "Desktop" or "Mobile" mode that will only use old school 1990's style HTML look and feel. Bring back the frames :)
Really? The problem is what you know, and what you are told. That screenshot is just the customer showcase from Edgecast's site.
Just looking at some of the list in the order which caught my eye:
Mozilla - Self explanatory for the Slashdot reader.
EMI - The music publishing arm of the EMI currently owned by UMG. Of note is that EMI has a Chinese subsidiary.
Break Media - A humor video site, quite a popular one at that. You'll probably find their logo slapped around videos played on youtube.
The Atlantic - A news paper older than my great grand parent's parents if they were still alive.
Most of the rest are crummy media companies some too hip to have a usable web presence (Red Agency has the web address www.ff0000.com)
Now it gets more interesting when you see what else is actually hosted on EdgeCast:
500px - Very popular Flickr replacement.
imgur - Pretty much every stupid picture on the internet, consider half of reddit gone if this is inaccessible.
LinkedIn - I doubt their only presence is on Edgecast, likely some content won't play.
Soundcloud - Audio distribution platform
Pintrest - Not sure how to describe this one.
Pokemon - The Chinese are as crazed for this as the Japanese.
Tumblr - Popular blogging site (or at least it was before Yahoo bought it)
Wordpress - Blogging platform
and I'm not really going to cry about this one: Yahoo.
So yes the depending on the level of affect this has on each of these companies the economic impact will likely be quite significant when some of the most heavily used sites on the internet are suddenly inaccessible to 1/7th of the worlds population, many of whom were internet crazed.
It just amazes me to think that anyone would believe that the same China that is currently blocking Google, Youtube and Facebook would hesitate for a second before blocking Edgecast.
As far as they are concerned, there is no economic damage, in fact there is an economic incentive since anyone wanting their website to be usable in China would now be best hiring a CDN within China.
This is similar to what happened when Facebook was blocked and it allowed buggy local clones, notably Renren and Kaixinwang which were previously maligned by users to surge in popularity. Similar also when Google was mostly blocked, allowing Baidu to fill up the void. The thing is, they have every economic reason to block large foreign online services that compete with domestic ones, it's just they cannot block them on economic grounds, since that would be in violation to the free trade principles they espouse and would lead to retaliatory import sanctions. They can however block whatever they like on political grounds.
I do not disagree with Google's pride and principles in not continuing in their previous manner of following Chinese censorship guidelines. However, the net result to the present date is that users have been forced from a service that follows the guidelines only as far as they must and was allowed a fair bit of leeway in their implementation, to others that take the initiative to censor what _might_ be required to be censored for fear of greater pressure if they don't go far enough. The users are also getting exposed to less worldwide ideas. The feeling amongst former users is that Google has abandoned them because of their pride and they are afforded less and less respect by Chinese netizens.
It seems that this whole project was simply going to isolate Chinese netizens further and push China further towards its own separate Internet. This edgecast block will be faced with far less uproar than the ones that came before it, and those caused very little uproar.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
but the fact remains that it's for China's own good that these actions are taken.
Bullshit to that. It's for the good of those in positions of power. Nothing more, nothing less.
I remind everyone that the Chinese Communist Party is made up of the smartest people in China. It is full of scientists and engineers, people with analytical minds, and people who are qualified to make decisions for others.
My god we could do with more politicians here qualified in something other than politics, but those qualifications make them no less self serving than any other qualifications. They want to keep their tyrannical rule because it's awfully good for the few on top. And they will defend their position at all costs.
Keep this in mind, young fellows: tyranny is fiercer than a tiger.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Google's decision to pull out had nothing to do with "pride and principles", that's just how they sold it to Western audience.
The actual reason was the fact that as long as they had hardware running their code in China, they were under severe cloning and hacking threat. The straw that broke camel's back came when someone in China (intelligence agencies? competitors? random hackers?) grabbed a large portion of their holiest of of holy - search engine's source code.