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Gmail Access Starts To Come Back In China, State-Run Paper Blames Google
An anonymous reader writes Basic access to Gmail is starting to come back online in China on Tuesday after going down on Friday. The state-run Global Times China did not explain what caused the four-day outage, despite the fact that the government clearly implemented the block, and instead pointed to Google's unwillingness to obey Chinese law. All of Google's products have been severely disrupted in China since June. While users in Chinaare not able to access Gmail via the website, email protocols such as IMAP, SMTP, and POP3 had been accessible. The Great Firewall of China started blocking the IP addresses used by Gmail for these protocols, leaving users in China with no way of sending or receiving emails.
Similarly, if Google doesn't obey all of China's laws and their service is cut off, it must be their fault, correct?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
is a free service a product?
You always hear this, but it's never specified.
If Google was blocked for not obeying Chinese law, but isn't blocked anymore... then what principles did Google compromise in order to get unblocked?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are you that knowledgeable about the Chinese legal system that if someone provided you the statue number it would make a difference?
I'm not sure, but i would assume any multi-national considering opening an office in China would hire chinese lawyers to ensure they are compliant with the relevant laws.
The problem with this stuff is when people take a law in their home country and think it applies elsewhere.
Given the absurdity of their blame-game in this situation, how does this affect their credibility in the recent claims made about Microsoft's culpability in the Xbox region-locking scandal?
This is likely China trying to exert its muscle to support Baidu the dominate search engine in China. China and Google have already butted heads about censorship in the past and Google withdrew services from China as a result.
However the actions here go beyond the borders of China, in that it influences international trade, in that if I can't use Gmail to contact my clients in China, I would be forced to use something different.
I would suspect that Google as a result highlighted this very fact to several jurisdictions heavily involved with trade with China, including the US, who no doubt sent very carefully worded messages to the Chinese government regarding what they thought of this trade influencing practice and how it relates to current treaties. To which I am sure China said, "Whoops!", blamed it on Google not meeting their laws, and promptly flipped the switch to turn it back on.
What did this all accomplish? Not much. However China made it pretty clear that it has the capability to flip a switch and totally cut off someone from their market if they so choose... Which is a pretty nice stick to wave about belligerently.
"leaving users in China with no way of sending or receiving emails" - SMTP has been designed so that it has no single point of failure. Why one poor webmail service failure can affect SMTP users in China (stated in general)? That's their problem if they made themselves dependent on some 3rd party service they have no control of and it is good they finally see it.
It is likely the too big to fail at play. Gmail is used by lots of people and companies. When you are too big, government will have to keep you running by either not hurting you or, as in the US, by rescuing you.
Do they have access to that? Are they getting it back?
Four day outage? What? GMail, nay, everything connecting to google servers has been down for at least a year.
Gee, the Chinese government is a pack of corrupt, lying bureaucrats. Who knew?
I am in Beijing. I know not of this restored service of which TFA speaks. Anything Google related website-wise (and including other services, like Google Earth) have been blocked on the PC since July or so (as opposed to just slowed down to 1 Kbyte/minute previously) but Google's client on cell phones worked without a problem. What was blocked on Friday was the phone client and any other services not covered by the previous block. As of my posting this message, everything G is still only accessible for me via VPN- Freegate or paid, either works fine. Funny thing, though, if I use Freegate, I can't use any services at slashdot (I had to shut off FG so I could post this message and see how a comment I made in another thread had been moderated).
The only thing that I use frequently that is hit and miss functionally without a VPN is Google Translate, which I am guessing is because some big Chinese web sites claiming to do translation are actually just front ends to Google translate and thus stop working.
Same for me (at Changsha, Hunan). Gmail does not work even with IMAP (which used to work before December 25th despite the web-based service being blocked).
"SMTP has been designed so that it has no single point of failure"
From SMTP:
"An e-mail client needs to know the IP address of its initial SMTP server and this has to be given as part of its configuration (usually given as a DNS name). This server will deliver outgoing messages on behalf of the user."
...how?
As an addendum to my previous comment, starting at approximately 11 pm Beijing time, three different VPNs I am using- one free, one paid, and one corporate- have all been blocked within China. Hopefully this is temporary. IT offices will have heads on the chopping block if this is still happening in 8 more hours (or less).
As of 11:45 pm, two of my three VPNs are working again. The one that isn't is, of course, the one that people will get fired for. C'est la vie, time for bed.
And down they go again. Looks like China has decided that it is time to play a pretty damned nasty card.