Wikipedia and Blogspot available in China
Not known for their sense of humor, the Chinese authorities chose April Fools day to unblock Wikipedia and Blogspot and netizens in the PRC are rejoicing. Danwei, Kaiser Kuo and CNET had the scoop. This past month saw both YouTube and BBC News unblocked as well. Ironic, considering the recent unrest in T%bet.
The downside is that Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) is still blocked, through the filtering of its “host header.” For the tech inclined, here are examples of the block in action showing how de: (German Wikipedia) works fine, but zh: does not:
SUCCESS
$ wget –header “Host: de.wikipedia.org” http://203.212.189.253
–2008-04-03 01:22:54– http://203.212.189.253/
Connecting to 203.212.189.253:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite [following]
–2008-04-03 01:22:55– http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite
Resolving de.wikipedia.org… 203.212.189.253
Reusing existing connection to 203.212.189.253:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 34452 (34K) [text/html]
Saving to: `Hauptseite’100%[=======================================>] 34,452 38.0K/s in 0.9s
2008-04-03 01:22:57 (38.0 KB/s) - `Hauptseite’ saved [34452/34452]
FAILURE
$ wget –header “Host: zh.wikipedia.org” http://203.212.189.253
–2008-04-03 01:23:02– http://203.212.189.253/
Connecting to 203.212.189.253:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers.
Retrying.
