Great Firewall playing nice(r)
On the evening of July 31, 2008, Beijing time, reports started to roll in on Twitter that Web sites previously considered hard blocked in China were suddenly accessible. Among the sites now allowed for me (using Beijing CNC as ISP) and others include:
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/chinese/
- http://zh.wikipedia.org
- http://www.rfa.org (Radio Free Asia)
- http://www.atnext.com (Apple Daily HK, newspaper critical of Beijing)
These were all considered pretty firmly blocked for a long time, so it’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps the cry of reporters in the Beijing Olympic Media Center finally made it through to the organizers that they should follow through on their promise.
Public relations-wise, putting a censored Internet in the press center simply seemed like a terribly dumb move. Yes, before the Olympics even start, why don’t you completely poke and upset the press corp and give them plenty of material for harping on human rights and censorship in China. Maybe they thought the journalists would be too busy writing about the bad pollution problems instead.
So for now, kudos to the authorities for opening up these sites, even though every indication is that the authorities will revert to pre-Olympic policies around October 17. John Kennedy suggested a betting pool as to when the sites will be reblocked. My bet: 8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony.
Let’s not forget though there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal, for which Twitterer wangzhongxia could not help observing:
I don’t kno why Livejournal is a bigger threat to China than things like RFA mandarin edition
Sometimes you need a sense of humor to deal with the net nanny.Â
July 31st, 2008 23:30
[...] –Reports are coming in that several previously blocked news sites are now accessible: these include the Chinese language versions of BBC, Radio Free Asia, Wikipedia and the Hong Kong-based Apple Daily. But http://www.andylau.com still seems to be having problems [Andrew Lih] [...]
April 17th, 2009 03:34
[...] out that while sites such as the BBC and the Chinese Wikipedia were unblocked, AboutUs remained so, according to this post by Lih. Other Internet communities that remained blocked included Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate [...]
April 17th, 2009 14:01
[...] out that while sites such as the BBC and the Chinese Wikipedia were unblocked, AboutUs remained so, according to this post by Lih. Other Internet communities that remained blocked included Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate [...]
May 30th, 2009 06:27
China firewall is lame, use water to put out the fire of the wall but how do you get over the wall? – use Freedur.com to bypass it. You can bypass China Great Firewall and access youtube, facebook, blogger and all other sites which are blocked.