China Starts/Stops Blocking Google 142
shekared was one of a number of readers to write in to tell a similar story. He says "I'm an American currently living and working in Chongqing, China. As of 9am (UTC +8) China began blocking google.com, gmail.com, google analytics and many if not most other google sites other than google.cn. Internet speed for connections outside the mainland have in general have come to a crawl. Surprisingly this has yet to pick up major coverage in the press. Using an open proxy or VPN for connection to hosts outside of the mainland continues to allow access to google, as does connecting directly to a google.com IP address.
As of 6pm (UTC +8) access to gmail and google.com have returned to normal."
Re:Please come to the local station (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Please come to the local station (Score:3, Informative)
They are both Republic of China, one is the Peoples Republic of China, the other is the Democratic Republic of China. They both call themselves "The Republic of China" internally. The Democratic Republic is normally the one to have the descriptor dropped in the west however.
This happens all the time. (Score:1, Informative)
International connections slow to a crawl on any politically sensitive event(most likely green dam filtering in this case). Any major news source that carries said political news(say hello google news) will slow down to a crawl, or not load at all. The major news doesn't carry this because it happens at least a half dozen times a year....
Re:Gauging response? (Score:3, Informative)
Not gauging response. Sending message.
"We can destroy your business in here on whim. Now, be nice and play by the rules."
And people wonder why Google turned evil while ago and cooperates with censor-states.
Re:Block Google Since Bing Will Play Ball (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Please come to the local station (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Please come to the local station (Score:3, Informative)
Internally, the PRC's official name is pronounced: "Zhonghua renmin gongheguo" (sadly /. doesn't seem to work with Chinese characters). That "renmin" bit means "the people", whereas thee other two words mean "China" and "Republic" respectively. In English, they usually just call themselves "China" these days, even in official documents like a Chinese visa, but when they use the full name, they always put the "People's" bit in.
Re:Let's all go shop at Walmart to Protest! (Score:2, Informative)
Have you tried to buy non-Chinese products lately? I have, when purchasing power tools and hand tools. So far, I'm 2 for 5 at finding the right product IN ANY PRICE RANGE that's not marked "Made in China." The metal Vise-Grips were made in the USA and the hedge shears were made in Mexico, with parts from Taiwan and Vietnam. The corded electric drills were all from China. The routers were all from China, except one professional-grade model far beyond what I needed. The wet-dry vacs were all made in China.
Re:Please come to the local station (Score:5, Informative)
You're correct.
A Chinese passport says "People's republic of China" (PRC), and a Taiwanese passport says "Republic of China" (ROC)
Supermarkets in China will often have imported goods under the label "Chinese Taiwan"
Let's leave the details for diplomats, our government overlords, and deranged Chinese nationalists to squabble over.
Re:In Soviet China... (Score:1, Informative)
by Anonymous Cowardon Thursday June 25, @05:40AM
Re:Gauging response? (Score:3, Informative)
Google is a real part of YOUR life. Most Chinese haven't even heard of it.
In any event, google.cn is apparently still available.
ZH connections (Score:2, Informative)
I'm posting this from China.
Google was off and on all today. Youtube is still blocked, 1 or 2 months since the last /. article about it, thought one proxy easily deals with the issue.
Other random factoids of note from a Chinese computer (not from a hotel; they use different censorship deals for Hotels than private residences).
The New York Times site is fully functional
Wikipedia works on everything except articles specifically talking about Chinese badstuff (IE you can visit the Chinese page, the PRC page, not the page of a certain Square).
Bittorrent will rarely use non-Chinese peers
The Sinfest webcomic is blocked.
4chan is not.
About 3/4 of the porn sites I know off the top of my head are blocked.
The french and japanese wikipedia articles for the Square incident aren't blocked.
A reply to the "it's not a block" comments... (Score:2, Informative)
I submitted the original story to inform rather than question the PRC governments right or ability to implement censorship. This is not a political matter for me, but rather an annoyance. I realized rather quickly just how much I depend on google (and how much I might need to change that). Google is the default search engine within my browser, my main email address of 7 years is handled through gmail, and I've become accustom to asking google to settle any fact based arguments that come up throughout my day. Whether or not I search for objectionable content via google is besides the point (I can get all of the same content out of China's dominant search engine, baidu.com), it was simply a shock not to be able to get to ANY google property.
On another note, this comes just days after the PRC government demanded that google give them more control over what is displayed on google.cn and/or remove all 'pornographic' content which appears within search results. If this was a move to point out how quickly the government can eliminate google's estimated 48M users within the PRC, it certainly worked on me.