China Blocks Google.com, Gmail, Maps and More During 18th Party Congress 129
DavidGilbert99 writes "In an extraordinary move, the Chinese authorities have blocked access to Google.com, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and many more Google services as the Communist Party of China holds the 18th Party Congress. The blocking of these sites was reported by Chinese web monitoring site GreatFire.org, which said, 'Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website.' The latest move in a long line of disputes between the Chinese government and Google, it is unclear yet whether this denial will be temporary (like a similar one in 2010) or permanent."
Pretty Conventional (Score:5, Informative)
What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint [chinadigitaltimes.net] China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.
I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.
Re:Google China (Score:5, Informative)
If China doesn't want to have open communication with the rest of the world, oh well. The internet isn't for everybody, however I've got to ask where are the Chinese people in all this if they truly care?
The ones who actually do something are either in the ground, in prison, or at the business end of an AK-47 in a "fun-time all-day (and all-night) exercise party" in fields or factories, or, if lucky, simple unemployed. The ones who care but don't do anything are, well, not doing anything, for fear of ending up in the first group. That's why Internet access is useful, it allows them to speak out with less fear of getting caught.
Re:Comments (Score:5, Informative)
Are comments disabled on this post?
No. I am in Shanghai, and Slashdot is not blocked. It is possible that it is blocked in Beijing, where the party congress is being held, but to the best of my knowledge, Slashdot has never been blocked in China. It just isn't popular enough here to matter.
Re:Is Slashdot blocked in China? (Score:5, Informative)
I am in China now. Guangdong province.
Slashdot is not blocked.
google doesn't work 90% of the time and is horribly horribly slow even though the google Hong Kong server is only a few hours away by boat. The web browser keeps throwing errors about invalid compression and it stops loading the page after waiting about 5 mins.. Gmail is working off and on. The more you use google and Gmail, the slower and less reliable they get to the point where I have to use Bing or taobao instead and a mail client because Gmail sits there for 30 mins with a progress bar and connectivity problems while trying to load my inbox. Gmail's imap works well in that i canMeventually send and receive mail if i wait long enough. My OpenVPN to my home PC in the states works well for about 5 mins and then drops to 5KB/sec and stays there unless i get a new ip from my isp.
I use reader on my tablet to get news via rss and the google proxy for that is almost always broken with messages about the google server having an error or the server timed out. It's very frustrating.
Bing works very well here. It is much faster than baidu and it is never broken like google.