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Curzon
Author

Curzon

Date

January 1st, 2006

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Yup, we’re in China

Sites currently blocked by your friendly neighborhood Ministry of “Information Industry”:

We’ve arrived in Shanghai and will backtrack tomorrow to Nanjing, where we hope to meet Heirabbit if things work as planned. And in 42 hours we board a ferry bound for Osaka; on arrival we hope to grab lunch with Adamu and Ms. Adamu. Ain’t blogger socialization grand?

Comments to this entry

darin
January 1, 2006
12:34 pm
My new goal in blogging is to be cool like Matt and get blocked from inside China.. hehehe.
Dan tdaxp
January 1, 2006
2:02 pm
Darin, I already live the dream ;)
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace
January 1, 2006
4:35 pm
But obviously you still have access to Coming Anarchy, so there is hope yet......

Travel safely, my friends, and give my regards to Heirabbit
Sonagi
January 1, 2006
4:38 pm
Welcome to China! One of things I LOVE about being back in the States is complete freedom to surf the internet. China's neighbor, South Korea, also has a net nanny that blocks sites with pics or info it doesn't want Koreans to see. I'm curious - does Japan have a net nanny, too?
Younghusband
January 1, 2006
4:52 pm
Japan doesn't, but Iran does.
Dan tdaxp
January 1, 2006
5:20 pm
If CA was blocked, would it still be possible to tunnel out, through vnc or a proxy, and be able to get blogging done in China?
Sonagi
January 1, 2006
5:31 pm
Yes. I never used a proxy, but it's easy enough and done all the time. Ask the folks at Peking Duck if you need help.
Matt
January 2, 2006
1:58 am
I use Proxys all the time. It's annoying as hell because Anonymouse is slow and often is out of service, but it's a godsend for us dedicated news and blog readers. I'm pleased, though, as the ban on Typepad was recently lifted so I can read my own site again without a Proxy.

Blogs don't get singled out in China, though.....for reasons having to do with convenience, the Chinese government prefers to ban entire domains instead. Who knows?
Mike
January 2, 2006
8:40 am
I think they reserve their surgical censor strikes for the Mandarin blogs, and ban wholesale the foreign domains that cause trouble.
heirabbit
January 2, 2006
3:00 pm
I've been using a proxy for the last year and it's mostly successful. I just can't open pictures found on Google. BBC, mandarin blogs etc. are all quite accessable. It's an inconvenience, but not serious.

Just met with Curzon and company, and we all had a good conversation over 饺�. We had hoped to assess Chinese milatarism, but we didn't end up getting into all the detail I had hoped. I was embarrassed how clean they were, while we in the majority of people in China who live without heat in the winter, typically shower twice a week. I was trying to hide the dirt under my nails while flipping through a 风水 book. They also get up obscenely early, and having been (oddly) abused by a January mosquito the previous night, I was a little groggy. Anyway we'll keep blogging away I'm sure.

My regards to Dr. Wallace, too.
Jing
January 3, 2006
12:42 am
English language blogs are not blocked in China on the basis of content, but rather are the victims of blanket domain bans by the censors at large. For the record, almost no one in China really reads English language blogs which is why the internet censors do not target specific English language websites on the basis of content. Blogspot and Blogspirit and similar services were blocked because they also hosted Chinese language content (I'm assuming this happened to Wikipedia because it has a Chinese language edition). It is somewhat flattering to assume that the commies are out to get you, but in almost all instances banned blogs were simply at the wrong host when the authorities pounced on Chinese language political content.

When I was in China last month, I could easily view the Free Republic, Coming Anarchy, Marmot's Hole, and a plethora of other blogs. Also I was able to access Occidentalism from Beijing just fine. A number of politically oriented websites with occassional Chinese in them were however inaccessible without proxies. (Blogspot was even available for a few weeks of my stay but apparently was rebanned).
Adamu
January 4, 2006
11:44 pm
Hey, we are about to come get you, so hope you'll be able to find us at Osaka station!
Curzon
January 5, 2006
4:23 am
Adamu and Heirabbit -- mission accomplished for the first CA blogger socialization of 2006. More to come later.