Great Firewall of China
A thread by Beejy on the (spanking new) forums, about workplaces blocking access to time-wasting sites like MySpace and Facebook, reminded me of a website I tripped over a while ago.
Great Firewall of China purports to allow testing whether or not a particular website is blocked by the government of China, in their efforts to prevent their people from knowing how fucked-over they are.
You can plug in any URL, and it will supposedly attempt to access it from a server in China. Now I can't know whether that's actually happening, but it seems like a pretty neat idea anyway.
I'd like to know if anyone has tried a site that's has come back as not being blocked, or whether this tool is just bullshit propaganda.
What doesn't make sense is that all the sites I tried (quite a lot) are blocked, including this one... and yet there are so many Chinese on MSN (and a few with blogs too), which I would think might be a bigger issue.
Anyway, have a play with it, at the very least you get a cool commie-red world map with the word 'blocked' on it.
Trackback
All I can say is, I am glad i don’t live there. I don’t *think* that’s a racist comment, I just couldn’t live without my ricki-lee forum!! HAHA!
Yeah, I completely understand… and it has nothing to do with race or even culture, it’s just to do with oppressive censorship.
If you feel that way though, you should pay close attention to the eroding civil liberties in our own society. It’s a big deal. Every little step brings us closer to the Chinese way of life, so we really do have to be careful not to let irrational fear drive us there.
– End Political Statement –
uhm, that was too deep for me!! LOL
Speaking of blocking facebook… check this out
I think that the non-Chinese versions of a lot of websites are blocked, while the .cn versions are available.
And of course, I’d imagine that the Chinese government has some serious conditions for those who want to host a .cn website and have it be allowed through the firewall (e.g. their QA list that you’d need to satisfy).
Sad.
Hey, thanks for posting this! I’m still smarting about my lack of Facebook at work (not so bothered about the myspace, lol).
Thats a very relevant article you linked to up there bleachy - I may print it and put it on the noticeboard when I return to work, hehe.
In the meantime I am off work and at Uni…wasting time again…oops :)