JISHOU, HUNAN — With the National Holiday fast upon us, China’s net nannies have blocked yet another Internet service, the Tor proxy network, which had been pretty reliable until quite recently.

China typically blocks access to the World Wide Web around important national holidays, such the 60th anniversary of the founding the People’s Republic of China next Thursday. With so many sites blocked already (YouTube, Facebook, Blogspot, to name but a few), I guess the censors decided the surest way to cut off potentially inflammatory websites was to choke the Tor network off.

Of course, there are ways around the newest layer of bricks in the Great Firewall of China.

I noticed something was fishy when I tried to connect to Facebook using Tor. My Tor client couldn’t complete the connection to the network. My little onion stayed yellow, and never went to green.

Tor uses a decentralized network of proxies scattered around the world. The Tor client checks a list of active proxies (computers acting as go-betweens), then logs into the network using one or more of the proxies. An add-on to Firefox then switches Firefox over to use the proxy to access the WWW.

An active Tor connection displays a green onion icon in the Windows taskbar. A pending one shows a yellow onion. The icon refers to Tor’s “onion routing” of connections to make tracing difficult.

September 27th, 2009 | Tags: blockage, censor, censorship, China, Great Firewall, proxy, Tor, torproject | Category: China, Civil liberties | Comments (2)

JISHOU, HUNAN — Since the Great Firewall of China has inexplicably blocked Picasaweb, where I host most of my photos from China, I have signed up with Flickr. So far, Flickr is not blocked {cross fingers}, so my Chinese friends can see my photos.

I paid for additional storage on Picasaweb, so I can upload most of photos there for posterity, but I am not yet going to shell out $25 to get extra space on Flickr. I’m hoping China’s net nannies will relent, and let Chinese netizens access Picasaweb again.

Flickr allows 100 MB a month for free, so I have uploaded my pix from the July 22 solar eclipse. I’ve included a sample here to pique your curiosity.

August 1st, 2009 | Tags: 2009, China, flickr, Great Firewall, picasaweb, solar eclipse | Category: Astronomy, China, Science | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime in the last week, China’s Internet gatekeepers decided to block Facebook, thereby cutting off my students (and thousands of other Chinese users) from communicating with their Facebook pals.

I can still use FB, but now I have to go through the Tor proxy network. Whatta pain.

China’s net nannies have been on a campaign recently to lock down the Internet, obstensibly to shut off access to pornography, but coincidentally to limit access to sites critical of the government. Given the recent riots in Xinjiang between Muslim Uighurs and local Han (the ethnic majority in China), one can only guess why Facebook has been banned here.

The media site, www.danwei.com, is now also blocked, too. Danwei’s writers are openly critical of Internet censorship in China, and provide links to news sites that are less biased than the official government sources.

For example, if you believe CCTV-9, the international arm of the state TV media, everything is just peachy keen in Xinjiang, where more than 150 people were killed earlier this month and where the army is patrolling the streets to prevent more outbreaks of ethnic violence. CCTV-9 interviewed a Westerner who teaches at a university in Urumqi, the provincial capital, and who said categorically that there were no problems on campus and everything is back to normal. We also got to see a queue of Chinese residents stuffing 100-yuan notes into a donation box — the whole scene was patently contrived for the telecast.

July 15th, 2009 | Tags: blogs, censorship, Facebook, Great Firewall, net nanny, Xinjiang, youtube | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary, Media | Leave a comment

[UPDATE June 25 15:56: Google.com is once again available in China, for now. I'm leaving this post up, though.]

JISHOU, HUNAN — Sometime this evening, the Chinese net nannies blocked access to Google.com, part of the government’s ever continuing struggle to combat (officially) pornography and (unofficially) access to sites critical of the government.

True to form, the state’s censors are using Google as a poster child to warn those who might want to buck the censors.

CCTV, the state-run television, had a report earlier this week blaming Google for “providing ‘vulgar and unhealthy’ content.” The report featured an interview with a young man – later discovered to be a CCTV intern — who said his roommate had become addicted to porn thanks to Google’s help.

State censors then blocked the intern’s name (Gao Ye 高也) from permissible searches at Google China, the Chinese (net nannied) version of Google.com. Google.cn apparently agreed last week to restrict access to porn, so we can still use it. But, the Great Firewall of China is now blocking the international site,Google.com, which joins youtube.com, blogger.com and blogspot.com on the no-no list.

Experts suggest that the government’s anti-porn crusade is a smokescreen to block access to politically sensitive websites. We lost access to Youtube, for example, after videos of Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan monks showed up there, and blogger and blogspot went dark around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square Massacre earlier this month.

June 24th, 2009 | Tags: censorship, google, Grass Mud Horse, Great Firewall, green dam, Internet, net nanny, proxy, torproject | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary, Media | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Ever since I arrived here last fall, China’s net nannies have blocked Livejournal, the popular blog site. Mysteriously, today, I was able to visit my daughter’s blog with no problems.

Wordpress.com is also now accessible. Just last week, it wasn’t.

Even more strange, I was briefly able to access a blogger.com site, then promptly lost that ability. The Great Firewall has been blocking blogger.com and blogspot.com for a couple of weeks now.

Youtube.com, alas, remains verboten.

May 28th, 2009 | Tags: blogger, bloggerr.com, blogspot, blogspot.com, Great Firewall, livejournal, wordpress.com, youtube | Category: China, Civil liberties, Commentary, Media | Leave a comment