June 4, 2010 | Filed Under GFW, foursquare | 33 Comments
The Chinese censors are a sight to behold. As in how fast they react. It’s an open secret that while Twitter is probably chock-full of “the wrong people” (to the censors), the censors themselves are there, too.
Given that, well, are we surprised? China has blocked foursquare — apparently because we’ve seen too much of this…
…and because foursquare speaks to both Twitter and Facebook, some of us posted that onto — right… especially Twitter. The censors probably went, “Ah…” and boom — blocked the site outright.
Jeepers. This is the stuff that must have the censors soiling in their pants. Virtually hundreds of people checked into Tian’anmen Square, the place where “something baaad happened” 21 years ago. Of course, the square itself is “safe” (in the real world) today, with cops even in helmets, as well as SWAT forces, all reported in the vicinity of the world’s largest square.
In place of student demonstrators and their banners, we have people basically filing into foursquare and leaving “sensitive comments” as “tips”. Those checking in included folks outside Beijing; @isaac (Isaac Mao), @rejon (Jon Philips) and the rest just flocked to the square, even if they were based elsewhere. (You can do this, by the way, by going to the Foursquare mobile site or even the main site and change your location — although if you’re not actually there, that could be seen as cheating…)
Can we call this politicized cheating — or a way to remind ourselves that something baaad happened on this day?
Foursquare. Dead to China beginning in the afternoon hours of June 4, 2010. (Confirmed here in Beijing.) You’ll have to reroute to get in…
Late night update: We have updates that this is indeed a nationwide block. Here’s a list of other cities in which foursquare is invisible: Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Hangzhou (thanks, @APE_kIng @EnjoyCHH @Marvinlou @warrenLOL for the updates).
Yet another update: Good news (if there’s any) for those who did check in: you automatically got the Swarm badge and the Player Please! badge. As they say, to every cloud there’s always a silver lining…
June 4, 2010 | Filed Under GFW, Twitter | No Comments
Go ahead, look up the Chinese word for turnip, 胡萝卜 (hu luo bo).
Chances are, unless you’ve ways around the Great Firewall, you can’t find it.
It’s not just because it has that sensitive word — Hu (as in Chinese President Hu Jintao) — in it, but because of… well, let’s take a look at this tweet by Chinese language tweep @geniusyrp:
Aha. Looks like carrots, or turnips, rather, aren’t just in the biz of being something to be fed to you. They have more “harmonious” tasks to do — stuff like to turn IPs. (That’s right: turnip = turn IP.) That would cause the censors to lose track of you.
Would the censors even think of approving this? (No way.)
PS: with today being the day it is, there are more polit tweets in Chinese than deemed healthy. Somehow, folks just have to let it vent…
May 21, 2010 | Filed Under GFW | No Comments
It’s time for another one of these #GFW (Great Firewall, Internet censorship) updates we wish we wouldn’t push out.
• Pakistan Blocks Wikipedia, Flickr: @guccihomme tweets: Pakistan is learning from China in blocking more and more of the Interwebs. With YouTube and Facebook blocked, the Pakistani censors now have their sights set on Wikipedia and flickr — and it appears even the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) is now invisible from Pakistan.
• Despite Twitter Being Harmonized In China, Dalai Lama Will Tweet: To hell with the Great Firewall! The Dalai Lama, one of these people Beijing has a passion on bashing, is on Twitter (despite a previous “incarnation” being proven as a fake), and he’s going to be tweeting with tweeps, notably those based in China. By the way, this bit of news, by way of Channel News Asia (thanks to a tweet by @imagethief), has estimates on the size of Twitter: 150,000 Chinese tweeting; up to 100,000 of them living in the Chinese mainland. This is no small crowd and has come a long way since early 2008, when the population was more in three-digit territory.
May 11, 2010 | Filed Under GFW | No Comments
Why would they block Dropbox, out of all things? Isn’t that like taking away your hard drive? And we thought only America had those (fill-in-the-blank) customs officers that fed on your hard drives, internal or external.
Dropbox being blocked in China has both upset a lot of the nation’s netizenry and left “foreign experts” on the Interwebs confused. Dropbox apparently is for your own use — plus for the use of sharing stuff with others. Much of what’s on Dropbox is your stuff. It’s not like it’s publishing “reactionary propaganda” for the masses… right?
The idea behind Dropbox is dead easy and is data magic: drop anything onto Dropbox folders and that very same thing is available on all computers registered at Dropbox. Yes, you can put the whole Beijing Subway photo library on Dropbox — and take “just” your MacBook Air around and — still get access to the whole shebang.
Which leaves us with the sole reaction here: is personal data organization reactionary? It’s less a case of getting upset at the censors than just asking ourselves: Did they feed themselves on some really bad seafood as of late or why the heck are they helping themselves to Dropbox?
As in blocking the service…
The Caonima disapproves of this most recent blocking.
May 3, 2010 | Filed Under GFW | No Comments
China’s more libre portal, NetEase, is known to the masses as 163.com, and some of us know it more as a portal that dares to go the extra mile. The portal is more libre and open in comparison to its more harmonious “big brother”, Sina.
Trouble is, one random truck is already predicting the… death of NetEase. We are not making this up:
(By the way, GFW stands for the Great Firewall. You know — it’s that thing that won’t allow you to access — oh heck — even I Can Haz Cheeseburger or the Scobleizer in China…)
So the question is: will they harmonize NetEase?
Given that it’s involved in Guangzhou 2010?… we think no… and that the more libre NetEase will live to fight another day. Its microblog service may not have an iPhone app out yet, but it’s still an open-ish forum.
April 23, 2010 | Filed Under GFW, SNS | No Comments
Some things never change. As in — when good things meet bad people — or bad firewalls. China’s super-harmonious Great Firewall (#fuckGFW in Twitterese) has taken Plurk (噗浪 in Chinese) offline — and that was a year ago today.
In the meantime, Plurk has since just about exploded with nearly two thirds of the user base from Taiwan. In fact, in a meetup with one of the more notable English-language tweeps in Taipei a few months ago, your blogger heard a fair bit of hearsay — of whether or not Plurk headquarters would migrate on over to the Green Isle. Meantime most Taiwanese news sites have a direct link to Plurk out news and commentary, and the island’s main political parties do Plurk.
Since then, China seems to have taken a liking to blocking social networking sites, whether they’re reactionary (Twitter) or not. With them even blocking I Can Haz Cheeseburger… it’s just a case before, as the Twittersphere has hinted to, them blocking every last website and creating an all-PRC intranet.
(The mandarins came close late last year, when they brandished the “foreign websites / whitelist” (白名單) sword. It, obviously, backfired.)
中國大陸去年今天起，開始對噗浪社交網絡進行封鎖，此後又對了推特、臉譜網等諸多國外社交網路採取封網措施。同時，噗浪在臺灣廣泛使用，許多政黨都在此設立帳戶，而臺灣不少新聞網站也提供噗浪連結，讓讀者直接將一條新聞轉入噗浪中。