

Twitter, Flickr, Bing, *.live.com, Hotmail blocked in China - est
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/02/china-shuts-down-twitter-and-bing-in-lead-up-to-tiananmen-anniversary/

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amalcon
Wait, so MS _isn't_ cooperating with China and giving them a special search
engine? Microsoft's product is actually being _less evil_ than Google's? Is
this some kind of topsy-turvy world?

Well, this is the first compelling reason to switch to Bing I've seen to date.
Maybe I'll give it a spin later.

~~~
tlrobinson
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but what if Google is setting up
China?

They gain popularity in China to the point that the country is reliant on it,
and the government is comfortable with Google because they're given some
control. Then, at some point in the future once enough of a fuss has been made
about Google helping China, Google gives China an ultimatum, either they end
the censorship or Google leaves China. Google can claim it's bad for their
business to help China censor, when in reality they were planning it all
along...

Unlikely, but who knows?

~~~
jhancock
I would say its unlikely as Google is not the top search engine in China.
Baidu lives with the same (possibly more) monitoring and censoring than Google
and the Baidu content is more in Mandarin.

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megaduck
Wow. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all spent obscene amounts of money and
time building "special relationships" with the Chinese government, ostensibly
with the hope of preventing this sort of thing.

Fat lot of good it's doing them. I expect that some, probably most, of these
blocks will stay in effect for a while. The 60th anniversary of the founding
of the People's Republic is coming up this fall, so the authorities are busy
creating a "harmonious society" in preparation.

FWIW, the mood here in Beijing is increasingly tense. Not a lot of fun.

~~~
omouse
That'll teach businesses to play nice with dictatorships...

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tel
I, American student working in China for a while, had a chance to take a look
at Bing just before it went under (and Google itself is operating at maybe 25%
tonight) and noticed that it had highly localized search results. I feel that
Bing probably was trying to play along with the Chinese government but with
June 4th just around the corner it's a very tight ship.

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omouse
Hey, look at that, China is a dictatorship. Amazing, isn't it??

~~~
jacoblyles
Wasn't aware of that. Thought it was a one-party state, complete with power
struggles inside that party. Not all words with the connotation "bad" in the
Western mind have equivalent meanings.

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ivankirigin
Does this mean twitter's API is blocked in china? It seems like an open API is
a great defense against getting blocked, if you already have an active
developer community who can work to unblock it.

It would be cool if someone could make an open source project deployable on
GAE or heroku to proxy twitter. It could self redirect daily to another
instance of the app, making it unblockable. I don't know much about blocking
btw.

~~~
est
I am thinking of Google infrastructure has a BIG advantage now, last time I
checked all youtube IP lists, it's about 1.6MB, I can't image how effective a
firewall could block all of these IP's.

Currently Google's services could be accessed with simple technics, just
modify your browsers PAC (proxy auto config) to this
<http://gfwtf.googlecode.com/svn/gfwtf.pac>

And just curious: does anyone happens to know an Akamai node within China that
could deliver contents over GFW?

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megaduck
Hey, that works! Thanks a bunch. Much faster than the SSH tunnel I was using.

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w1ntermute
Twitter's been unblocked: <http://twitter.com/MissXu/status/2004993287>

~~~
est
negative as in CNC, Chengdu.

I observed twitter has been trying to change IP for at least three times, but
it's a URL block. Any port 80 TCP request that has a twitter.com between GET
and HTTP/1.1 will be blocked.

~~~
paulgb
I thought the first line only contained the absolute path, not the host name.
I assume it's checking the host: parameter?

Just checked and twitter.com will accept an HTTP/1.0 request (which doesn't
require a host to be specified). So one way to get around this block _might_
be to set up a local proxy that uses HTTP/1.0 to connect remotely.

~~~
est
my mistake, they check URL as well as host: parameter.

the GFW will RST your again and again even if you Google for twitter.com

