For seven days our beloved Blogger Website has been blocked all over China. Thus, I haven't posted anything for a while. Whenever I try to connect to this site I always end up with this kind of message:
Rather than outright tell you that the site you want to access has been blocked by the government big wigs, they make it so it just looks like a usual connection difficulty. But when that message pops up for the 100th time you begin to realise that it is not the case.
The same goes for YouTube, Amnesty International, Wikipedia (partially), and about a million more websties. Try Googling something"sensitive" like: "Tibet Protests", and after clicking on a link you will soon find that the site is blocked once again. This can also cause a domino effect and within a matter of seconds every single page you try and open will also be blocked (but only for a few minutes).
I do not know the real reason why The Great Firewall of China has chosen Blogger as its next target, but I have a good idea: The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. It is possible that many bloggers around this time will be writing all sorts of posts about this historical even that China would prefer is forgotten about. In fact, a lot of young people I have spoken to have no idea what actually happened during the protests.
I'm accessing Blogger now using a proxy tool for Firefox called Gladder, the only problem is that it's painfully slow and very often tells me that some pages don't exist. It's been so frustrating to use that when I tried to post this article a few days ago I got so fed up that I just quit.
We'll see if things get better soon....
10 comments:
Hi there. Another blog that I follow is going through the same thing, and someone told him to try this http://hotspotshield.com/ and it worked. even his youtube!
Having a blogger hosted blog myself, I'm suffering with you... :/ Oh well, that's the charm of living in China I guess (that was a bad joke -there's no charm about pages being blocked here). Anyhoo, I used to use anonymous, but apparently that's also blocked nowadays (!) so now I connect via a VPN... it's faster and more reliable than using a proxy. Dunno if u have a chance to do it, but I hope so. Let's hope blogger gets unblocked soon though.. Apparently blogger is working on it:
http://knownissues.blogspot.com/2009/05/we-understand-there-are-reports-of.html
I noticed Jonna had said the same thing. Tis very rubbish! :(
Hey Chris, I haven't checked out your blog since your first few posts lol.
You can do a search for "proxy" on google. There is a list of free proxies there.
But the catch is, any information you send through the proxies is captured on a log and can be viewed by the proxy owner. It will be best to avoid logging into your emails or other password protected sites if you won't want your password to be compromised.
Ya..it happened before.
Remember last year during the olympic events, the regulation was extremely harsh, even some file storage website like fs2you (now Rayfile) was blocked down as very few users seemed posting adult video to that site.
oh, it reminds me a trivia, might not be very relevant. Search "sb" (ShaBi, means moron in chinese) in www.baidu.com, google is listed on top.....
Hi, thank you for all of your comments everybody. I've only just been able to check them after the proxy I was using decided to completely stop working. I've got a lot of alternatives to try now....I will try them all and see which one works best for me!!
Thank you again everyone, very kind of you all :o)
Elwin, I just tried that, hehe....Baidu likes to have a joke I guess, hehe. I'll send you an email sometime, I'd like to know how you're doing now!!
I'm really sorry Chris, I haven't checked that mailbox for a long time. This is the mail address I'm currently using: "elwint@126.com". Forgot to tell you earlier, sorry.
I may come back at July. Keep in touch.
Good to have you back, Chris. Can't wait to hear your latest.
Really great to hear from you I.S! I'm working on updating my blog right now. I don't know where to start it's been so long.
Hope you're well.
Speak to you soon.
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