As per the reports making news all over, around 290 million blogs (citation) hosted on blogger.com have been banned in China.
It is assumed that the ban has been imposed keeping in mind the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident.
What is the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989?
Around 4000 to 6000 civilians (unconfirmed) were shot dead by the Chinese army during a bloody military operation on 4th June 1989 to crush a democratic protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
News & articles related to the incident in China banned!
- The news media is forbidden to report anything related to the protests
- Websites related to the protest are blocked on the mainland
- A search for Tiananmen Square protest information on the Internet in Mainland China largely returns no results
- In 2006, Google agreed to censor their China site- Google.cn, to remove information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre
- Wikipedia was blocked as it had uncensored articles on the 1989 protests. The ban on Wikipedia in China was lifted recently, but the link to this incident in Chinese Wikipedia remains dead.
How to find if your blog is accessible from China?
- Go to WebSitePulse’s China test tool
- Enter the URL of your blog
- See the result
How to read your favorite blog from China?
Here is workaround, which should work:
(Can someone from China test its authenticity?)
- Open the home page of Newsgator Online, Bloglines or Google Reader
- Subscribe to the blogger blog RSS by typing xxx.blogspot.com/rss.xml or xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml in the URL field
- You shall be able to see the content as they are served from the cache of web readers and not from Blogger’s server
How to ensure that readers from China can read blogspot.com without trouble?
- Get a static numeric IP address for your blogger’s blog hostname
- Broadcast the IP address to your subscribers in an email or through rss feed
As ISPs generally block sites by name but not by IP address, this should work.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Nice workarounds
Chinke log are very active in these works
@ Harshil : LOL
I am Seriously Doubting the Right to Freedom of Speech (or whatever). Though this is the case of China … I read in digital inspiration that similar ban was made in india too few years back…
Seriously, people are nowadays living off blogs. And if Non-Techy, illogical Governments starts imposing Unnecessary Bans they thats total injustice.
I find the News really Disgusting…
Thanks to Swati for Informing Us…
By the Way you are a very good blog writer.
One thing, Doesn’t Google the Great have to Say Something about This ?? After all this will affect Ad networds & revenue of google
Regards
Debajyoti Das
Thanks for such an informative post Swati.. I was following people tweets on twitter regrading China blocking blogspot..
This is really a sad move.. Thank God I live in a diplomatic country
@ Gautam, SnapHow, Harsh
Thanks you find the information useful.
@SnapHow
Well, it is a debatable topic.. right of expression /rights of media / true spirit of blogging….
and then different kinds of ban by various Government world over to curb populous movements at different times.
….and the story continues…
Swati I was just wondering authorities in China may as well find this work around and block every possible way to access blogspot blogs. Google may have to come forward and do something about this. Probably developing dynamic URLs may be some sort of wild idea.
Freedur.com – cool proxy site to bypass China Firewall. Freedur.com is faster and so much easier to use then the other crappy web based ones.
All my favorite sites youtube, gmail, facebook open correctly using freedur. I use it also at work – they have a portable version so you don’t need to insall anything.
Just put it on your USB stick.
I don’t think the “How to read your favorite blog from China?” advice works. I can’t access blogspot.com from china, nor posterous.com to post my own blogs.