T-Salon

This is insanity and paranoia to the greatest extreme.

Via Wang Jianshuo:

"The "very important meeting" is going to be held soon. To prepare a "good environment" for the meeting, massive websites in China were shutdown. This time, much different from the previous actions, it is the whole data center instead of websites or servers that were shutdown.

Let me take few famous IDCs (Internet Data Center) as examples. Zitian, an IDC in Luoyang was shutdown completely, and all the 500 servers were unplugged from Internet, and tens of thousands of websites hosted there were inaccessible on Aug 24. Among them is the largest traffic tracking site 51.la, and this infected a very big portion of Internet websites in China.

Soon, on Aug 28, Lanmang, the other IDC in Shantou faced the same situation. Again, tens of thousands of websites were complete inaccessible. An unconfirmed news said the data center closed in Shantou has 3000 servers, and they are all closed. Lanmang has to hire lots of trunks to put all these servers and distribute the servers into many other data centers across China."

[...]

It seems the pressure from top really makes people take it seriously. These days, all kinds of people are busy.

* Telecom companies are busy unplugging Internet cable for data centers one by one.
* Hosting companies that were already shutdown are either busy find out solutions for the closed sites, or handle waves of customer complains, or both.
* Those hosting company or sites which were lucky enough not have been shutdown are busy shutdown "interactive sites" themselves, to avoid the whole data center run into bigger problem.
* Bigger websites are preparing contingency plans about what they will do when they were shutdown.
* All kinds of small site webmasters, or independent bloggers are busy signing up hosting package from abroad (I would be interested to know how many more orders bluehost, dreamhost, or ipowerweb got from China these days)
* Bloggers hosting their blog on BSP can only keep their finger across and pray for their little blog.

Labels: censorship, China, internet

This is what I have heard from various IM conversations with friends in China tonight: "Chinese authorities have asked internet websites to switch off all social (interactive) functions, including BBS, comment and blogs ahead of the 17th National Party Congress."

Is the plan to turn the Chinese internet into this in the upcoming weeks?

Labels: censorship, China, internet

If you are reading this in China, chances are you won't be able to see this interesting image where Erning says as "The [Flickr] interestingness page becomes more interesting."

That's because Flickr is filtered in China by the "Great Firewall" very likely because many Chinese users have uploaded photos from a recent protest against a poisonously chemical plantin Xiamen.

"Currently, the flickr.com is not blocked but the image repository server(farm1.flickr.com and farm2.flickr.com) [is]. It means the blockage is not whole domain as target, but some subdomains which may be referred most by Chinese blogosphere recently on those "sensitive" contents...Right now, people can still access flickr web site but can't see any pictures there," Isaac noted.

So unless the site blockage is lifted, I am very well losing a very effective channel to share my life and communicate with my friends in China given pictures are better than a thousand words.

Perhaps the saddest part is what Keso wrote:

"In the global Internet, the better the website, the more likely it will get GFWed. This is the sorrow of all Internet users in this country. In the past it has been Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Wordpress.com, Vix.com... Now it's Flick's turn ...... 

I just have one character to tell those bastards: Fuck!"

.

Labels: censorship, China, Flickr, internet