Recently GreatFire.org reported the increased blocking of Google's services. As described by Dan Levin in The New York Times:
1. Google China's "splash page" at www.google.cn.
2. Google's map service for China at ditu.google.cn.
3. Google's translation service for China at translate.google.cn.
The map and translation services were useable, but some components didn't quickly or ever load. Notably, all of the above services appear to be based in mainland China. Mainland Chinese users are redirected to Google's Hong Kong servers for other services. Except for one brief initial moment, I have not been able to access Google's services based on servers outside of mainland China.
I would also like to comment on two sentences in the GreatFire.org post:
During the course of today's testing, I noticed some curiosities that deserve further attention. If they prove noteworthy, I will share them while also moving forward with posts on other themes.
Finally, as this post proves since I need to access blocked-in-China Blogger to write it, my VPN is working as usual at the moment.
The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4, 1989.I have done some repeated testing over the course of several hours at my location in Hengyang, Hunan province with the VPN I use to "break through" China's Great Firewall (GFW) turned off and using a local DNS servers. My experience was mostly consistent with what is described except I was able to reliably reach:
In addition to Google’s search engines being blocked, the company’s products, including Gmail, Calendar and Translate, have been affected.
1. Google China's "splash page" at www.google.cn.
2. Google's map service for China at ditu.google.cn.
3. Google's translation service for China at translate.google.cn.
The map and translation services were useable, but some components didn't quickly or ever load. Notably, all of the above services appear to be based in mainland China. Mainland Chinese users are redirected to Google's Hong Kong servers for other services. Except for one brief initial moment, I have not been able to access Google's services based on servers outside of mainland China.
I would also like to comment on two sentences in the GreatFire.org post:
Back in 2009, Google decided to remove itself from China so that it no longer needed to censor its content. But it seems that Google is quite happy that GFW does the censorship work for them.To be clear, Google has not fully removed itself from China and still has offices, employees, free lunches, etc. here. In 2010 it did stop censoring its search results per China's rules and redirected some of its services to servers in Hong Kong. I would not be surprised if Google is "quite happy" not to be censoring as it did in China before. But I doubt they would characterize the GFW as doing "the censorship work for them". Google has already made it clear it would no longer censor regardless. My guess is that Google prefers the GFW selectively blocking Google search over completely blocking it. But what would make them "quite happy" is if the GFW ceased to exist.
During the course of today's testing, I noticed some curiosities that deserve further attention. If they prove noteworthy, I will share them while also moving forward with posts on other themes.
Finally, as this post proves since I need to access blocked-in-China Blogger to write it, my VPN is working as usual at the moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment