Sunday, April 08, 2007

The Great Firewall of China

Are you in China? Are you going to China? This may not be news to some of you but it it first time I have seen this website. Thanks to Josie Fraser for blogging about it.

This website The Great Firewall of China allows users to test if a particular URL can be accessed from within China. Given the changes made on a random basis (so it seems from the outside) by the Chinese government to Internet censorship this is an interesting way to see if your blog or website can be accessed. The news is of course, and I did have the heads up on this recently from Jeff Utecht's blog, that blogger.com is being blocked. [sorry Jeff you will not receive this post :-( ]

Here is the evidence that this E-Learning blog is being censored within China:



OK, so let me test some others....
  • wikispaces (any URL) comes up with the message the URL cannot be found. This could be one of the technical errors they mention on the website so therefore (I hope) wikispaces is not being blocked
  • Google video: available
  • YouTube: available
  • Wikipedia: blocked
  • Blog that I do not post to often In Touch with a Flat World: Not Blocked! This is ELGG, or now called Eduspaces and my Grade 11's use this as well for their class blogs this year. Good news!
The site is also supposed to allow users to look at the website from the perspective of someone in China but I only got blank pages come up for this feature.

Clippings from the About page:
The main aim of The Great Firewall of China is to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored. A database is being kept that is searchable. Also, transparency of censorship and raising awareness of one particular government applying censorship to the Internet and being able to visualize Internet censorship.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Julie, this is most interesting as I am off to the MYP workshop in Guangdong in a few weeks. I don't suppose I'll be doing much blogging though, as I've heard these workshops are pretty full on. Thanks for the heads up.

Jeff Utecht said...

Hi ya Julie...yep you are now blocked in China. Thanks for the site BTW...but here I am commenting on your site...hmmmm...just goes to show you that if you want something bad enough there are ways around it. :0

As for your list. wikispaces is accessible and google videos is not or at least from where I'm sitting in Shanghai.

Anonymous said...

Here is another site where you can test in real-time if a website is blocked from multiple Chinese cities: http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html