Chinese internet access goes to the dogs
We all know that internet access in China has never been good. There are plenty of traps and potholes to navigate, as well as a heap of banned sites. But in the last couple of weeks, internet access has been at its worst. Hotmail has been practically inaccessible – I type in my user name and code but my inbox rarely loads. The Age’s website literally takes an age to load up and I couldn’t access The Australian’s website yesterday. Unlike the banned sites, e.g. blogs at Blogspot, Hotmail, The Age and The Australian do not come up with an error message. Instead, the loading icons on Firefox or IE never stop churning around.
This has definitely been a bad year for internet access in China. Photos on Flickr are inaccessible, in a move that coincided with protests in Xiamen over the building of a chemical-producing factory. Fortunately, this filter for Firefox can solve the problem of non-appearing photos. The Flickr photos ban seems to me as particularly dumb. Most of the China-related photos on Flickr are beautiful shots of tourist areas like Sanya, The Bund and Guilin. Now, most of these good images of China are inaccessible (without that filter) because someone apparently posted images of the protests in Xiamen. Talk about killing a fly with a sledgehammer.
And of course, Chinese internet access still has its traditional no go areas, as Richard Spencer found out this week. His blog had some accessibility problems after he wrote about the recent ban on the sale of organs that come from executed Chinese prisoners. I think it was the comments section that attracted the attention of the Chinese internet police – a follower of a certain spiritual group called for the destruction of the ruling party in China. Despite the government’s heavy-handed tactics, the propaganda arm of that certain spiritual group is on the move – we have received a phone call from them and messages are being printed on Chinese money.
Source: China Machete
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