Just a few weeks ago, Google Plus change the server IP and consequently make itself accessible in China. Thus thousands of comments from Chinese users flooded the page of Barack Obama. Though China blocked Google Plus a few days later, the action of Chinese users have not been stopped.Coincidentally, Google Docs-- a product dedicated to provide a platform for users to share documents and files online is unblocked now. Because its encrypted transmission of information (https protocol), the whole subdomain had been blocked for several years. Today, however, even any "improper" materials such as how to by pass censorship could be directly accessed in Mainland China without any specially tools or configurations.
Also, every language version of wikipedia supports secure connection, which makes URL filtering and Packet filtering impossible. This has not been a problem for Chinese government before, after all, they've blocked the former version of secure wikipedia has been completely blocked, even today. So I'm wondering why they choose to ignore such an breach and impose basically no censorship on wikipedia. Any restricted materials e.g. is accessible now.
Same thing also happened in cloud Storage.
http://www.dropbox.com/ is still filtered by the great firewall of China, but https://www.dropbox.com/ has been unblocked since Nov. 2011Amazon cloud storage which offers an ideal place to host tools for bypassing censorship has even not been blocked once. And picasa web album https://picasaweb.google.com which allows previewing and downloading uncensored photos is also directly accessible.
Mostly important of all, Google encrypted search of both the Chinese regional version, standard global version and personalized search are totally accessible with only minor speed issue, which comes as a surprise because https://encrypted.google.com/ was blocked as soon as it was launched.
To sum up, I get the feeling that China is loosening its grip on censoring the Internet, or not tightening the censorship to be more exact. Since an increasing number of websites start to support secure connection and their servers would change IP addresses from time to time, not adding new rules to the Great Firewall of China means users here would gain a considerable amount of freedom.
For more real time info about GFW,
check out https://en.greatfire.org/ and the post about how to evade censorship without VPN
Where I live is almost impossible to browse outside China sites after 6pm, it's like the bandwidth to outside is so constrained that it breaks down once people come home from work.
ReplyDeleteOr is it designed to break down at this specific time?
Who knows.... It just makes me crazy as can't be in touch with my family via Skype, nor browser my friends FB or even open our company main website which is hosted in USA..... All gone after 6PM.