Tokyomango Blocked in China!

Is your blog blocked in China? Mine is. A friend is in Shanghai for work this month, and he just told me so on gchat. (I guess gmail is not blocked.) Hmmm. We all know that China has a massive firewall, and that the Great Firewall is kinda patchy and not very consistent and hackers are always trying to figure out how to get around it, but I wonder if there's anything you can do about individual blogs being blocked. Ideas?

Comments

[Akai]

Wow, that's weird.
Do you know the reason for them to block your blog specifically, if there's any?
I think you should check it with your hosting service.

[Ronnb]

I am not surprised. The CCP blocks almost anything. I have read that this heavy-handed activity is beginning to backfire on them as well.

It has nothing to do with one's hosting either, as I am told, most Chinese simply know how to see what they want to see by using proxies and other devices.

[vagrant]

Actually, it could be do to your hosting provider, or their upstream provider. (There might be a site that they didn't like and they just threw a blanket to block anything close to the same IP address.)

Anyways, does anyone know why China does what it does? It could be that they've blocked out a class C, which your provider uses, or even a class A. (Probably a couple class A blocks from what I've read in the past. Block first, ask questions later.)

Did they block your blog specifically? Perhaps it was that one article on the Condom Fashion show and someone mis-understood the meaning of, "rad-looking".
;) One never knows.

[Ronnb]

Funny, I just found an interesting article regarding China's firewall attempts; what they do and how they do it:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall

[toddsmith]

I spent part of last year traveling through China on a photography/editorial project, while traveling I was blogging and there wasn't a block on my posting ability; however, there were systems to prevent me from reading them once they were live. I know that the PRC has spiders that crawl and block a lot of wordpress pages regardless of their function. I assume that if you are using some sort of blogging platform, the chances are you will be blocked at some point. As far as I know it has nothing to do with content, but rather the act of blogging itself.