While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now.Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of websites, including pretty much any site syndicated by FeedBurner.
It looks like some Chinese users are having success with online feed-readers like Newsgator. We'll see how long it takes before China bans Newsgator. In the meantime, there's always proxies and anonymous web browsers like Tor.
If you want to find out if your website is blocked in China, Website Pulse has a Great FireWall of China testing tool.
[via TechCrunch]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-05-2007 @ 11:01PM
Ypocaramel said...
What the fuck? The Great FireWall of China testing tool has a check for Hong Kong - the firewall doesn't exist there under One Country Two Systems. Hell, the firewall bans Hong Kong websites from the inside of China.
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10-07-2007 @ 9:35AM
Jeebou said...
Thanks for the heads up. I can still read the headlines in Google Reader and I thought there was a problem with the links that it opened. At least now I know that it's the government here that wants my good... I hope gladder will offer an update soon for that, good thing I go to Hong Kong often for business.
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