Day before yesterday on Jan 8th, Access to IMDb.com was blocked in China, adding the movie business Internet portal to a fast-growing list of banned Web sites featuring user-generated content, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And fresh reports have started coming that since yesterday, Chinese authorities have begun blocking Chinese internet users from reading Wired.com. Really, weird (wired)! Isn’t it?
While IMDb.com, fully named the Internet Movie Database, is owned by online bookselling giant Amazon.com, and claims over 57 million monthly visitors, Wired.com is the online affiliate of Wired magazine and ranks among top 1000 sites in Alexa. The block adds IMDB.com and Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users.
Current blacklist members and alumni include popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia and even Google. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies. While it is Ridiculous and hopefully China will someday learn from these mistakes, lets just hope they don’t try to censor the entire world first.
However, I think Thats ok. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing Wikipedia. It hurts me not in the slightest. Let them prevent a billion people from accessing everything. Can you imagine how much more difficult it will be to grow an educated population without the basic internet sites? Silly people. And its a waste of time anyway. These filters keep honest people honest. Anybody in China can use a proxy server to access these sites anyway. Many websites and personal blogs were banned since 2008. Some of these sites are excellent technical places or resource exchange platforms. What a pity.
|
|
At the end of the day, I feel that it is GOOD for you IMDB and Wired! Anybody who earns a black-out from the Chinese censors goes up a notch in my estimation (as long as they don’t pull their punches in the future as a result). I would be least surprised if tomorrow China decides to block TechChunks.com as a result of this particular article. But who cares? Would you care, if tomorrow you find your blog being black-listed in China? 
TweetDeck Sheds Beta Tag, Arrives in Android Market
Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Officially Available for Download (Review)
The Evolution of Steve Jobs [Pics]
Sculptris is Full of Awesomeness, Free 3D Modeling Software [Review]
Grab The Best Apple Deals Here: Apple Offering 'Black Friday' Discounts
3 Top Online Technology Revolutions that Rocked 2009
Teri (3)
Rent Textbooks. (2)
used tires (2)
Adeline (1)
Best Andriod Tablets R... (1)
This is indeed a d**k move on Chinese part, blocking youtube,imdb and wired. And as you said we might be on list too. Who cares , I don’t get much traffic from China. so that doesn’t make a difference
.-= Ramkumar´s last blogpost >> Bloggers Community !!! =-.
Absolutely. Whatever little traffic we get from China is far from being “targeted traffic” because the possibility of those visitor’s English understanding creates a Big Question mark! So, who cares if China blocks us tomorrow? At least if it happens to me, i would be delighted to get added to the Elite list of Youtube, IMDB, Wired…
Seems like China is going to create record for country with maximum blocked websites
.-= Themepremium´s last blogpost >> WordPress Default kubrick theme will die, Guess the successor =-.
Going to create record? Do you know of any other country beating China at the moment?!
I don’t have a real website, just a personal blog that no one reads. That said, it sucked a lot when I was in China and WordPress.com was blocked, along with Facebook and Twitter. Yes, I had Tor, and other people used proxies, but those were slow and difficult to use, and I couldn’t use a VPN because I was at a university (VPNs are also more expensive than most Chinese could afford).
So, yes, the blocks do have an effect, and there are people who will not visit your site as a result. Unfortunately they are semi-random and transient, so even those who care enough about reaching China to self-censor a little may not know exactly which topics to leave out. And that is how the authorities like it.
.-= GAC´s last blogpost >> Ideas about Organ Donation =-.
Thanks GAC for sharing your China experience with us. It’ sad and unfortunate and that is the exact reason why the world should unite against such web censorship!
It´s lovely to surf with Google. Wrote movie imbd and look what a great blog I´ve found
I have found that people like to get onto facebook / youtube / myspace when they are at work. So the simple way to do that if it is blocked is just to unblock it with a facebook / youtube / myspace proxy. You can always find new ones if yours gets blocked.
I appreciate your comment. But here the point is not that we can bypass such web censorship via web proxies. The point is the fact that one morning some govt. decided to block some sites because they found their content hard to swallow. And as a result the sites became entirely blocked to a whole nation!
That is really weird of China!
Just wanted to say that you have some awesome content on your blog. If it’s OK I would like to use some of the information you provided on my website. If I link back to your website would it be OK to do so?
After searching Google I discovered your internet site. I think both are great and I is going to be coming back to you and them in the long term. Many thanks