Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Opening Up

It appears that my benevolent communist overlords have opened up the Great Firewall to allow access to Blogspot and Wikipedia pages.  (Finally!) As a test I tried to get to what is generally regarded as the most banned page in China.  Here was the response I anticipated.

It seems that the Chinese are becoming more adept at filtering specific content on certain sites, rather than simply blocking the sites themselves.  For example, when the recent troubles in you-know-where began, access to YouTube, the BBC, and other news outlets was temporarily disrupted.  One day I got an email from a friend saying that the BBC News site was back up.  I went there and clicked on a link for a news report about you-know-where, only to have the page manually redirect back to the main BBC page. 

Well, at least I don’t have to go through a slow-ass proxy server when I want to get info from Wikipedia any more.