The Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica.
There have been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored, providing Chinese viewers information that would otherwise be blocked if attempting to visit a regular webpage or blog.
A quick test of WebSitePulse’s Great Firewall testing tool indicates that the TechCrunch feed is blocked.
The number of broadband internet users in China will surpass the United States within the next 12-18 months; China is fast becoming one of the most important online marketplaces in the world. Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign competition, particularly at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia.
There is also some suggestion that China will enter an APEC FTA in the future: would it then be fair that online industries are either excluded from the FTA or that access rights are ignored by China under those agreements? Western Governments are still generally not focused enough on the benefits of online business in a broader economic sense, so unless there is some serious lobbying, or more understanding leadership, our industry will likely be forgotten in the clamor for mineral, industrial and agricultural trade.
That does not surprise me at all. I did a thesis on internet censorship in China and they have quite strict restrictions for the most part. However, it has surprised me that they took this long to block feeds.
ths u.s. should do the same thing. rss sucks.
that “Great Firewall of China site” is fake, btw.
why don’t they put a complete ban on using internet once and for all over stopping services in installment
http://www.extremetech.com
You see people lie & get jealous… They don’t want Americans get rich. They want EU to get rich… Don’t worry. http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/test/ isn’t funded by Chinese government. They need original or register .cn
China won’t block Techcrunch… It’s popular….
you could start techcrunch china if you register .cn . As long as you write technology stuff, not violent content or anti chinese stuff.
I check out search engine. It’s there…
http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=techcrunch&cl=3
http://www.google.cn/search?co.....&meta=
#3 Steve is correct…
Why isn’t greatefirewallchina.org register .cn?
Why is line jump to Europe?
You check out baidu, google.cn… It’s not blocked.
You know China have American products — GM, Mattel, McDonalds, Starbucks, etc… Why should your website get blocked?
TechCrunch is currently not banned in China, despite being a blog. There is a good chance that in the next few hours, TechCrunch will get banned, in the world’s 2nd largest internet market. Very brave of a so-called $100 million dollar company to make such a move.
FYI, “foreign competition” is not blocked - the blocked sites are one’s which contain “sensitive information”. Cultural understandings of what counts as sensitive information is what varies,and many in the West disagree with Chinese Government sensititives.
For your info, BBC News has long been banned, and their RSS feed has been disabled since at least August.
Churchill
thanks for trotting out the official Communist Party line, but I suspect that the firewall may be used for more than just “sensitive information” and the concept that it might be used as a trade tool as well isn’t new.
As for being blocked, are you suggesting that we shouldn’t report on news from China because it might be sensitive? Note I’ve not criticized the Chinese Government for their censorship, what I have noted is the possible trade implications.
Attention please! NOT blocked: TechCrunch, RSS in general, even RSS feeds coming from FeedBurner. Blocked: FeedBurner over http is (links, which go through FeedBurner)!
I am in China, but I am read this post via feed, because Google Reader is still available
I do confirm that greatefirewallchina.org doesn’t not work, I checked it last time I was in China.
I will check once again once I am there again, last time any blogspot.com subdomain was working but I could read the feeds anyway via GoogleReader.
I think Greatfirewallchina developers get Jeolous. They don’t want to see mike get so popular in China. They write code to block it.
You have strangest creatures running Greatfirewallchina website.
Techcrunch doesn’t talk about politcal stuff. Randy pausch was right about brick of wall. I like to see Techcrunch make into China.
Duncan, even though there is a lot of blocking going on here, depending on the moment as well, the situation is not as black as you paint it.
Yes, feedburner feeds over http (as Thijs mentioned) are blocked which is indeed kind of a hassle (the feedburner website itself not).
Websites with the words, blog, rss etc in it (as mentioned in the Arstechnica article) are not by definition blocked.
I did an inurl:blog as well as an inurl:feeds etc and I was able to access all websites.
Techcrunch loads just fine and I see no reason that would change.
Although I would’t dare to say “never”, I think chances are not very likely that “rss” will get ever a blanket ban. It’s too much part of today’s Chinese internet world and here to stay.
Unless of course they decide to make the internet here a Chinese intranet:)
That site said my URL was also blocked. WTF? So I called a friend in Shanghai who works in an engineering firm and had him punch in my site and TC and both worked. I asked him about RSS but he didn’t know what I was talking about but he did comment “Is this more US fear mongering?” (he’s an American ex-pat)
feeds.feedburner.com has been blocked for a few weeks now. I’m guessing that they are flexing their muscles: the Communist Party National Conference is just around the corner…
Not that it makes too much difference, they’re are hundreds of proxies to use, Google Reader and Bloglines are available so any site with a full feed is still easily accessible.
Steve (in Beijing)
I’m happy that the news isn’t all bad, but I still worry that the firewall could be used for more than just “sensitive information.” If the story from Ars is incorrect all the better…for the record I live in a State that has a $33billion trade surplus thanks nearly entirely to trade from China, and for the record my wife works for a mining company (and I’m also in the same time zone) so please don’t suggest that I’m being anti-Chinese here, I think that China really is the place to be online in the next 10 years, I’m just hoping that we all have reasonable access to the Chinese market in the same way that many fine Chinese companies and startups have access to our markets as well.
For the suggestion that we use .cn names: sure, and if I was to have a Chinese language site I’d take up a .cn name without thinking twice (presuming I could get one), but that shouldn’t prevent companies using .com names having access, presuming that they aren’t culturally sensitive etc…
The ‘related’ image you use in the post makes me sick …
how can you even consider taking greatfirewallofchina seriously. That site is a total nonsense. Check baidu.com in it and it will say URL blocked.. lol how come baidu.com which is china’s official search engine be blocked in china??
as all said techcrunch could access with broswers,also via google reader
but i suggest that do not report these things about GFW and about concership,it’s dangerous to your site,maybe several days later we can not read your articles..it’s so sad to hear things abot this.
what china blocked is something did harm to China GOV
there are so many countries want China down,want the Tibet out of China,
China sold something cheap,and so many countries said we do dumping
it’s not China want to do like this,it’s some people did do harm to China!!!
I like to have Techcrunch in China. I like travel to shanghai some day & log in internet access in 5 star hotel. It’s make feel rich in my startup.
It helps me create jobs, new economy, new rivals, and build wealth.
I saw beautiful mocking cities in Shanghai.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.....garcia.jpg
What can I say?
wikipedia blocked for years…..
Duncan,
Many Western firms - Google, Yahoo, various publishers, are not doing anything that could upset the Chinese Government, and in turn jeopardise their business in what will soon be the World’s largest market - both on and off line.
Could you site me some other sources of people’s claiming the great firewall is for trade and competitiveness and not solely for keeping the masses ignorant.
Why is everyone coming from the woodwork defending china on this crap? Whether or not greatfirewallofchina is legitimate or this or that site is actually blocked, who fucking cares? Governments have no legitimate right to block any information, information should be free, and that is the stance we should all take. It doesn’t make you anti China to say the government there screws the people (I love many things about China, my girlfriend is even mainland Chinese). It makes you no more anti China to disagree or chastise them for their human rights violations than it makes one anti American to disagree with the idiotic policies of our president here. You can both love and despise many things about a country…or you can love a country and its people/culture, but hate the current government and their policies.
When my VPN is down, I can’t access a lot of U.S. sites and a lot of my feeds don’t load. But with my VPN (which is based in the States), no problem.
Some people use TOR to get around TGF, but I’ve heard that TOR makes the connection as slow as mud. Besides, like I said, with my VPN everything is just fine.
@Steve (who also lives in China) is evidently right about clamping down before the Party conclave this month. Who succeeds Hu is in play and may determine the future of U.S.-China relations. BTW, Hu will remain in power through 2012; it is reasonable to expect stability through that time (or at least through the World’s Fair in Shanghai in 2010). But what happens after 2012 is up in the air; a glimpse as to who might lead China should become apparent after this month’s meeting. All sorts of issues are at stake. China’s leaders haven’t really surprised us, i.e., they’ve done pretty much what was expected given their ideologies and backgrounds. It’s a country run by technocrats, which is probably a good thing for the West. Will the next leader be a favorite of the PLA, champion environmental causes, focus on closing the disparity between rich “citizens” and poor “villagers,” aim for Taiwan, enter a space race with the States, the list goes on and on. We’ll all have a better idea later this month.
Given the nature of all of this, it’s not surprising that there has been a clampdown. I expect things to loosen up in December/January. Let’s face it, the future of China through 2022 is at stake — and it might be a whole new world by then, especially vis-a-vis the U.S. and China.
Good post, and excellent photo to go with it. Too many people are enamoured of China’s economy, and forget that the place is run by a totalitarian, autocratic, unaccountable regime, which causes all sorts of problems.
I lived in China for two years, just got back three weeks ago. Blogs on certain domains were blocked, it only made sense to get rid of the feeds as well. My question is if Google reader is also blocked over there. I could access all of the feeds through that site as opposed to using a local feed reader application.
here in china, feedburner has been banned for weeks, and all the photos on flickr has been banned for months.Both sites are important for web developer.
By the way, that http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ website is complete crap. It listed three sites of mine in the US as blocked when I know for a fact that they are accessible from the heart of beijing and Dalian. Some ISPs are able to block content on a local basis. Others are blocked region wide. Depends on the ISP where the current server is hosted that they use for testing.
A lot of nonsense going around again, I think it would make sense to listen to the guys who are reading and commenting from China. No blanket blocks of rss, no problems with this blog and zillions of others.
Yeah, that greatwall site is bogus. It says one of my sites is blocked. But my server stats show lots of traffic from China. I’m constantly battling content theft by Chinese sploggers.
Inaccurate. I’m in China and confirm what the others in China are saying. I tested some sites in http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ and through a browser and that website is inaccurate as well.
I am a Chinese, here, in Beijing China. gfw (Great FireWall) once even blocked itself in some leading search engine, I am a computer programmer, I really hate unreasonable content sensor.
However I belive things will become better, I can visit wikipedia which was banned for long time. You know, China is not a country under Chairman Mao (30 years ago, as illustration) now……
>>Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation
>> to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue
>> from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use
>> of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign
>> competition…”
Oh come on, Duncan. Please don’t pay lip service to China’s paranoid despotism by alluding to a possible argument for state censorship. Reasonable people know that this is morally objectionable–it’s OK to call it both objectively wrong and bad for business.
It’s also directly antithetical to Web 2.0, which calls for a thriving ecosystem of open participation.
Call a spade a spade, please.
Yes, you can read this in RSS. You can read this in techcrunch.com, and even post a comment. But you cannot access it via RSS@feedburner
For the “feeds.feedburne-r.com” is banned
“Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign competition, particularly at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia.”
This kind of nonsense censorship is why I’ve passed up on opportunities to make some things happen in China. I can’t do my work there.
But I also don’t want to become complicit in any state’s victory over the people or become someone who would say that the most pressing issue is a business issue when we’re discussing freedom.
Joseph at 32:
“Please don’t pay lip service to China’s paranoid despotism by alluding to a possible argument for state censorship. Reasonable people know that this is morally objectionable–it’s OK to call it both objectively wrong and bad for business.
It’s also directly antithetical to Web 2.0, which calls for a thriving ecosystem of open participation.”
Right on. We’ve money and room to move. Let’s not get so caught up in the bottom line or so wrapped up in what the people in power claim to be culturally sensitive issues that we can’t support humans who don’t have the resources we have.
Maybe they’re envious of Burma/Myanmar and since retribution against them is scant, they’re using that lesson as an opportunity to test the limits again?
Could this be caused by the ongoing Burmese events and online campaign in the support of Burmese people against the China?
I was in China during 07/07 to 09/07. and from my experience, China have different ISPs and not all ISP are synchronized on what have to be blocked. back then, wikipedia was blocked and I was really mad at it-.-
don’t know about it now..
Listen to Fons (#29). he knows his stuff.
And he’s right.
No blanket ban in China. This ars technica support lists no sources.
It’s flat out wrong.
Rick Martin
Dalian, China
Star News: Duncan gets Techcrunch banned in China with his imaginary post and thus loses a big marketshare for Mike Arrington in emerging market
did anyone see Cisco’s ad? a beautiful great wall…
It’s BS of course. My wife and I own an apartment in Shenyang, China, and travel back and forth frequently between there and MA USA where we own a house. Her family still lives there, and we communicate regularly over email, MSN, Yahoo IM and Gmail. We have never been blocked from looking at a site we want to see in China, never been blocked in any way from using an IM client, and never had a communications problem with email or the internet mail programs such as Gmail and Hotmail.
Personally, I think it’s so much propaganda. There are no blocks that I’m aware of on websites in China, certainly not to sites that I regularly visit, and I can retrieve my bloglines subscription at any location we visit with internet access throughout the country.
In fact, China has a much more reliable high-speed internet service in most cities, than I have here in the US.
People that write these ridiculous articles should try living there before reposting what they read in the tabloids.
I’m sorry to hear that.
wikipedia,flickr,and feedburner and so on can not use in China.i hate gfw.
I’m a Canadian who does IT/web/marketing in Beijing and use netvibes to get RSS feeds and feedburner is definitely blocked. There are other rss feeds that get through the firewall so please give us options over here!
Lately I’ve been noticing tons of problems outside the normal blocks of technocrati, wikepedia, etc. One of the main problems is that hotmail is ridiculously slow to load, and on top of that someone is trying to put up an unsecured double load copy of my sign in page to try and steal my passwords….thank god for security checks.
The fallacy of getting around the firewall by using .cn names is false. The only real way of getting around the firewall is to host in China….but then you’re likely to be hosted on a spam server and all your stuff will get blocked anyway by personal/system firewalls(no joke almost every host is a spam farm).
From experience the best way around this problem is to host your sites on dedicated servers that hold no bad info about China and the usual taboo topics. Being on shared servers means that someone on the server could put up something that is banned, and China would ban the whole server.
drshd
The ‘related’ image you use in the post makes me sick .
stay america elephant tom
house see yes keyboard cube letter head