I’ll be travelling in PRC in a few months and want to keep the family updated with photos on my blog. I just realized that the blog and my yahoo photo album are invisible to friends already in China. Anyone had this problem and overcome it? I know I could attach photos to emails but that’ll clog some people’s inboxes.
The PRC blocks access to all sorts of sites deemed subversive. Anything with a .tw domain for instance, and any western news service that has ever criticised the commies. If your friends in China can’t see your blog then you probably can’t get in to update it.
Find a service that your friends can see, experiment with proxy servers, or just email everything to someone who can post your blog for you. Or don’t go to China. It’s a shithole.
First of all, have a great time. There are many wonderful places and people in China.
About sites being blocked (not censored, just blocked), it’s actually hit or miss. One day, Yahoo and CNN are accessible, the next day they’re not. At least that was my experience 2 months ago when I was there.
BTW, .tw sites are not always blocked. But sometimes they are. Again, hit or miss. I checked Forumosa as all as the China Post site several times while in China.
I don’t think you can access any blogspot sites in China. I tried from Beijing and Fuxing in July. I don’t know about other blogs (Livejournal, etc)
The last time I was out there Blogspot wasn’t blocked and then was blocked, Blogger wasn’t blocked, Geocities was blocked, the Taipei Times wasn’t blocked, the BBC was blocked, the NY Times and CNN were available at first, then blocked during the run up to the invasion of Iraq and then unblocked the first day troops began pouring across Iraq’s borders.
I had a Blogspot blog which I was able to read through anonymouse.ws (a proxy server). They might have cracked down on that particular proxy server since then.
The proxy server idea is brilliant, to a tech moron like me. So someone in china has access to the whole internet if they go through an unblocked proxy server? And it’s only word of mouth when a proxy have found the sweet spot, I guess. Thanks all, I think I learned something today.