I'm fairly sure this has been the case for a few months, this site is very useful: http://www.blockedinchina.net/ .
That web site tests HTTP. The article specifically mentions IMAP and SMTP.
Gmail blocked in China
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Re: Gmail blocked in China
#12While this is undoubtably an aggressive move by China I can't help but doubt that the impact will be very large. By now most Chinese users of googles services are using VPNs so this really only affects the lowest common denominator of Chinese users
Using VPNs are becoming increasingly difficult too. All the large VPN services are blocked here; OpenVPN doesn't work; the only option left is to use unknown services which are not guaranteed to be genuine.
I found ARK and a few others to work on my iPhone. None on my MacBook though.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#13Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different. Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media. Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better su…
In my experience, internet access in Hong Kong is completely separate, and not restricted by the "Great Firewall".
One Country, Two Systems
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)
What a red herring. That is one weak excuse for China's violation of human rights. Yeah, most of the world lacked human rights in the past, so what?
This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#15What would happen if everybody added random "free tibet human rights xinjiang" triggers to their web pages? Or even better, randomly embed real snippets from organizations that fight for human rights in China.
I'd guess 'decreased traffic from China'. Something tells me that isn't the answer you are looking for.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#16I've had less and less success with VPNs in China - I resort to SSH tunneling / SOCKS proxies on personal boxes.
SOCKS proxies will get cut off after ~1h or so, you'll have a 'cool down' period of a few minutes, and then they'll come back.
Presumably this is to irritate, or perhaps to have a chance to see which requests slip through during the disruption.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#17The "Great Firewall" in China has over 600 million active Internet users. That's double the population of the United States. Baidu is the dominating search engine, there are replacement services for Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their IM "Wechat" has over 300 million active users alone.
In all reality, Google, Facebook, and others would _love_ to have even the smallest presence in China to get access to that user base. It's a gold mine just waiting to be cracked. Until they are, it will be referred to as "The Great Firewall", when in reality, Chinese internet users probably aren't really missing a lot, outside of politically charged sites, perhaps.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#18Trade war imminent?
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a red herring. That is one weak excuse for China's violation of human rights. Yeah, most of the world lacked human rights in the past, so what?
This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
Human rights are a luxury of stable, developed countries. If autocratic governments are too liberal with them, they can lose their power, and that can end up worse than all the human rights problems put together (ie civil war). See Iraq or Syria for example.
Re: Gmail blocked in China
#20Is Tor not an option? I thought it could hide itself pretty well via HTTP tunneling. Maybe the performance makes it a last resort.