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Gmail blocked in China

reuters.com

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Re: Gmail blocked in China

#21

Post by Normati »

praptak wrote: post #4

What 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 like this idea. Unfortunately the small cost to each individual site operator is too great for their own motivation - despite the value it might add. I guess that value would be more intelligent filtering which may actually be a good thing. A lot of innocent content gets blocked.

It won't cause everything to get blocked - if they were going to block everything, they could have done that already.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#22

Post by WhitneyLand »

akramhussein wrote: post #3

Travelling 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…

>>Speaking to locals they don't care

Locals don't care that they can't use certain American sites, or don't care that they are intellectually oppressed?

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#23

Post by Normati »

kancer wrote: post #9
freakyterrorist wrote: post #2

While 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.

StrongVPN works fine for me. I leave it on pretty much 24/7 except when it disconnects a few times a day.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#24

Post by malandrew »

atoponce wrote: post #17

The "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 ba…

I don't think it's fair to say that Chinese users aren't missing a lot. At the end of the day, a small number of users are responsible for the overwhelming majority of quality content created and discovered (authorship and curation). Those users more often than not rely on high quality content irrespective of national origin. When you cut off that access for those people, it's certain to limit the quality, breadth and depth of what they create and share with their peers in China.

I expect this to be especially true with Twitter, which is often a very valuable back channel for many communities of interest (for example, a lot of prominent engineers in several programming language communities use Twitter as a way to share novel ideas and libraries).

When you cut off Chinese users from these sites, you cut them off from a lot more than just inconvenient political content.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#25

Post by sindarknave »

praptak wrote: post #4

What 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.

You misjudge the nature of Chinese political control; awareness of human rights organizations is not the issue.

Apart from a vocal minority of patriots, most people are quite aware of the lack of democratic freedoms, crackdowns of dissidence, or restrictions on speech. But most people are very satisfied with the prosperity of the status quo. Case in point: in response to the very public Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Mainland Chinese response was either "meh" or that Hong Kong people were overly optimistic that the Chinese government would allow universal suffrage in Hong Kong. Source: HK national.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#27

Post by hipaulshi »

atoponce wrote: post #17

The "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 ba…

almost all tech companies in China are behind VPNs. Yep.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#29

Post by est »

No no no this is bad journalism. Is not just blocking "access" to gmail, but one out of of five Gmail's MX servers are blocked

    gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com (74.125.31.26, blocked)
    alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
    alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
    alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
    alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
to be specific, all traffic to address of 74.125.31.0/24, including gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com, got null routed after AS4134

This means China now risks becoming isolated in global email network, not just "access" to Gmail.

And no, your VPN/SSH/whatever_tunnel won't work if all of the MX servers are blocked.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#30

Post by hibbelig »

akramhussein wrote: post #3

Travelling 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…

My understanding is the locals mostly want to earn good money and have a reasonable life. And it's dangerous to care about the Greate Firewall. So they prefer to look the other way.

Of course, this way it's only going to get worse over time.

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