Great Firewall Blocks Xiaxue
Written by WishBoNe on July 19, 2007 – 1:45 pmDecided to try out something since firewalls are fun to play with. One can test if the Great Firewall of China has block your URL. Apparently, Xiaxue’s blog is blocked.
[via Flickr]
I kid you not.
Posted in Blog, Life, Technology, Web |
July 19th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
hahaha!
July 19th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Should apply to the world, everywhere else. She is one irritating blogger that likes to hog the limelight picking up fights with her short and chubby limbs.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
You’re in China too?
Apparently over at my side, it blocks all blogspot, livejournal and occassionally wordpress.com blogs. So what we do is use a proxy.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
lol!
July 19th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
@Yumin
She just loves to be noticed. *sigh*
@Jasmine
Nope, that site was for simulating if you were in China. I do understand that a proxy can be used to bypass that obstacle
July 19th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Yeay~!
July 19th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
All blogspot blogs are blogged in China. So is BBC and Wikipedia. I wonder whether PING.sg is blocked haha. Somebody go to China and experiment?
July 19th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
haha its not jus xiaxue’s blog i guess.. all blogspot, wordpress, and LJ (I think) are blocked. when i was in beijing last winter, i had to use a browser called Torpark to get around this, so that i cld blog!
July 19th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Yup as what daph just said, blogspot is mass banned in china.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
@bitbot
Nope, someone tried in China, it got through fine.
@incywincy, arzhou
As long as anything remotely related to blogs, all are banned. Tight security reasons.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:40 am
What about YouTube? Its an avenue for self expression as well. LOTS and LOTS of democracy stuff on YouTube.
Oh yea, if you try to google stuff like “democracy”, “freedom of speech” and the likes in China, you’ll get to a server error page.
July 20th, 2007 at 6:22 am
@Bitbot
I think it would be blocked too, I haven’t tested the site yet. It’s well-known for blocking, isn’t it?
July 20th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Long Live the China Firewall!! Too bad it was blanket block on blogspot.com. It would be interesting if it had blocked xiasuay specifically. A testimony that her moral degeneration is also repulsive to the ‘Thought Police’ working in the Chinese Public Security (Gong-An) Department.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:42 am
This website is very, very inaccurate. All websites I entered were told to be blocked, including many that are proven to be accessible in China, inlcuding some that are based in China.
If you don’t believe, try xinhua.org, the largest official news agency in China, and baidu.com, the largest serch engine in China.
Just another anti-Chinese Government trick I suppose. It does not test the URLs at all, but merely showing a flash of ‘test in progress’ and later tell you the URL is blocked.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:46 am
However I do admit there are many websites blocked (kinda irritating huh?), such as blogger, wordpress, and even flickr. (That’s why I didn’t use flickr but used a paid host called fotop.net, which now also has problem being accessed from China.)
July 20th, 2007 at 9:53 am
@Adam
It is irritating that most sites you can access in Singapore, you can’t in China. However, a proxy can be used as Jasmine has suggested.
I don’t think the site is really testing besides, it was fun
July 20th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Ping.sg is not blocked
And wikipedia, lol, they only block http://www.wikipedia.com so if you go to the individual pages, where the links are something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAGENAME, then it isn’t blocked.
Any other sites you guys want me to test since I’m over here? Haha
July 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Oh and wordpress is blocked occassionally. So is LJ.
And yea, flickr is blocked too.
July 20th, 2007 at 11:03 am
@Jasmine
What about those government sites like IRAS, MFA, MHA? And which search engines are also being blocked. Hee.
I wonder why Flickr is blocked though? They show nudity? Block only Wikipedia’s main page, feels half-baked blocking
July 20th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Okay. Just tried the sites mentioned.
Note that I’m currently testing the sites over here at work where the ISP is the company itself. So.. yeah might have a different result as compared to others. 
Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Dogpile, Altavista, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, HotBot, AllTheWeb, Ask.com and Lycos are not blocked.
IRAS, MHA, MFA isn’t blocked. Also randomly clicked on the SG Government sites and all of them aren’t blocked.
BBC and ABC both aren’t blocked too. Hm…
I think maybe my office ISP is not as stringent?
They just blocked wordpress.com
And oh yea, the ISP my office uses occassionally blocks Multiply whereas I can’t even access Multiply at all at home.
Not sure why flickr’s blocked though. And Photobucket, same problem as Multiply. :-/
Anymore sites you would like me to test? I’ll try the sites again at home and see if it’ll deliver the same results.
July 21st, 2007 at 8:52 am
@Jasmine
I lost the comment that I was going to write because my Internet connect got lost. *sigh*
I think this test is enough for me. I just wanted to know how limited it is if I were to go China to surf without a proxy. It goes to show that the stronger the deterrent, the more people want to get around it.
July 31st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
The Chinese government being right for once. There is hope for mankind yet!
July 31st, 2007 at 5:51 pm
@Sicarii
Which part being right? Blocking everything?
April 30th, 2008 at 12:41 am
hey, i’m having the same problem,. i cant even access my multiply acount. any alternative. i’ll be staying in china for quite awhile. thanks
April 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am
@grace
I think there’re alternatives like proxies. Google for them, they should appear.
August 2nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
use Firefox lah! :>
WishBoNe Reply:
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Firefox may be better in IE in certain sense but it isn’t that powerful to use the fire at the Great Firewall.