A curiosity mentioned in passing in yesterday’s Search Engine, I’ve not heard it reported anywhere else.
Don’t we have journalists in China? Can someone ask one of them to type double-you double-you double-you dot see bee see (not “see eye bee see”) dot see eh (not “dot calm”) into the computer and let us know what they see?
I’d ask them myself, but I’m also blocked in China.
CBC.ca site and podcasts blocked in China
Editor, publisher, factual entertainer.
Published February 15, 2008 6:00 am
6 Comments
Good summary of how Teamakers is blocked from Chinese readers, so losing a 1000 million viewers that Mr. Stursberg covets…..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
More non-technical for general readers is the mildly untrustworthy James Fallows of The Atlantic magazine this month
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall
And the Toronto group that was working on workarounds so that the Chinese could read the English and French words of Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe was Slashdotted.
The usual juvenile hijinks ensued, but you can find good bits in the dross.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/16/0334232
The biggest barrier is the poor sub-titling on CBC shows. Remember that English (Yingyu) is a tiny language in the sea of Hanyu there.
See how many CBC.ca readers go to a non-English (non-French for radio-canada.ca) after visiting.
The world looks at its own navel far too much.
Living near Shanghai and I can attest that the website as well as all podcasts are being blocked, which is seriously pissing me off. I am using a private proxy service but downloading podcasts through itunes is not working. The Vinyl Cafe is too strong for our benevolent leaders, I guess. Can someone please contact the CBC and let them know about this? Nothing on their site about it. You would think that this would be news. They could interview the Chinese ambassador and ask why they are being blocked. This should unblock them in China quickly.
I just got back from Beijing yesterday. The entire CBC.CA domain name seems to be blocked.
This surprised me a bit … I lived there in 2005 and I could access the site back then (back in the days when cbc.ca defaulted to the news site).
And yep, teamakers was blocked too. :(
Teamakers would be blocked because it’s on blogspot.com. Perhaps it’s time now that Hubert is here to take the next step and move to a real content management system and a teamakers.ca domain name…
Ah, the Great Firewall.
Numerous ways to get around it.
It’s based on IP addresses and
administrated by Public Safety (police) office.
I don’t bother, but run a Telnet session and then SSH back to my Canadian ISP and work mutt, lynx, rssh etc. from there. Quicker, safer and no one cares.
BBC for example gets you the first English page, but not the first Chinese BBC page. But you can’t get further in the English page.
Like most nations, China is very insular in its browsing, both by subject, by language and by interest (That’s 3! main! reasons! for the Spanish Inquisition!)
CBC would be blocked for news, their new Road to Beijing series, and for any coverage of Falun Gong.
Try the ABC of Australia, any non Beijing line Hong Kong media.
See :
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/04/asia/04china.php
http://www.chinaherald.net/2007/10/forget-about-great-firewall-as.html
http://www.chinaherald.net/2007/09/dealing-with-myth-of-30000-internet.html
and numerous others.
Don’t forget the Canadian journalists working at China Radio International, and blogging on the CBC pages at http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/
When I was in Beijing a few weeks back, I could get to the main page but I couldn’t get to any of the news items or the schedules or anywhere else on the site.
I had similar problems with other news sites, including BBC and CNN. Usually what would happen is the attempts to get to ‘forbidden’ pages would just time out.
Incidentally, I also had this problem with Teamakers, and a few other blogs as well.
However, Google China worked perfectly :)