Now, Google is almost totally blocked in China. A lot of its products, like Google Reader, Google Mail(GMail), Google Code... is not accessible in mainland China.

What a shame for us. What a shame for the stupid kommunist!

Actually, the "www.technorati.com"(with the www-prefix) had been blocked inside China for years, but the technorati.com was always working. But this time, when I try to access the "technorati.com", it shows "This page is not available".

Well, seems blogging in China is really a hard job :)

Update: Wikipedia seems to go back "inside" while Facebook seems to return to us. It's really very strange that maybe it's due to some "upgrades" of GFW system?

Anyway, let's keep in track.

It's been a year since I wrote this post, now in 2009, facebook.com is again blocked in China. What a pity, what a shame! The same of you all, I want my Facebook and Twitter back!

BTW, this blog (ifgogo.com), aka Chinese in English, is a blog with different authors from all over the world blogging anything about China, Chinese, etc. I'd like to know whether you'd wanna be one of us :)

Update on July 3 / 2008:

It's back again, but not quite stable. There are occasionally package loss in the data transmission.

Anyway, I hope I was wrong, I hope it's just a little mistake of the censorship system. But for the damn censorship, my Application would get more users ;)

Update on July 2:

It’s totally down now. The other 2 IPs are also blocked. Take a look at this screenshot:

My ping result:

however, seems the Application server is "a little safer" than others :)

My tracert result:

C:\Users\awflasher>tracert 69.63.178.11

Tracing route to www.facebook.com [69.63.178.11]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1     9 ms     7 ms     7 ms  221.223.96.1
2     8 ms     8 ms     7 ms  61.148.36.85
3     7 ms     7 ms     7 ms  61.148.5.209
4     8 ms     7 ms     8 ms  61.148.154.17
5     8 ms     8 ms     7 ms  202.96.12.197
6    51 ms    51 ms    51 ms  219.158.7.178
7   151 ms   151 ms   150 ms  219.158.3.118
8     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Update on July 1: It's okay now, 2:58PM. Facebook.com now changed a new IP at 69.63.178.11. I am sorry if this post cause any inconvenience.

But they still blocked one IP(69.63.176.140) from Facebook: take a look at this pictures:

ping from inside China:

ping from outside China:

It's really a pity that I cannot access www.facebook.com. It's blocked just now on June 30, 2008.

It's "Beijing time 12:52PM".

I am just a web developer. I am not at all interested in political issues. But how can they just completely block a whole site? It's so rude!

My first Facebook Application is going to ship, what a pity!

It seems that only the www server is effected. The app server and developers server are all available and very fast.

some screenshots:

Ping from One of my server hosted inside the U.S:

Ping from China:

Tracert from China:

Yes, censorship takes a lot of trouble to bloggers, but there are many funny ways to avoid the censorship. Let me introduce some of the methods here:

1) An old way - "Spliting-Character-Way"
As we know, Chinese characters are made up of various components regarded as radicals(BuShou, aka 部首 in Chinese"). And some of the components are themselves individual characters. So it's a great way to "split" one character into two or more characters.

For instance:

"软件", aka "software" in English, can be "re-rendered" as "车欠亻牛".

There is even a funny IME software to help you input such characters on the fly:
http://go.6.cn/d379

2) Another old way - "Mars language"(aka "火星文" in Chinese)
This is not originally for getting rid of censorship, but just for fun amoung the young netizens. However, young students are alway like to go against the tradition. By making the Characters in another style, they successfully fooled the adults.

However, people now called it "Mars language", it is said that this name is originally from Taiwan.

For instance:

"游戏里用不了或新闻" can be "re-rendered" as "蝣戲裏苚吥ㄋ吙煋攵"

Also there's an IME helper to let you input such "Mars language":
http://go.6.cn/0r80

3) The latest way - "Classical-Chinese-Style"
Well, as we know that many years ago, Chinese people wrote and read in vertical directions. I'm sorry that I don't know how to accurately explain it in English, but a simple demo would make you understand it soon (the demo is presented in English):
║Ｃ│＇│ｗ│ｌ│ｅ│ｏ│　│　│ｉ║
║ｈ│ｓ│ｏ│ｌ│　│ｍ│ｂ│ｉ│ｆ║
║ｉ│　│ｒ│ｉ│ｗ│ｅ│ｌ│ｓ│ｇ║
║ｎ│ｈ│ｌ│ｎ│ｈ│　│ｏ│　│ｏ║
║ａ│ｏ│ｄ│ｇ│ｏ│Ｃ│ｇ│ａ│ｇ║
║　│ｔ│　│　│＇│ｈ│　│　│ｏ║
║　│　│ｗ│ｔ│ｓ│ｉ│ｂ│ｔ│。║
║　│ｉ│ｈ│ｈ│　│ｎ│ｙ│ｅ│ｃ║
║　│ｎ│ａ│ｅ│ｔ│ｅ│　│ａ│ｏ║
║　│　│ｔ│　│ｅ│ｓ│ｓ│ｍ│ｍ║