China orders telecoms to block personal VPNs by February

China declared that virtual private networks were illegal back at the start of the year, and now it's giving telecoms no choice but to fall in line. Bloomberg sources understand that the government has told carriers to block individual access to VPNs...

Chinese state media squashes claims of less restricted internet in Shanghai zone (updated)

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A few days ago, the South China Morning Post claimed that blocks put on websites like Twitter, Facebook and The New York Times were to be lifted in Shanghai's new free-trade zone. And the justification made sense, too: relax restrictions to make visitors happy, and potentially cash in on accelerated foreign investment as a result. Plausible, sure, but according to state-run news outlet the People's Daily, completely untrue. As it turns out, the Chinese powers that be allegedly have no intention of allowing web traffic in the free-trade zone to circumvent the Great Firewall, which means visiting Twitter addicts will still have to turn to Weibo for their social network / microblogging fix.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Update: People.com.cn (not the People's Daily, as reported earlier) has since pulled its post. There's no explanation as to why.

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Via: The Register

Source: TechWeb (Chinese)

China said to be unblocking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the NYT, but only in a small part of Shanghai

China said to be unblocking sites like Facebook, Twitter and the NYT, but only in a small area of Shanghai

Given how large a mobile market China has become, and its role in gadget manufacturing globally, we sometimes forget the government of this increasingly tech-aware country still dictates what corners of the web its peoples can see. Today, the South China Morning Post reports the state has decided to unblock several foreign internet sites "considered politically sensitive," but only in the free-trade zone of Shanghai's Pudong New Area. According to "government sources," the move to open access to sites including Facebook, Twitter (both of which were cut off in 2009) and The New York Times (blocked last year) is so visitors can "live and work happily in the free-trade zone." The greater goal is to make the area more attractive to foreign companies, beyond the favorable regulatory and tax environment, of course. Furthermore, the Chinese are allegedly beckoning overseas firms to come in and "provide internet services" for the new, 30 square kilometer zone. The Great Firewall may remain firmly up for the rest of the country and its billion-odd population, but one step at a time and all that.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

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Via: Quartz

Source: South China Morning Post

Google to flag ‘censored’ searches for Chinese users (video)

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Google is announcing that it's going to place a flag on contentious search terms for users in mainland China. Mountain View's Alan Eustace euphemistically described how some searches break a connection to the service, leading to users being frozen out for around a minute each time. He theatrically added that the company has checked its servers several times and found no error, so whatever issue causes these outages must be external. Whenever a term is typed that is likely to cause an "outage," the error message in the picture above will appear, with a suggestion to search for something else, or use Pinyin to search for a term where contentious keywords appear inside otherwise natural searches.

Continue reading Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video)

Google to flag 'censored' searches for Chinese users (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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