I’ve been banned by the government of China! I have! Alas, it isn’t because Jiang Zemin decided my imperialist running dog propaganda was too dangerous for the masses to read. They got themselves a list of authorized sites, see, and my friends and I aren’t on it, and you and your friends aren’t either. But don’t let me keep you from enjoying that frisson of dissidence while it lasts. Oddly, the official Chinese Government site is reported as inaccessible in China. A prize, or something, to the first person who finds a site that isn’t blocked in China. (Link from OxBlog.)
(Update: The Declarer, Floyd McWilliams, comments that he was in an Internet cafe in China last week and pulled up The Washington Post, Drudge and Instapundit, all of which are reported inaccessible by the Harvard site. The apparently universal faith that if software returns results then the results must be correct is touching. Really.)
(Further Update: Looks like Harvard ironed out a few kinks. I’m now reported as accessible in China, and so is blogspot, and so, I suspect, is everyone else who was so pleased about being banned. Which indicates that I was wrong, and that they do, in fact, maintain a list of banned domains rather than authorized ones.)
I used an internet cafe in China last week, and was able to get to http://www.washingtonpost.com (with marketing questionaire popup!), http://www.drudgereport.com, and http://www.instapundit.com. All these sites were reported inaccessible by the URL.
The only site I could not get to was http://www.bayarea.com, the home page for the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times. This was an improvement over my experiences with dialup in China in 2000; at that time I could not get the Post or Drudge.
"The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore