Censorship 2.0: China Blocks Google Search, Apps, GMail, and More
Jun 24th, 2009 by Johnny
Reference Source: TechCrunch – Censorship 2.0: China Blocks Google Search, Apps, Gmail, And More
Google for some reason started to blocking access to everything Google today. It is really preventing my clients with China offices from doing their work. Especially since they use Google Apps for their e-mail. When will China join the rest of the world and realize that the network is now global for many companies.
China must have done something with their Great Firewall to even block proxy traffic. My client has a proxy server in the US which they use in Firefox. Even that was blocked today. It results in a message saying that the “network was interrupted”.
Anyone know of a way to prevent that (blocking of the proxy, that is)?
Has your client tried setting up OpenDNS on their network (or even individual workstations)? I’m in Shanghai and it’s helped me get around the annoying Great Firewall issues with Google.com, Gmail, Analytics, etc. all day today.
OpenDNS only helps when China is “changing” DNS lookups. OpenDNS has helped in the past, but recently it seems that recently the ISPs are required to block foreign DNS lookups. When using OpenDNS, lookups timeout. Changing back to the ISP DNS servers, it resolves. Maybe it is different in Shanghai, but in Guangzhou using OpenDNS is not helping.
Heck, my client has their own proxy server in the US, even that is not working. The requests are processed through the proxy, but all of sudden the browser in China shows “connection interrupted”. Using the same proxy in the US, everything works. So China must now have a way of “seeing” into the proxy stream and breaking it.