William Long at Moonlight Blog reports that YouTube is again accessible from his connection in China.
I'm in Osaka, Japan, but a friend in Beijing, who prefers to be identified as "Hot Mama in Beijing," confirms.
Hot Mama adds an anecdote: Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, "This content is not available in your country." Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google's part. Mama reports that YouTube soon went completely dark, until just now.
Another glitch that emerged, which may suggest some sort of Google involvement, is that when Mama was sending Gmail messages, anything containing the nonredacted T%%%, or even its first three letters, would return an error message she'd never seen, stating that there was an error while sending.
This is by no means certain to be Google involvement. Transmitting sensitive keywords may have triggered a stall that Google recognized as trouble--something Hot Mama would not have usually seen in Beijing or New England. Similarly, YouTube may have correctly interpreted the block and redirected to a human readable error page rather than the usual "reset connection."
I asked Hot Mama, who also wanted me to mention she's a truck driver (seriously), to try to access her Gmail, which had been terribly slow, using an anti-censorship micro-tactic: Instead of accessing http://mail.google.com, go for https://mail.google.com. The result was stark, she said. Everything loaded much faster. This suggests that encrypted communications are not being seriously delayed but that language filters are engaging a larger portion of traffic than usual.
The YouTube messages are still vexing. Was YouTube cooperating or was this a very smart error message? To have a Google property that's not Google China itself cooperating with Chinese censorship would be unprecedented, to my knowledge.
A Chinese agency promised to shut or punish video sharing websites for hosting prohibited material, but this was going on before the incidents in Tibet made a different agency's occasional blocking of YouTube famous.
An AP reporter says the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) announced Friday that the leading Chinese video site, Tudou, would be penalized. The report notes that no mention was made of Tibet, but doesn't make clear the most important part: that this all started before the demonstrations in Tibet did. I am sure SARFT takes politically sensitive films into account in addition to their advertised concern about obscene material, but it's important to note how Tudou's travails began.
As I reported earlier, rumors that Tudou had been ordered to shut down started circulating in the first week of March, with a failure to catch some pornographic material on the site as the justification.
That story got more complicated after a mixture of denials and partial acknowledgments of SARFT action and a 24-hour shut-down of Tudou that the website said was for a server upgrade, a reason few commentators believed at the time. But the site did come back online on schedule.
At the time, rumors emerged of a "blacklist" that was circulating as a precursor to some sort of punishment in compliance with new regulations that require video providers to be state-run (but were modified to grandfather in already existing sites if they were vigilant about SARFT's rules).
Beating the AP with a bit of detailed information, Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that Tudou will be one of 32 sites to be punished, while 25 others will be shut down all together. So, after all, unless the penalty is massive, Tudou will live on to fight (and probably keep on with free illegal TV and movies) another day.
As for YouTube, it's been much reported that YouTube is inaccessible in China since the beginning of the current situation out west. (I have been in Japan the whole time, so haven't experienced this myself.) But this is not the first time YouTube has been blocked. The most recent example I know of was during last year's 17th National Party Congress when the site was blocked and then unblocked at a time suspiciously near that important political event.
On Monday, I'll be able to talk first-hand about what's on- or off-line from Beijing. For now, Osaka is my new favorite city in Japan.
Rumors are flying: Tudou, a hugely popular streaming video site based in China, has been instructed to shut down by a Chinese government authority. Tudou is still online as of this writing, but if it goes down, a major haven for streaming television will be gone.
The rumor can be summarized quickly. China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) supposedly instructed Tudou to close its doors, and word is it's because the people responsible for taking down illegal material missed some porn.
Anyone who has looked through sites such as SurfTheChannel is probably familiar with Tudou, which means potato and is named with "couch potato" in mind. Whereas YouTube tends to take down copyrighted material relatively quickly, Tudou is less vigilant about copyright.
As for its potential shutdown, Danwei, one of the most reliable sources on Chinese internet news, tracked down some facts but nothing conclusive. One unnamed Tudou source told a Chinese source that they haven't been asked to shut down.
Meanwhile, Marbridge Consulting, whose staff watch the Chinese tech industry closely for a variety of clients claims to have confirmed with unnamed authorities that Tudou has been ordered to shut down, but they don't say whether the report they've translated is accurate in saying that the shut-down may be temporary.
- prev
- 1
- next
