Beijing snuffs Google.com

Chinese net censors appeared to block Google's worldwide website last night, as that country's government continues to grapple with the company over pornographic links turned up by its search engine. After 9pm local time, the The Financial Times reports, attempts to access google.com and gmail.com from separate computers in …

[Grass Mud Horse]

The mother of idiots is always pregnant

Shenzhen is still google-free zone. The censors are probably watching pr0n and missed the all-clear signal.

Yeah, a real creative block. They direct *.google.com at their gateway! That's why god created /etc/hosts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Protest

To protest China's net censorship, I will download all the

Chinese porn I can. I sacrifice myself for all our Chinese friends.

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't care about porn

I really don't think this is about porn, so much as politics and maintaining a police state.

Banning porn is silly, its harder to get really outraged about policital censorship when they are banning porn, and .. video games which are an insult to their national identity or whatever.

So 9 out of 10 sites they ban are porn ... the rest are political. Plus they can arrest people for porn charges when really they were accessing political content.

I just find it really suspicious whenever a government is trying to crack down on porn, prostitution, illegal substances that are mostly harmless ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Really

And I was wondering where 1.4 billion Chinese come from. Only then it dawned on me that people have sex over there too.

[Long Fei]

Yeah

I've gone back to Yahoo as my main search engine, as Google is all but useless now. Gmail is okay, but it's very on/off.

And...

Ohh, new icons! ~Chooses beer icon, 'cos I quite fancy a pint right now~

[Anonymous Coward]

2 hours?

It's been down for me in Shanghai since 9pm last night, also in the office (which is a MNC in the centre of the most technologically advanced city in the country). It may be temporary, but it might not be just a warning shot...it could be longer.

[frank ly]

What's the Problem?

"...Google set up a Chinese subsidiary in 2005 - and agreed to submit to government censorship rules, which include the suppression of government criticism..."

So, Google entered into agreements as part of the conditions for being allowed to operate in China. Then they repeatedly broke parts of the agreement and as a result are being punished for it. This sounds quite reasonable. If you get into bed with the devil you have to expect (...insert suitable pornographic description to complete this sentence).

[Anonymous Coward]

Hu Flung Dung

Big Brother loves you

[Anonymous Coward]

Helping Baidu

Maybe Beijing is just helping Baidu?

[Martyn Breckenridge]

Are you sure..

It sounds more like a DNS problem to me, are you sure it wasnt just a dns problem?

I remember reading something way back that almost all chinese isp's use the same dns servers. I could be wrong though

[imposter]

Population control

Banning porn just increases the urgency of getting laid, ergo goes against their population control agenda. Oh silly the silly fascists. Whatever next? A hugely expensive spy database which is not only in defiance of every elected representative and pushed through by a non democratically elected government but based on technologies that dont' yet exist?

Oh wait.

[Cullen Newsom]

2 Hour Blockage?

It's still down as I write this.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Martyn Breckenridge

you may be right - it's just been "down" again for 2 hours - this time only *seemed* to be google & chinese sites accessible (although it wasn't an exahaustive check by any means...) - heh, probably someone trying to fix problem which lost google yesterday!

what is it they say about not assuming malice when it can be easily explained by incompetence?

[nothanx]

Fact missing

They framed Google. If you don't believe you can check it yourself using Google's search volume indicator. One of keyword used by CCTV to demonstrate porn on Google is "儿子" and if you search "儿子母亲不正当关系" (the inproper relationship between son and mother) using that service, you can see large amount of pr0n-word search requests from clients in Beijing this month.

Google must know that at the very beginning. Once you decided to work for devil, dont expect to reason with it. Google lost its soul and guts, and truth is missing from this report.