China adds another brick in the firewall by blocking RSS
Posted by Bill Gaffney | October 5th, 2007
According to Ars Technica, China appears to have further clamped down the “Great Firewall of China” not only restricting access to certain sites, phrases and keywords, but more recently add RSS feeds to the list.
Many of the more internet savvy in China have depended up the simplicity of RSS which up until recently has flown under the radar to obtain “forbidden” information. In August, however, the first complaints started cropping up surrounding access through Feedburner managed feeds.
Further reports suggest that China’s Public Security Bureau (PSB) appears to have extended the ACL to any and all URLs beginning with “feeds,” “rss,” and “blog.” This unprecedented censorship does close the door on this work-around but others still appear successful albeit slower and less reliable.
- Web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, for RSS access
- SSH connections to servers outside the country
- Proxy tools, such as the Firefox extension gladder
- Tor tool is also popular
Check out China’s Great Firewall turns its attention to RSS feed
Update:
Dave Feng, who uses China Netcom’s ADSL service, confirms roadblocks to certain international feeds but not the blanket failure suggested earlier.
Due to a variety of reasons, the clamps may remain on for some time. It could be a block, or simply because the sheer mass communications between China and the outside world just manage to overwhelm the network and stretch it to the limit. [more]
At this point, conflicting reports exist as to the extent of the censorship, but RSS does seem to be in the cross-hairs of the PSB.
