<Wired> China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’

[Guest guest]

China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’ - Updated

By Singel   January 9, 2010  |  4:52 pm  |  Categories: Censorship, The Ridiculous

Chinese authorities have begun blocking Chinese internet users from reading Wired.com, according to a report from the Examiner.

Internet users from Beijing to Shanghai found the site inaccessible starting Friday, reports Glenn Loveland, the Examiner’s Beijing correspondent. The block adds Wired.com to a long list of sites that are or have been considered too dangerous for Chinese net users.

UPDATE Saturday 19:45 PST: Reports of Wired.com’s demise in China may be a bit premature, as readers in several cities in China report being able to read the site. One says that urls that include the words RSS or blog are often blocked, one said we were blocked on a cell phone, while another said Wired.com was fine now but was blocked for weeks in December. We are glad to learn you all can hear Radio Free Wired.com in Beijing and Shanghai, but we promise to redouble our efforts to anger political censors around the world. /UPDATE

Current blacklist members and alumni include YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia, Google and most recently, IMDB, an encyclopedic movie information site. China’s censorship of the net is in constant flux, aided by sets of powerful firewalls marketed to the Communist government by Western technology companies.

Am I supposed to have sympathy for Cisco because their intellectual property was ripped off after they sold equipment to China as part of the Chinese firewall? This seems like a hired killer complaining he never got paid for a hit.

Also, as for CyberSitter, whose intellectual property was infringed upon by the Green Dam software: I have no sympathy. SnoopStick is a form a spyware sold as legitimate software on the open market designed to monitor and record another computer without being detected.

However, the People's Republic of China has shown a complete lack of respect towards the principles of intellectual property, almost outright encouraging theft of intellectual property (unless, of course, it is Chinese, and the infringing party is not the Chinese government).

 

We’re not sure if we are supposed to give an acceptance speech or file an official complaint in triplicate at the Ministry of Proper Online Thought.

Wired.com was not notified of the block and has not been able to confirm it independently. If you are based in China, we’d appreciate you letting us know in the comments or by e-mail if you can’t load the site without having to use a proxy or censorship evasion tools like Tor. Another easy way to report this block or others is to use the Berkman Center’s Herdict tool.

Wired.com editors are hard at work trying to figure out what we did to earn a spot on the blacklist. Was it our wall-to-wall CES coverage? Or was it Wired.com’s critical coverage of Chinese internet censorship?

Wired.com is the online affiliate of Wired magazine. Both are owned by Condé Nast, a privately held publishing company based in New York that also publishes Vanity Fair, GQ and The New Yorker, among other titles.

[Guest guest]

One needs to keep in mind that China Inc., as we know it today, became this way

because of Clinton's trade pact and Obama's support of it.

China freely commits trademark and copyright abuse, thereby causing our domestic

companies to fail, and Obama continues to encourage us to buy Chinese shoddy

problems.

Ask yourself how much money is in your wallet and how much more you are willing

to part with. Ask yourself who you voted for in the last election and whom you

are going to vote for again.

Everytime we buy something, it is like casting a vote.

Every time we cast a vote in an election, we tell the people we are voting for

whether we approve or disapprove of what we stand for.

It may be someday that you won't be able to find a job because there is some

Chinese person doing it illegally overseas. Will you vote for a politician who

allows this to happen?

Administrator

Am I supposed to have sympathy for Cisco because their intellectual property was

ripped off after they sold equipment to China as part of the Chinese firewall?

This seems like a hired killer complaining he never got paid for a hit.

Also, as for CyberSitter, whose intellectual property was infringed upon by the

Green Dam software: I have no sympathy. SnoopStick is a form a spyware sold as

legitimate software on the open market designed to monitor and record another

computer without being detected.

However, the People's Republic of China has shown a complete lack of respect

towards the principles of intellectual property, almost outright encouraging

theft of intellectual property (unless, of course, it is Chinese, and the

infringing party is not the Chinese government).