China Now Blocking RSS Feeds

Phurge passed us an Ars Technica link covering China's newest internet-based crackdown: RSS feeds. Real Simple Syndication has apparently been a fairly foolproof way to get around Chinese government censors in recent years. As long ago as August, though, access to feeds has been curtailed by the Great Firewall. "More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with 'feeds,' 'rss,' and 'blog,' thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites — including ones that aren't blocked in China, such as Ars Technica — useless ... there are a few workarounds, some of which may be simpler than others. Some of our readers in China tell us that web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, (sort of) help provide access to RSS feeds. One reader says that if he has the aggregator set to display the full post (or however much of the post is made available) and clicks through to read more, everything is just fine."

Re:why not use http?

[brunascle]

i think they meant the hostname or path part of the URL, not the protocol (as "blog" isnt a protocol, is it?).

Re:why not use http?

[mini me]

Safari uses the feed:// "protocol" for RSS/Atom feeds, even though it's still really just HTTP under the hood. It allows you to enter, for example, feed://slashdot.org and it will automatically find the appropriate feed for the site instead of having to type: http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot [slashdot.org].

Re:Workarounds are illegal in China...

[gzipped_tar]

Thank you for the info but...
unfortunately we are not able to read Wikipedia now in China without the 'workarounds'. It has been blocked by the Firewall. Btw, we hear rumors that the Chinese government is running proxy servers outside China in order to find out who (or at least, how many people) are using proxy servers as a Firewall workaround.
As far as I know there hasn't been any lawsuit against the Firewall's operators. So, if I own a site and I lost 1 million Renminbi because of the Firewall's behavior, that's the Babylonian lottery..... ha.