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."

There is no future for China if they keep this up

[GnarlyDoug]

China is heading toward becoming a living example of a Reductio ad Absurdum. [wikipedia.org] The internet is now the critical infrastructure over which information flows. To use Marxist terms, it is becoming critical to defining the Mode of Production [wikipedia.org] for a society. It is becoming powerful for social relations, organization and management, and education among other elements. Their own philosophy tells them why thier own actions will cripple thier development.

China will have to choose between having the internet and being a world power using the tools of the 21st century, or becoming isolated from the rest of the world on all levels. The internet is becoming the primary infrastructure for a new future. The idea of becoming or staying economicaly and politically viable without it is naive and foolish. It would be like trying to become a economic and military power in the 20th century without an industrial base to build anything.

Re:Workarounds are illegal in China...

[gzipped_tar]

Illlllegal? As far as I know there's no law banning me from SSHing some remote host not explicitly blacklisted by the Chinese Gov't (i'm Chinese). And we don't even know who we are against. We don't know who operate and are responsible for the GFW. No*body*. The GFW is a more a cult, or humor, or both, than someting substantial for me, but it is _really_ there. The GFW works just like the Babylonian Lottery of Jorge L. Borges (at least for me). Errrr, am I offtoopic?