Facebook blocked in China

[cui ruide]

I'm having trouble getting "fg" to work. Most of the time it won't even connect, but when it does the pages never finish loading. I was prompted for a while to update (I have 6.82), but I never did. Could this be related?

[Don_Horhe]

Try "dleihs topstoh eerfrohcna" spelled backwards - it works fine with me.

[gougou]

Try "dleihs topstoh eerfrohcna" spelled backwards - it works fine with me.

That's interesting, mine stopped working a couple of days ago.

gato's advice worked for me, though, so I am now using that one.

[liuzhou]

I'm having trouble getting "fg" to work

The newer version won't work any better.

There is a good summary of the current situation here.

[gato]

There is a good summary of the current situation here.

Sounds like the end of the Internet as we know it.

[Don_Horhe]

I'm assuming - hoping, to be honest - that things will loosen up after they've had their Communist party (no pun intended).

That's interesting, mine stopped working a couple of days ago.

Weird, I can still use mine.

[imron]

Port-forwarding over SSH FTW!

[wushijiao]

I'm assuming - hoping, to be honest - that things will loosen up after they've had their Communist party (no pun intended)

Nice pun.

They might relax things in mid-October, but then again, they've institutionalized many of the Olympics security related procedures, so I'm not so hopeful.

If you like living in China but don't want to put up with many of the annoyances, you can always consider moving to HK, where Facebook and other sites work like a charm.

[joshuawbb]

Blue Dam sounds pretty scary. Gato pretty much summed it up. What does everyone think?

The workaround Gato posted in the Witopia review thread worked like a charm (thank you), though I'm not so knowledgeable about proxy addresses, etc, so I'm not quite sure where to find other proxies. The one shown in the thread worked fine though it seems to have been blocked now.

[wushijiao]

Take a look at Rebecca MacKinnon's recent article (if you can), it sounds really bad:

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2009/09/chinas-censorship-arms-race-escalates.html

I don't think anything she's writing about sounds temporary at all.

[liuzhou]

Take a look at Rebecca MacKinnon's recent article (if you can)

It's also here, unblocked.

While they may reopen certain sites, there is no way they are going to reopen Freegate and/or Tor etc. just so we can get to where they don't want us to get to.

[gato]

The workaround Gato posted in the Witopia review thread worked like a charm (thank you), though I'm not so knowledgeable about proxy addresses, etc, so I'm not quite sure where to find other proxies. The one shown in the thread worked fine though it seems to have been blocked now.

I found the proxies using LotusProxy, which is able to download a list of proxies from a server somewhere (not sure exactly how or where) and test them one by one. I'll post some more proxies later tonight if LotusProxy is still working.

EDIT: The FG + proxy method doesn't seem to work, any more.

The latest version of FG version 6.89ub5 (beta 5) is just out, released on Sept. 30, 2009.

http://rapidshare.com/files/286957450/fg689ub5.exe

Give it a shot. It's working for me. Just be patient while it tries to connect. China doesn't spend billions of dollars on the Golden Shield Project for nothing....

Edited September 30, 2009 at 03:49 PM by gato

[rlinda_yuya]

What about paid VPN such as strongvpn.com anybody use that?

[crazy-meiguoren]

Could the ban have something to do with this? There's a certain mafia game on Facebook which I've seen quite a few Chinese play.

It might be part of the reason, but I think there's more to it than that.

[crazy-meiguoren]

Maybe "Crazy Taxi" was mistaken for a driver training course?