But you can still update Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and many other social networks at once with http://ping.fm (works from mobile too). It doesn’t mean you’ll have access to blocked sites from China but at least you can keep your lucky followers – who are out of China – updated with your stream.

Hope this helps… ;)

Among the several conclusions, this has drawn my attention:

Internet Filtering (“the great Firewall”) is only one part of Chinese Internet censorship

Domestic web censorship is not centralized at all

Domestic web censorship is outsourced by government to the private sector

Domestic web censorship is inconsistent – if you can’t post successfully in one place, it’s usually possible to post your content somewhere else, at least for at least a while

The system of “managing” user-generated web content in China appears to follow a similar logic and approach as the system for controlling professional news media

You don’t need to be an activist to be willing to freely navigate the Web… Here is a handy workaround I wrote previously to acces any website from China Mainland.

Log on www.skype.com and you will be redirected automatically to http://skype.tom.com – no choice, this is the Chinese version of Skype. Then look at the color of the Siteadvisor icon on your web browser, it turns from green to full red which is a strong invite to leave the page. Asking more details at SiteAdvisor, you will then discover that the Skype Tom page in China is hosting Adware-BDsearch, a generic trojan considered as harmful to your computer.

I discovered this long ago adn advised friends to download Skype from the US site instead.

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that surveillance of Skype messages was found in China. At last…

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

The list also serves as a filter to restrict text conversations. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server. The Chinese servers retained personal information about the customers who sent the messages. They also recorded chat conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users outside China. The system recorded text messages and Skype caller identification, but did not record the content of Skype voice calls.

The researchers said their discovery contradicted a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 after the content filtering of the Skype conversations was reported. At the time the company said that the conversations were protected and private.

So if you don’t want your private conversations log to be stored on a Chinese computer somewhere you don’t want it to be, make sure you use a US version of Skype and make sure you correspondent is doing the same as well.

Read the full article here.

Also in French from Reuters here. [Update] The previous link has been removed from Yahoo archives.

According to the South China Morning Post (subscription required), the Chinese government has taken to censuring financial media in effort to stem the floodgates of discontent brewing over dismal market sentiment.

With the craziness of the financial meltdown in the United States, the Shanghai Stock Exchange has followed the rest of the world down the rabbit hole. Within 10 minutes of the opening of the SSE on Tuesday morning, right after the declared bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the SSE Composite fell by almost 5% but slowly steeled itself back around the 2000 mark.

The idea of the SSE breaking the 2000 barrier might have seemed impossible this time last year but the stock market has been free-falling, losing more than half its value since January. Frustrations have been mounting despite varied efforts by the regulators to stem the volatility (loan controls, bank reserve rates, administrative fiats, etc). Calls for government intervention have grown louder as fund managers, academics and regulators debate the efficacy and timeliness of a Chinese-styled bailout.

The interesting point is now, because this is the real issue behind the figures:

SCMP reports that perennial fears of social disunity have led the Communist Party’s Publicity Department (rather than the securities regulator) to verbally inform major financial websites to sift out negative and sensitive commentaries, reports and headlines about the hard-hit markets. There is no paper trail backing up such claims, but editors of online financial media have confirmed them.

Read rhe full post here.

But what is interesting here is this:

But censors are blocking all comment on the motives of the man on every website. Was he an activist of the Falun Gong banned movement? Was he a Tibetan Buddhist? How about a disgruntled property rights activist?

Whatever the cause, there is a story there, and the government may not want the motive to come out. But at least it’s a step in the right direction to allow Xinhua to report the news. Here’s the agency’s latest story:

Read the full story here.

Since the release of Firefox 3, the Gladder extension was not compatible. It is fixed since today with the release of the version 2.0.2.2.

You can download Firefox 3 here and the Gladder extension there.

Serious concerns were raised in Davos last week about the ability of the Chinese government to spy on the country’s 500 million mobile phone users.

The head of China’s biggest mobile phone company, which has more than 300 million subscribers, stunned delegates by revealing that the company had unlimited access to the personal data of its customers and handed it over to Chinese security officials when demanded.

We know who you are, but also where you are,” said the CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, Wang Jianzhou, whose company adds six million new customers to its network each month and is already the biggest mobile group in the world by users.

He was explaining how the company could use the personal data of its customers to sell advertising and services to them based on knowledge of where they were and what they were doing.

Unsolicited advertisements by SMS can be annoying, but read the following:

When pressed about the privacy and security implications of this, he added: “We can access the information and see where someone is, but we never give this information away … only if the security authorities ask for it.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University in Britain, stressed how the mobile phone had become a serious threat to privacy in all countries.

“It’s amazing to see how such a comprehensive surveillance network has been set up through the market force of consumer demand,” he told AFP.

“With CCTV (closed circuit television), the government sets it up and you have nothing to say about it. With this (mobile phones), you’re paying for your own monitoring device.”

Isn’t it just great ?

Full article can be viewed here.

As reported by The Atlantic, this is how this all happens.

The government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from a list of specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses—certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games.

China has indeed erected a firewall—a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world—but that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship.

If you’re trying to reach one on that blacklist, the Chinese international-gateway servers will interrupt the transmission by sending an Internet “Reset” command both to your computer and to the one you’re trying to reach.

Instead of the site you want, you usually see an onscreen message beginning “The connection has been reset”; sometimes instead you get “Site not found.” Annoyingly, blogs hosted by the popular system Blogspot are on this IP blacklist. For a typical Google-type search, many of the links shown on the results page are from Wikipedia or one of these main blog sites. You will see these links when you search from inside China, but if you click on them, you won’t get what you want.

The final step involves the newest and most sophisticated part of the GFW: scanning the actual contents of each page—which stories The New York Times is featuring, what a China-related blog carries in its latest update—to judge its page-by-page acceptability. This again is done with mirrors. When you reach a favorite blog or news site and ask to see particular items, the requested pages come to you—and to the surveillance system at the same time.

Here are a few workaround:

As a practical matter, anyone in China who wants to get around the firewall can choose between two well-known and dependable alternatives: the proxy server and the VPN. A proxy server is a way of connecting your computer inside China with another one somewhere else—or usually to a series of foreign computers, automatically passing signals along to conceal where they really came from.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a faster, fancier, and more elegant way to achieve the same result. Essentially a VPN creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet.

But is this so secure ?

As a technical matter, China could crack down on the proxies and VPNs whenever it pleased. Today the policy is: if a message comes through that the surveillance system cannot read because it’s encrypted, let’s wave it on through!

The good news :

“China could simply not afford to crack down that way. “Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist,”

A last simple workaround is to use Mozilla Firefox 2 instead of your old and crappy MS Internet Explorer and to install the Gladder Extension. It is not encrypted but at least gets you to your favorites sites.

Hummm… I just wonder how many foreign corporation in China are actually using proxies and VPN…