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.

Found on Pew / Internet, a report on how Internet will be in 10 years’ time and how we are going to use it. The good news is that you will officially surf from behind your office Proxy – it’s work time, so what? – and you will all switch to open-source unless you want to keep on giving your money away to counter IP Lawyers.

- The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020

- The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness

- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020

- Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment

- The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations

- “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch

Not much surprise for Geeks like you but worth a look anyway, you can download the full report here (Via Pew/Internet)

A man in Tianjin had put a deposit on a Toyota Corolla, then started venting on the Internet when the car failed to show up after three months. Given the anti-Japan sentiment that rages in China’s cyberspace, the griping created a big risk for Toyota.

What did this PR firm do ?

The Beijing-based firm spotted the disgruntled consumer’s postings in one of the 500,000 online forums it regularly searches. Before the topic could draw much attention, Daqi put the buyer in touch with Toyota, which pressed its dealer to deliver the car.

So far, so good. Everything ended up gently and smoothly. Such  PR companies apparently won lots of new contracts this past year, when angry bloggers attacked Carrefour, Nokia, Coca-Cola or Mc Donalds. Here is how they do this:

When online commentary turns negative, the monitors assess whether it might flare up. They figure out who’s generating the criticism—an irate consumer, a nationalist teen, even a rival. Then they consider how fast the complaint is spreading, and whether it’s likely to be picked up by Web portals such as Sohu and Sina. “You know it’s a crisis when Sohu or Sina has created a special page to collect all the news articles and aggregate comments,” as they did when bloggers angry about Tibet called for a boycott of Carrefour in April.

PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: “Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day.” Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.

Even if most of PR companies say they don’t pay bloggers, they acknowledge pampering online opinion leader, by inviting them at sessions where they can test products or even taking them on overseas trip.

What If…?

Let’s just imagine for a second that we use the same such a nice PR firms to work- not for but – against a rival brand… Let’s imagine that you enroll a few hundred students, who create each another dozen profiles on popular forums and you get an instant task force of thousands of bloggers, ready to hit the Web.

Just spice the whole thing up with a few algorithms to generate some web traffic, bookmark this on popular social bookmarking sites and spread the word on social networking sites… What do you get ? A disaster.

A typical example is how British Airways’ reputation was damaged by employee comments on Facebook, read the full post here.

What to do then ?

Basically 3 steps:

1. Create you online profiles, manage these profiles, monitor the buzz.

2. Optimize your online presence by posting positive comments about your brand before being hit.

3. Engage if hit.

More resources here:

Free Online Reputation’s Management Beginner’s Guide by Andy Beal

Basics Of Online Reputation Management by Lee Odden

34 Online Reputations Management Tools by Andy Beal

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.

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.

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…