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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the most valuable thing to come out of all of this is the China apps status dashboard:

http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

tells us what China is currently allowing, blocking, or partially blocking.

Seriously. It would be nice to see a widget like this that anyone could throw up on their site or blog. Problem would be getting the update -- you'd have to have a server in China pinging all the participating sites, I suppose.

This could be a very nice way for the web to passively protest China's censorship: put a strip at the top of your blog that displays whether or not your blog is readable in China at the moment. Even if the Chinese couldn't see it, plenty of people outside of China would, raising awareness of the problem and putting pressure on China.

Could someone please explain to me the frequency of the sentence, "Seriously."? An in joke? I don't get it...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Seriously&...

I never stopped to think this was a regional colloquialism, but I suppose it is..

I used it above to mean "I agree"

When you see that, mentally swap it with 'Fo shizzle', then you should be ok.

(Strong agreement, like, 'Indeed!', 'Right on!', 'Quite!', 'You said it!', 'Yeah no kidding!', 'For sure!', (or more recently, 'this!' :) ))

There may be some connection to HomeStar Runner, which has been a part of "nerd culture" (or some subset) for at least a decade.

I think it's just another idiom. It has been around, in this form, for a long time.

Would be nice to see one dedicated to tech sites in general, e.g., http://www.python.org/download/ which has been blocked by the Firewall within China for the last 6 months.

http://www.python.org/download/ is not blocked from Shanghai

It's been blocked from my apartment in Wuhan with the instant "Connection Reset" message for the last 6 months, whereas the rest of the Python.org site has been available. Perhaps the national Firewall can target geographic areas inside China, and someone in the Firewall Bureau wanted to restrict Python's available somewhat, but hide the fact by limiting it download page outside the main cities. Though I can't imagine why! Or perhaps it's being blocked at a more local (ISP) level, but I think that's unlikely. I'll check it next time I'm at Starbucks with my laptop.

Would be nice to have a similar dashboard for each country in the world.

Awesome, except the munged copyright symbol. Pretty unusual for Google to have encoding issues in copy (and not to be using the entity).

It looks good to me.

I see the good ole' question-mark diamond. I see the same thing when I view-source.

Changing my text encoding to latin-1 fixed the display.

I'm on Chrome, amusingly enough, on OS X 10.6.

Weird, works for me with both chromium-daily & Chromium Dev channel, Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

It was probably copy pasted by the legal department from a word document. Just because they're google doesn't mean they can change how lawyers work. ;-)

Re: the wrench by Google docs. Google spreadsheets are blocked here, but not the rest of the service as far as I can tell. Why? One can only ponder what goes on in the censors' heads.

Probably someone created a spreadsheet with measurements and pie-charts showing the actual costs and benefits of the current government :)

Haha, all the images on Wikipedia are also filtered and my assumption for the reason was pretty similar to what you just suggested.

Perhaps the spreadsheet component of Google Docs is better than Baidu's.

It's a few years old but Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ may be interesting

And the most valuable thing to be squashed by it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211947

It would be nice if they listed the status of Appengine too.

What do "Web" and "Sites" mean? I assume one tells us whether China is blocking Google search results.

I presume "Web" is the main web search, and "Sites" is sites.google.com

Web = Search Results; Sites = A Google Apps product and personal websites hosted by Google

Thanks.

Just made it my new home page!

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