Node.js 0.6.4 was blocked in China

Kinda off topic, but I thought people might be interested to know that there's absolutely no blocking (or any other kind of censorship) in Hong Kong.

I am currently visiting China and everything you said is exactly what I've experienced. Using a VPN is the only way to get a working internet connection, but China is also blocking various popular VPN providers seemingly at random.

You don't need to be doing anything questionable to feel the bite of the GFW, webpages with Facebook like buttons are enough to cause a 30 second delay while the connection times out in the background before the site loads.

The censorship occurs at the TCP level, which is why pretty much only a VPN will help.

It's because they're manually checking the page as it loads.

Once it's okay'ed, it'll load instantly the next time.

Seriously.

Lol. "Write to the Internet police." Yeah, good luck with that. The government doesn't ever officially acknowledge sites that are blocked. Even the AWS east coast data center (read: heroku) is blocked in China intermittently. All writing to the mythical Internet police would accomplish is getting your name on a list of people with a stated desire to visit 'pornography'.

Internet companies that don't end in .cn and start with 'Tencent' or 'Baidu' are better of just leaving China. It'll never be good here as long as the communists are in power.

[NEW]I just ask my friends in China to visit the site and it turns out to be ok. Don't know how and when it recovered. Another funny story is python.org is blocked for a long time. Somebody say it is the version number 2.6.4; Somebody claim it's because GAE(could be set up as proxy); The other part believe it's because python.com...... We don't know which is the truth or neither of them.

If enough people stop talking about it in enough places, then the govt will have successfully edited the internet at large. Potential tragedy of the commons, limited mainly by outrage.

This is completely the wrong attitude. Should we stop using the number 64 in our software too? That's fucking insane. Get a VPN, leave the country, use tor, or otherwise figure out how to get around the firewall. You're asking us to essentially pretend, at high cost, that we are also behind the Great Firewall of China, and we will not do that.

Edit: It looks like you were joking. I get that. I just don't want this community to actually seriously sympathize with this concept.

Neither 89 nor 64 are blocked by GFW -- that's a terribly simplistic view of how the system works. There are plenty of things that can trigger temporary, automated blocks, and perhaps the version number _did_ cause the block (as unlikely as that seems), but to blanket say that certain integers are blocked by the GFW is FUD.

I'm very sorry but some of what you said was lost on me as there was a little bit of broken English in there. If I understand correctly, are you trying to say that nodejs.org isn't being locked and that only a few people are having this issue? And are you also trying to say that we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions and this isn't a political issue and that while the GFW is ridiculous this isn't the place for a political discussion? I'm just trying to understand because I honestly didn't completely understand your comment.

I disagree and think this is a perfect time to talk about the politics of it even if this is a false alarm and an isolated issue. Does the GWF really help China politically? Don't the Chinese citizens know that information is being kept from them.

I think just knowing that your government is keeping information from you is enough to make a person dislike and distrust their government. At the same time I wonder if I'd feel the same if I grew up with censorship. It's one thing to have freedom then have someone take it away and it's another to not even know what you're missing out on. If the Chinese people don't know that there's a whole wealth of information they cannot access then they probably don't care. But if they once had full access and now it's gone I'd imagine they would be very angry about it.

A BETTER VERSION:

I am a Chinese programmer and I have to say, we cannot determine whether nodejs.org is blocked in China at this period. Only quite few persons cannot access this site. We shouldn't be that sensitive and lead the topic even more political.

I am from the US, currently visiting China. I've confirmed that I'm able to access nodejs.org without my VPN. However, it's been my experience here that the system is aggressive about false-positives in general and will result in intermittent access to various websites for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

I'm not sure whether this happens at a regional level or across the entire country, but right now it's loading fine in Wuhan :)

I sort of agree with your general point, but I think there's something else going on too:

Actively favoring and caring about this kind of thing advances your career, social status, etc, in China (for some career paths, not all). There are incentives to care. Consequently, many people learn to care and become true believers. (Faking like you care is harder to get right than being genuine, and requires better thinking, and the people who can do that usually go for other jobs, so it's much rarer.)

Lots of people do more than follow orders, they internalize some of the values of the people they are trying to please. And they learn skills like figuring out which way the wind is blowing without being told, and figuring out how to convince themselves that is good, and then (if they are ambitious, or under pressure from their wife to make more money, or whatever) they may even try to get out in front of the thing, show their dedicated enthusiasm, take initiative, seek a leadership role, etc... All the while, they are not in general thinking about how they are secretly opposed to what they are doing, which would be unpleasant and get in the way of their success.

Do you think that 1billion people will move to HK just to browse a censorship-free version of the Internet?

Not every Chinese person can just go to Hong Kong. Also the blocking isn't about censorship as much as it's about creating an unfair advantage to the Chinese companies who pay huge kickbacks to certain top officials. China can do context specific blocking but instead they block entire sites like FB and Twiiter in order to let the local guys gain dominance. Once FB is unblocked, by then it will be irrelevant.

On the second part of your question, western companies use VPNs. The corporate VPNs are not running on the same service as 'normal' residential connections so they aren't subject to the same countermeasures.

Do you think travelling to 'Hong Kong, part of China' is just a matter of hopping on a bus for a 20 minute journey?

1. China is a very big place.

2. Even if the travel itself is convenient, not all Chinese can travel to Hong Kong. You need a visa, different currency, etc. Hong Kong isn't just another city in China.

3. Would you travel to a different state just to drink fair trade coffee (pretend it is not available in your own state)? Would you go every time you wanted coffee?

Why on earth would a government ban a particular integer?

And what exactly does this entail? Are you allowed to utter the words? When you learn to count to 100 do you have to skip them?

A Chinese reader resident in China here.

Precisely, it's not 64 that triggers GFW, it's 6.4 I'm not joking... 64 is a number while 6.4 is a date (June 4th). I'm not aware any content that's blocked because of 64 but sometimes 6.4 does make a page get REST (temp for a couple of minutes) or permanently black listed if the page/site draws attentions from some guy behind GFW.

AFAIK it's rare that guys working for GFW are good enough or responsible enough do fine grained filtering so they brutally block everything contain 6.4 no matter what the context is. This is common in a bureaucratic org or a dictatorial nation. Because power in your hands is not audited by people. So blocking everything 6.4 is safe enough to make the boss happy, why bother working hard? Just block everything.