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In principal it's easy to explain - as long as you have uncensored content on your website, it's going to be blocked. For example, HN is blocked. If it didn't
by rfoo 3y ago
In principal it's easy to explain - as long as you have uncensored content on your website, it's going to be blocked. For example, HN is blocked.
If it didn't happen, then it's because you are not big enough.
A few cases:
- FB, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube are all blocked: user generated content and without outrageous censorship effort (Douyin has 100k employees dedicated to censor and is top cost center, Weibo 50k IIRC) it is very predictable, just assume such things get blocked.
- Google is blocked. They announced in 2010 they didn't want to censor any more.
- A censored version of Bing is not blocked.
- Dropbox is blocked: the same reason.
- Notably, GitHub is NOT blocked. GitHub pages and Gist are blocked. This is because GitHub does censor repos upon government request, plus that when it was once blocked scientist spent effort and managed to reverse the decision.
- WhatsApp and Signal are blocked. SMS from Signal is also blocked for all +86 numbers so people simply can't register.
- iMessage is not blocked. This is, IMO, an outlier. My guess is it's because Apple + no group chat + incompetence.
- error_logic 3y agoDidn't Apple agree to store data inside China for their citizens in a separate server system, thus making it subject to scrutiny on a national level? If that has been the case and people think otherwise...well, it shows how hard it is to navigate the abstractions of networked systems.
- rfoo 3y agoThey did. But iMessage is end-to-end encrypted. As long as you avoid the iCloud caveat (iCloud backups are by default not E2E encrypted) you get an actual uncensored E2EE messaging app in China.