15 ms·

Gmail blocked in China

261 points by brandonheato 12y ago

freakyterrorist 12y ago
While this is undoubtably an aggressive move by China I can't help but doubt that the impact will be very large. By now most Chinese users of googles services are using VPNs so this really only affects the lowest common denominator of Chinese users
- kancer 12y ago
  Using VPNs are becoming increasingly difficult too. All the large VPN services are blocked here; OpenVPN doesn't work; the only option left is to use unknown services which are not guaranteed to be genuine.
  - akramhussein 12y ago
    I found ARK and a few others to work on my iPhone. None on my MacBook though.
  - Normati 12y ago
    StrongVPN works fine for me. I leave it on pretty much 24/7 except when it disconnects a few times a day.
akramhussein 12y ago
Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different. Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media. Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better suited to Chinese culture too.
- crishoj 12y ago
  In my experience, internet access in Hong Kong is completely separate, and not restricted by the "Great Firewall".
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    One Country, Two Systems
- WhitneyLand 12y ago
  >>Speaking to locals they don't care Locals don't care that they can't use certain American sites, or don't care that they are intellectually oppressed?
  - dengnan 12y ago
    We do care. The problem is: What can we do? Using technical method to get through GFW? Well, it works now but technically, Chinese government controls all Internet facility and they do not even care to block thousands of IPs, even if it means block the whole Internet (It happened in Xinjiang and Tibet.) Moreover, ISPs constantly throttle the international data which means connecting to a server outside GFW may be very slow or even randomly disconnected. In short, any technical solution does not work on a government who controls the country's Internet facilities and does not care to pull the plug. Other solutions? You cannot turn to traditional media like newspapers and TVs, because they are, as well, controlled by the government, which is in turn controlled by a single party. There's also no way to make any meaningful non-violence political influence. The government is not voted by the people so they just don't care whatever their people say. The only possible way is to use violence, but we do not have guns.
    - chinathrow 12y ago
      "The only possible way is to use violence, but we do not have guns." Well, there's a few options left, no?
    - LiweiZ 12y ago
praptak 12y ago
What would happen if everybody added random "free tibet human rights xinjiang" triggers to their web pages? Or even better, randomly embed real snippets from organizations that fight for human rights in China.
- deleted 12y ago
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- menato 12y ago
  The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)
  - kryptiskt 12y ago
    What a red herring. That is one weak excuse for China's violation of human rights. Yeah, most of the world lacked human rights in the past, so what?
    - menato 12y ago
      This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
      - Normati 12y ago
        Human rights are a luxury of stable, developed countries. If autocratic governments are too liberal with them, they can lose their power, and that can end up worse than all the human rights problems put together (ie civil war). See Iraq or Syria for example.
        tobltobs 12y ago
BillFranklin 12y ago
I'm fairly sure this has been the case for a few months, this site is very useful: http://www.blockedinchina.net/ http://www.blockedinchina.net/.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  That web site tests HTTP. The article specifically mentions IMAP and SMTP.
  - BillFranklin 12y ago
    Ah, thanks. I spoke too soon. I remembered it started earlier this year and thought this was a repeat of the story. This is a colossal increase.
kweks 12y ago
I've had less and less success with VPNs in China - I resort to SSH tunneling / SOCKS proxies on personal boxes. SOCKS proxies will get cut off after ~1h or so, you'll have a 'cool down' period of a few minutes, and then they'll come back. Presumably this is to irritate, or perhaps to have a chance to see which requests slip through during the disruption.
- strebler 12y ago
  Have you tried obfsproxy? You can make a tunnel that looks like web/skype/etc traffic, it's worked well for us in China when we've needed it.
atoponce 12y ago
The "Great Firewall" in China has over 600 million active Internet users. That's double the population of the United States. Baidu is the dominating search engine, there are replacement services for Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their IM "Wechat" has over 300 million active users alone. In all reality, Google, Facebook, and others would _love_ to have even the smallest presence in China to get access to that user base. It's a gold mine just waiting to be cracked. Until they are, it will be referred to as "The Great Firewall", when in reality, Chinese internet users probably aren't really missing a lot, outside of politically charged sites, perhaps.
- malandrew 12y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say that Chinese users aren't missing a lot. At the end of the day, a small number of users are responsible for the overwhelming majority of quality content created and discovered (authorship and curation). Those users more often than not rely on high quality content irrespective of national origin. When you cut off that access for those people, it's certain to limit the quality, breadth and depth of what they create and share with their peers in China. I expect this to be especially true with Twitter, which is often a very valuable back channel for many communities of interest (for example, a lot of prominent engineers in several programming language communities use Twitter as a way to share novel ideas and libraries). When you cut off Chinese users from these sites, you cut them off from a lot more than just inconvenient political content.
- hipaulshi 12y ago
  almost all tech companies in China are behind VPNs. Yep.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
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- nihaody 12y ago
  We got ourselves a big old steaming 五毛党. How about you rip up your US student visa and return to your 土包子 parent's apartment in Shanghai.
illumen 12y ago
Trade war imminent?
- thomasato 12y ago
  I wonder that as well.
  - JTon 12y ago
    What motives does China have to begin a trade war with its largest trade partner? Serious Q
- frozenport 12y ago
  Its already happening in the form of non-unilateral trade policies. China is able to do what it wants in the US, but US companies are de-facto required to make vast contributions of intellectual property to do business in China.
WhitneyLand 12y ago
Is Tor not an option? I thought it could hide itself pretty well via HTTP tunneling. Maybe the performance makes it a last resort.
- hipaulshi 12y ago
  all public tor bridge is blocked in China. Besides, it's soooo slow...
- oahziur 12y ago
  I think Tor network was not working in China a long time ago...
nihaody 12y ago
But the big bad USA is still much much worse than China let us not forget!
est 12y ago
No no no this is bad journalism. Is not just blocking "access" to gmail, but one out of of five Gmail's MX servers are blocked gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com (74.125.31.26, blocked) alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com to be specific, all traffic to address of 74.125.31.0/24, including gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com, got null routed after AS4134 This means China now risks becoming isolated in global email network, not just "access" to Gmail. And no, your VPN/SSH/whatever_tunnel won't work if all of the MX servers are blocked.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  Why doesn't my tunnel work in China?
  - salmonellaeater 12y ago
    The issue is that Google's mail servers can't communicate with servers within China, so any user of a Chinese mail service will not be able to send mail to Gmail users (and vice versa). If you are within China using a VPN to access Gmail, Google still can't send emails back in to Chinese machines.
    - 3pt14159 12y ago
      Ah. Seems dumb of them. There are millions of Chinese people all around the world that will be trying to email their family back home. Why block just one email provider? Why try to segregate yourself from the world's email network? It isn't even going to work because what every Chinese person will do is get a tunnel to sign up for the non-Chinese email service (maybe even Gmail!) and it will just further push people to use encryption. If the Chinese government were shrewd, they would do what the American government does: make using American servers as easy as possible then spy on the contents.
      - Chronic30 12y ago
        Why block one email provider? Because China isn't a fan of Google. Yes they will be cut off from the world. But if you want to communicate with the Chinese, you will simply use something other than Gmail.
Nux 12y ago
So, should I understand that essentially centralising email within gmail is bad? How have we not seen this coming? /sarcasm
kaptain 12y ago
The sentiment that access to Google services doesn't matter because there are sufficient Chinese replacements is absolutely wrong. The Chinese government is handicapping its tech labor development by blocking Google. I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better. And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.
- edwinyzh 12y ago
  This is correct. While it's a minority, all the Chinese programmers (me included) hate the GFW!
- LiweiZ 12y ago
  Baidu's search results are basically unusable compared to Google's. The only reason it thrives is it's one of the only few options in the country. Another thing, given the ruling party's organization structure and its way of execution/management, a rough cut(I mean 一刀切 in Chinese) style is exactly what you can find in almost all the things they do. A fine-grained approach can hardly be expected in this case. Not to mention there is a lack of feedback mechanism of this demand for decision makers.
- auganov 12y ago
  Ironically though, if there was to be no GFW in China, at least half of the web tech sector would disappear. Startups are in a weird place of suffering the most but also benefiting the most from the GFW.
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
What do citizens in China think of this? When Google Search was effectively banned, some scientists said that they depended on Google Scholar and Google Books, services which were also affected by the ban. Are Baidu and similar services really an effective replacement? I'm also wondering what would happen if the U.S. takes this to the World Trade Organization. Arbitrarily blocking some company's services could well be interpreted as unfair trade practices. And a more aggressive U.S. government, perhaps with a more protectionist president in 2016, might well decide to retaliate.
- wilbeibi 12y ago
  Thanks to GFW, many of my friends learned the usage of VPN/SSH/NAT/hosts at a very early age, which benefits a lot when taking computer network course. (>﹏<.)
- CitizenKane 12y ago
  Most are aware of it, and for a lot of things there simply aren't good replacements. Baidu is pretty much a poor clone of Google and definitely doesn't work as well (even for Chinese language searches). At the same time though, Chinese people are fairly used to censorship. It's pervasive at every level in China, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult to see. I think there is a stymying effect here, but there is no way that the Communist Party will give up censorship of the internet over nothing. There might be at least some possibility that using the WTO could help this. It did have an effect on the rare earth trade when China was restricting rare earth exports [1]. I suspect China would fight _far_ harder against this though.
- LiweiZ 12y ago
  Not an effective replacement but one of the only few options they have. Google is not even in majority's option list.
- smilekzs 12y ago
  The majority of Chinese netizens [citation needed] don't care simply because they're not as well educated to digest English content to begin with. Looking forward to see this issue escalate, as it's the only way to deter the Chinese Gov't.
devll 12y ago
I live in Urumqi. Not only Gmail is blocked , but all the google services are blocked here. And it has been quite a long time.
- smcl 12y ago
  Are you a foreigner or are you Chinese? I'm curious as I naively assumed that due to the unrest\resistance that even tourism in Urumqi was difficult to do legally, and therefore residence\work would be out of the question or nigh on impossible
  - devll 12y ago
    I'm Chinese, but I am from minority. I am a developer so it is quite painful to live with this network.
- kweks 12y ago
  I'm looking to ride through west china this summer. Would I be able to send you an email / IM to ask a few logistical questions? :)
  - devll 12y ago
    Sure. I am happy to help . I can access Gmail with SOCKS proxy, so you can mail me at a p h a w k.
radikalus 12y ago
Is this true in the FTZ as well? I've yet to find really good reliable info on the net situation in the FTZ...
eitally 12y ago
Perhaps we are an edge case, but this has a potentially significant impact to certain businesses, namingly those that are Google Apps customers and rely on gmail to get work done. They'll be routing all web traffic over their own network via HK or Singapore, but... That doesn't help employees who need Mobile email access. As of now, companies can't count on remote access to corporate gmail by Chinese employees. We have about 2500 Chinese employees with sanctioned BYOD phones - it's a huge problem!
- lsseckman 12y ago
  We're going to be running into the same problem as we're planning to roll out thousands of new Gmail & other google app accounts over the next couple of months. Has Google made any statement about whether these will be operable or not?
fown9 12y ago
Two observations: 1) Since China effectively blocked most of Google's services (and uses Google's mobile operating system for free and makes a ton of money off it - look at Xiaomi), Isn't it basically that China was able to rob Google, and doesn't suffer any consequences from it? 2) Also most US websites are blocked in China (Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYTimes, the list goes on and on...) Why is it that the US government doesn't take any action against that, where as China is freely dumping cheap manufactured products that are made in factories that violate human rights?
- abhinavk 12y ago
  AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) is open-source.
- frozenport 12y ago
  >>Why is it that the US government doesn't take any action against that Because the US goverment is in league with China[1], and American voters have a non-pragmatic view of unilateral free-trade? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fin...
xnull2guest 12y ago
This is likely because of Google's agreement with the US government to provide access to Chinese emails to officials as part of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and the Chinese hacking of the access systems put in place by Google for law enforcement to collect a list of active surveillance targets.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  It is good that China is protecting their citizens like this maybe Europe can do it too.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Not surprising considering the tricks they've been pulling of late. What can be said here? The people have chosen an autocratic government and often, without me even provoking them, will tell me how superior is is to western values, the same way Russians will also do. As an international traveler and sometimes international worker, this is fairly typical stuff. I see this kind of thing on VK and Facebook all the time. Everytime some autocratic regime cracks down the people go, "Please more sir! We dont need the Western pigs and their decadent values!" They buy into the anti-Western narrative pretty deeply. My personal take is that there's a great war for democracy going on right now and the final lines are being drawn. The weaker autocrats have fallen (mideast, Ukraine, etc) and the stronger ones are falling (Syria) but the strongest have double-down on oppression (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc). I think this political dynamic will be the defining narrative for quite some time. I also think a balkanazation of the internet is slowly happening. China is certainly doing it and Russia might follow. I personally don't have a big problem with this. Probably means less malware and cyberattacks for everyone. I think its obvious that easy access to information isn't this revolutionary thing, at least in autocratic regimes. People just seem to prefer state controlled media or narratives that fit in with their biases. Once China sets the precedent others will follow, especially if there's zero economic fallout from it.
- edwinyzh 12y ago
  "The people have chosen an autocratic government" - saying so is so unfair to us. Maybe people like me who desire for an unblocked Internet is a minority (when compared to the population in this country), but people who desire for safe milk and food, clean water and fresh air for their babies are not! But on the other hand, I must say that your observations described in your first paragraph are correct. Take the recent Hong Kong protest for an example, almost all people I know, including the highly educated people, are "tricked" by the censored local newspaper and are not on the same side of the HK people, and that made me sad and irritated...
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    We in the US complain about our lack of choice in the political system. We have two parties, making our choices rather limited in elections. However, China has a one party system. There is no counter to the Communist Party.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
So if I want to start an email conversation with a vendor about some work I might need, they can't correspond with me because I'm on GMail? And this makes sense to the Chinese? But on the bright side, looks like China will begin a struggle to stop "organ harvesting", a euphemism if I've ever seen one. (Not that the effort is forecast to be successful.) From a meta narrative, it's interesting that there was a great push for centralization of everything, which Google benefited from. Now, due to political realities, we may be seeing another huge push for localization, even if it means owning one's own cloud server somewhere that one can VPN into.
kazinator 12y ago
Can mail server operators other than Google opt into this? It would be an administrative simplification for me if China would block itself from my port 25.
manlio 12y ago
Slightly OT, but I'm going to travel through China in a couple days and before reading this thread I thought I could get away with my VPN (hosted on my Digital Ocean VPS) plus eventually Tor, but now I'm not quite sure anymore. Could anybody shed light on this?
- zirkus 12y ago
  Not quite the same as what you're proposing but here's what I did. My parents were living in china for a few years and I set them up with a squid server on ec2 tokyo region micro instance with a script that would create a ssh tunnel to it and configured the browser to use it. Little hacky but it worked fine.
- djvu9 12y ago
  VPN is roughly ok as long as your IP address is not in the blacklist. But it could be unstable. The GFW may drop your connections from time to time. I am not sure about Tor but I believe it probably doesn't work any more. Private VPN/shadowsocks is now the majority I think.
  - silviogutierrez 12y ago
    Out of curiosity: what does shadowsocks do that regular SSH tunneling doesn't do? Why is an entire program needed just to run a simple ssh command? I couldn't find any info on the matter.
    - djvu9 12y ago
      Shadowsocks is (arguably) easier to use for ordinary people and better informed. Most people don't even have command line experience before. After all this is one problem limited in one country which couldn't be freely discussed so choices may not be "optimal" in some sense.
      - silviogutierrez 12y ago
        Ah thanks. So it doesn't actually offer additional functionality, then? The best tool I've ever used was https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle , because it was far lower level than a proxy. Unfortunately, it's super unstable on modern OSX versions.
runewell 12y ago
I have only been to HK and Macau but never to the China mainland. Pardon my ignorance, but why does the Chinese government bother to censor the Internet? Are the people in China not happy with the progress that has occurred over the past few decades? Is the government really that concerned with their populace discussing politics or sensitive issues openly? Do Chinese provinces consider themselves to be separate and distinct or is it more like US states where the differences are superficial and the division is unimportant? It seems to me the US doesn't have much leverage regarding this particular issue. We would be best served working harder towards more affordable and flexible manufacturing automation so we can be more self-reliant.
- edwinyzh 12y ago
  I think the reasons include, but might not limited to two reasons: 1 - Prevent the people from reading and discussion sensitive issues - there are so many of them. 2 - Prevent the people from knowing universal values.
- timguoqk 12y ago
  To answer your questions: Chinese government obviously bothers and is very concerned, for many cultural and historical reasons that cannot be easily summarized. Provinces do not have so much power. It's completely different from US. China has been a centralized country since ancient time and the communist party is really good at executing the decision of the central government.
- djvu9 12y ago
  I think the Chinese government works more like a gang than the kind of government you are familiar with. The only politically correct thing is to maintain the ruling, and the real motivations are nothing uncommon: power and money, and most of the time the latter. The great firewall project is a big business for a lot of people (e.g., billions dollars business if not much more). Hardware providers look for the deals. Professors in universities look for funds (for themselves and for their students). And the biggest cut would be bribes for officials and commissions for pimps. The worst part is this business is sort of under table and there is not much control. All these people want this business to stay and grow under the name of glorious "reasons", and there is just zero motive for people to get in its way.
justicezyx 12y ago
Let's be honest. They are just trying to protect a extremely-valuable domestic IT market... Whining about censorship is always dodging the core issue of China's IT policy... But I guess, Google, for one at least, does not give a damn on Chinese market (pun intended)...
fidotron 12y ago
It's fairly interesting to contrast the reaction here with that whenever Uber is involved. Google violate laws in China, but apparently that's to be encouraged, yet if Uber do the same in a nice supposed liberal democracy they are to be criticised? As it stands end users are reduced to pawns in the emerging power struggle between governments and multinationals.
- skwirl 12y ago
  What law did Google break that caused gmail to be shut down? According to the article the Chinese government denies doing anything. I also don't think you understand HN very well. What is supported is not supported on grounds of legality but on what is viewed as good for people as a whole. "What is legal is what is right and what is right is what is legal" is the antithesis of how most hackers think.
roylez 12y ago
Chinese Gmail user here. Now the easiest way to access Gmail is via Mailbox. No kidding. It works on my android phone and Macbook, and should do as well on iPhone. The first time of use requires a proxy, but afterwards it is okay without any. My guess is email information is partially saved on Dropbox servers by Mailbox. I don't know for how long Mailbox would continue to work though. when it doesn't work, I will have to use a SSH tunnel every time checking emails.
footpath 12y ago
Here is an editorial from Global Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times, a government mouthpiece known for its ardent pro-Party slant): http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/899197.shtml http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/899197.shtml Some select quotes: "The problems with Gmail access this time may be caused by the China side, by Google itself or a combination of the two. But Western media pointed the finger at Chinese authorities immediately, accusing them of strengthening its cyber censorship. This is far too simple a hypothesis. It should be noted that Google voluntarily quit the mainland market in 2010. The issue at heart is to what extent Google is willing to obey Chinese law, on which China's attitude is steadfast." "In this sense, it's dubious that China "blocked" Gmail simply over security concerns. Since both Google and China haven't given an explanation and meanwhile Gmail is a technically complex system, there may be some puzzling reasons behind the incident. "If the China side indeed blocked Gmail, the decision must have been prompted by newly emerged security reasons. If that is the case, Gmail users need to accept the reality of Gmail being suspended in China. But we hope it is not the case." The article's original Chinese version can be found here: http://tech.huanqiu.com/internet/2014-12/5313893.html http://tech.huanqiu.com/internet/2014-12/5313893.html Curiously, the English version is missing the following two paragraphs: "中美围绕互联网既有合作，亦有摩擦，双方的相互适应过程仍在继续。由于中美关系庞大而复杂，互联网问题只是其中一部分，外部变数的影响也是存在的。"(Third to last paragraph) My translation: In regards to the Internet, China and the US both cooperate and experience some frictions, so the mutual adaptation process of the two sides continues. Due to the complexity of the Sino-US relationship, Internet issues are only a part of it, and there also exist other external variables. "因此无论Gmail“失联”是谷歌还是中方的原因，或者是复合原因，使用者们不妨顺其自然，做多手准备。中国发展有过多难以计数的磕绊和插曲，这个故事又算得了什么。"(Last paragraph) My translation: Whether Gmail's "losing contact" is caused by Google or China, or a combination thereof, users should just go with the flow, and be prepared with other backup plans. China's development process has been met with countless stumbles and other interludes, so this story doesn't really matter in the end.
horacex 12y ago
this is so stupid. we are a startup team from China using Google's Apps service. So far most of mainstream mail provider like 163.com and qq.com can still exchange email with gmail. But without VPN we can't send/receive mails from mobile.
epynonymous 12y ago
i didn't rtfa, but this is nothing new, i've been in shanghai since 2007, afaik, google services (including gmail) have been hard to access, it was really after eric schmidt put the assault on china by making things public (circa 2010) that things started to get to really bad. from memory, 50% of the time, google services (search, gmail, apis, compute engine, office apps, etc) would not work back in 2007, in 2010 probably 80% of access would fail, and recently in the past year and a half, it's been almost 99% to now 100%. i've already started a backup strategy long ago (about 8 months ago) as the frustration was just started to drive me crazy, I migrated all my services to either local equivalents or microsoft (outlook.com), but there's only a matter of time before those perhaps also get blocked. of similar relation, ever since the snowden leaks, it seems that china has started looking to ban or outright limit foreign technology services used by the china government which is basically almost like everything, the nickname is qu ioe, qu which stands for out/oust, ioe stands for ibm, oracle, and emc. note that vpn still seems to work, and if you're traveling on a roaming mobile service, you can still access google services (and others like facebook, twitter, youtube), but if you're plugging into the hotel wifi without vpn, good f'ing luck. note that i also work at a foreign national software company in china, the office can access these services uninhibited since we have an mpls to the main office in the valley. if you're living in china and dependent on foreign services/apis like google then it's really hard because you must have vpn or some equivalent. i suggest even using a jumpbox.
- epynonymous 12y ago
  for the record, i don't work for microsoft, so note trying to shamelessly solicit outlook, reading back on my post, i imagine some would think so.
- edwinyzh 12y ago
  Hi, maybe I ask what's "mpls", did a Google search but had no luck.
  - melchebo 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS_VPN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS_VPN
gebegb 12y ago
Oh yeah, let more people see through the nature of the RED empire. It's funny that they even hosted a world internet conference recently.
kaptain 12y ago
Any HN'rs who live in China use Fastmail? Can you share your experience? I'm thinking of switching over but my primary concern is whether Fastmail encounters similar problems to Gmail. (You might recommend using a VPN all the time, but that doesn't always work for me).
invaliddata 12y ago
I have friends and family who are Chinese. Although it is not a universal ttuth, the fact is that many Chinese see the west only as something to be exploited, and do not wish to play by the same rules. This applies to individuals who have come here to work, not just the government or Chinese businessmen. The sentiment is that China was exploited inygr past, and now it is time for payback. One deals with China and Chinese without this backgroud at one's peril.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  There is some of that, but it isn't "getting back." Its like going to Italy and getting ripped off as a tourist; there are plenty of people looking around for an opportunity for a quick buck on the gullible, Foreigner or Chinese. Then couple that with poor rule of law that make scams and unfair exploitation feasible, and you have China (as opposed to say Singapore, which is mostly Chinese but rule of law is strong and people are less hungry for a quick buck).
fan123199 12y ago
Gmail blocked shocked me a lot. I was optimistic about the future of China's speech environment by new Chairman Xi's comming, but from he got the power, the condition is not changed, still bad, and even worse. The internet block is more aggressive and now the gmail is blocked. This is my baseline because email is very individual services. I think it's time to think about immigrating abroad.
known 12y ago
This URL appears to be accessible from mainland China. http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=gmail.com http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=gmail.com

261 points by brandonheato 12y ago

While this is undoubtably an aggressive move by China I can't help but doubt that the impact will be very large. By now most Chinese users of googles services are using VPNs so this really only affects the lowest common denominator of Chinese users

kancer 12y ago
Using VPNs are becoming increasingly difficult too. All the large VPN services are blocked here; OpenVPN doesn't work; the only option left is to use unknown services which are not guaranteed to be genuine.
- akramhussein 12y ago
  I found ARK and a few others to work on my iPhone. None on my MacBook though.
- Normati 12y ago
  StrongVPN works fine for me. I leave it on pretty much 24/7 except when it disconnects a few times a day.

akramhussein 12y ago

Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different. Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media. Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better suited to Chinese culture too.

crishoj 12y ago
In my experience, internet access in Hong Kong is completely separate, and not restricted by the "Great Firewall".
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  One Country, Two Systems
WhitneyLand 12y ago
>>Speaking to locals they don't care Locals don't care that they can't use certain American sites, or don't care that they are intellectually oppressed?
- dengnan 12y ago
  We do care. The problem is: What can we do? Using technical method to get through GFW? Well, it works now but technically, Chinese government controls all Internet facility and they do not even care to block thousands of IPs, even if it means block the whole Internet (It happened in Xinjiang and Tibet.) Moreover, ISPs constantly throttle the international data which means connecting to a server outside GFW may be very slow or even randomly disconnected. In short, any technical solution does not work on a government who controls the country's Internet facilities and does not care to pull the plug. Other solutions? You cannot turn to traditional media like newspapers and TVs, because they are, as well, controlled by the government, which is in turn controlled by a single party. There's also no way to make any meaningful non-violence political influence. The government is not voted by the people so they just don't care whatever their people say. The only possible way is to use violence, but we do not have guns.
  - chinathrow 12y ago
    "The only possible way is to use violence, but we do not have guns." Well, there's a few options left, no?
  - LiweiZ 12y ago

praptak 12y ago

What would happen if everybody added random "free tibet human rights xinjiang" triggers to their web pages? Or even better, randomly embed real snippets from organizations that fight for human rights in China.

deleted 12y ago
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menato 12y ago
The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)
- kryptiskt 12y ago
  What a red herring. That is one weak excuse for China's violation of human rights. Yeah, most of the world lacked human rights in the past, so what?
  - menato 12y ago
    This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
    - Normati 12y ago
      Human rights are a luxury of stable, developed countries. If autocratic governments are too liberal with them, they can lose their power, and that can end up worse than all the human rights problems put together (ie civil war). See Iraq or Syria for example.
      - tobltobs 12y ago

BillFranklin 12y ago

I'm fairly sure this has been the case for a few months, this site is very useful: http://www.blockedinchina.net/ http://www.blockedinchina.net/.

rahimnathwani 12y ago
That web site tests HTTP. The article specifically mentions IMAP and SMTP.
- BillFranklin 12y ago
  Ah, thanks. I spoke too soon. I remembered it started earlier this year and thought this was a repeat of the story. This is a colossal increase.

kweks 12y ago

I've had less and less success with VPNs in China - I resort to SSH tunneling / SOCKS proxies on personal boxes. SOCKS proxies will get cut off after ~1h or so, you'll have a 'cool down' period of a few minutes, and then they'll come back. Presumably this is to irritate, or perhaps to have a chance to see which requests slip through during the disruption.

strebler 12y ago
Have you tried obfsproxy? You can make a tunnel that looks like web/skype/etc traffic, it's worked well for us in China when we've needed it.

atoponce 12y ago

The "Great Firewall" in China has over 600 million active Internet users. That's double the population of the United States. Baidu is the dominating search engine, there are replacement services for Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their IM "Wechat" has over 300 million active users alone. In all reality, Google, Facebook, and others would _love_ to have even the smallest presence in China to get access to that user base. It's a gold mine just waiting to be cracked. Until they are, it will be referred to as "The Great Firewall", when in reality, Chinese internet users probably aren't really missing a lot, outside of politically charged sites, perhaps.

malandrew 12y ago
I don't think it's fair to say that Chinese users aren't missing a lot. At the end of the day, a small number of users are responsible for the overwhelming majority of quality content created and discovered (authorship and curation). Those users more often than not rely on high quality content irrespective of national origin. When you cut off that access for those people, it's certain to limit the quality, breadth and depth of what they create and share with their peers in China. I expect this to be especially true with Twitter, which is often a very valuable back channel for many communities of interest (for example, a lot of prominent engineers in several programming language communities use Twitter as a way to share novel ideas and libraries). When you cut off Chinese users from these sites, you cut them off from a lot more than just inconvenient political content.
hipaulshi 12y ago
almost all tech companies in China are behind VPNs. Yep.
deleted 12y ago
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nihaody 12y ago
We got ourselves a big old steaming 五毛党. How about you rip up your US student visa and return to your 土包子 parent's apartment in Shanghai.

illumen 12y ago

Trade war imminent?

thomasato 12y ago
I wonder that as well.
- JTon 12y ago
  What motives does China have to begin a trade war with its largest trade partner? Serious Q
frozenport 12y ago
Its already happening in the form of non-unilateral trade policies. China is able to do what it wants in the US, but US companies are de-facto required to make vast contributions of intellectual property to do business in China.

WhitneyLand 12y ago

Is Tor not an option? I thought it could hide itself pretty well via HTTP tunneling. Maybe the performance makes it a last resort.

hipaulshi 12y ago
all public tor bridge is blocked in China. Besides, it's soooo slow...
oahziur 12y ago
I think Tor network was not working in China a long time ago...

nihaody 12y ago

But the big bad USA is still much much worse than China let us not forget!

est 12y ago

No no no this is bad journalism. Is not just blocking "access" to gmail, but one out of of five Gmail's MX servers are blocked gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com (74.125.31.26, blocked) alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com to be specific, all traffic to address of 74.125.31.0/24, including gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com, got null routed after AS4134 This means China now risks becoming isolated in global email network, not just "access" to Gmail. And no, your VPN/SSH/whatever_tunnel won't work if all of the MX servers are blocked.

3pt14159 12y ago
Why doesn't my tunnel work in China?
- salmonellaeater 12y ago
  The issue is that Google's mail servers can't communicate with servers within China, so any user of a Chinese mail service will not be able to send mail to Gmail users (and vice versa). If you are within China using a VPN to access Gmail, Google still can't send emails back in to Chinese machines.
  - 3pt14159 12y ago
    Ah. Seems dumb of them. There are millions of Chinese people all around the world that will be trying to email their family back home. Why block just one email provider? Why try to segregate yourself from the world's email network? It isn't even going to work because what every Chinese person will do is get a tunnel to sign up for the non-Chinese email service (maybe even Gmail!) and it will just further push people to use encryption. If the Chinese government were shrewd, they would do what the American government does: make using American servers as easy as possible then spy on the contents.
    - Chronic30 12y ago
      Why block one email provider? Because China isn't a fan of Google. Yes they will be cut off from the world. But if you want to communicate with the Chinese, you will simply use something other than Gmail.

Nux 12y ago

So, should I understand that essentially centralising email within gmail is bad? How have we not seen this coming? /sarcasm

kaptain 12y ago

The sentiment that access to Google services doesn't matter because there are sufficient Chinese replacements is absolutely wrong. The Chinese government is handicapping its tech labor development by blocking Google. I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better. And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.

edwinyzh 12y ago
This is correct. While it's a minority, all the Chinese programmers (me included) hate the GFW!
LiweiZ 12y ago
Baidu's search results are basically unusable compared to Google's. The only reason it thrives is it's one of the only few options in the country. Another thing, given the ruling party's organization structure and its way of execution/management, a rough cut(I mean 一刀切 in Chinese) style is exactly what you can find in almost all the things they do. A fine-grained approach can hardly be expected in this case. Not to mention there is a lack of feedback mechanism of this demand for decision makers.
auganov 12y ago
Ironically though, if there was to be no GFW in China, at least half of the web tech sector would disappear. Startups are in a weird place of suffering the most but also benefiting the most from the GFW.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

What do citizens in China think of this? When Google Search was effectively banned, some scientists said that they depended on Google Scholar and Google Books, services which were also affected by the ban. Are Baidu and similar services really an effective replacement? I'm also wondering what would happen if the U.S. takes this to the World Trade Organization. Arbitrarily blocking some company's services could well be interpreted as unfair trade practices. And a more aggressive U.S. government, perhaps with a more protectionist president in 2016, might well decide to retaliate.

wilbeibi 12y ago
Thanks to GFW, many of my friends learned the usage of VPN/SSH/NAT/hosts at a very early age, which benefits a lot when taking computer network course. (>﹏<.)
CitizenKane 12y ago
Most are aware of it, and for a lot of things there simply aren't good replacements. Baidu is pretty much a poor clone of Google and definitely doesn't work as well (even for Chinese language searches). At the same time though, Chinese people are fairly used to censorship. It's pervasive at every level in China, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult to see. I think there is a stymying effect here, but there is no way that the Communist Party will give up censorship of the internet over nothing. There might be at least some possibility that using the WTO could help this. It did have an effect on the rare earth trade when China was restricting rare earth exports [1]. I suspect China would fight _far_ harder against this though.
LiweiZ 12y ago
Not an effective replacement but one of the only few options they have. Google is not even in majority's option list.
smilekzs 12y ago
The majority of Chinese netizens [citation needed] don't care simply because they're not as well educated to digest English content to begin with. Looking forward to see this issue escalate, as it's the only way to deter the Chinese Gov't.

devll 12y ago

I live in Urumqi. Not only Gmail is blocked , but all the google services are blocked here. And it has been quite a long time.

smcl 12y ago
Are you a foreigner or are you Chinese? I'm curious as I naively assumed that due to the unrest\resistance that even tourism in Urumqi was difficult to do legally, and therefore residence\work would be out of the question or nigh on impossible
- devll 12y ago
  I'm Chinese, but I am from minority. I am a developer so it is quite painful to live with this network.
kweks 12y ago
I'm looking to ride through west china this summer. Would I be able to send you an email / IM to ask a few logistical questions? :)
- devll 12y ago
  Sure. I am happy to help . I can access Gmail with SOCKS proxy, so you can mail me at a p h a w k.

radikalus 12y ago

Is this true in the FTZ as well? I've yet to find really good reliable info on the net situation in the FTZ...

eitally 12y ago

Perhaps we are an edge case, but this has a potentially significant impact to certain businesses, namingly those that are Google Apps customers and rely on gmail to get work done. They'll be routing all web traffic over their own network via HK or Singapore, but... That doesn't help employees who need Mobile email access. As of now, companies can't count on remote access to corporate gmail by Chinese employees. We have about 2500 Chinese employees with sanctioned BYOD phones - it's a huge problem!

lsseckman 12y ago
We're going to be running into the same problem as we're planning to roll out thousands of new Gmail & other google app accounts over the next couple of months. Has Google made any statement about whether these will be operable or not?

fown9 12y ago

Two observations: 1) Since China effectively blocked most of Google's services (and uses Google's mobile operating system for free and makes a ton of money off it - look at Xiaomi), Isn't it basically that China was able to rob Google, and doesn't suffer any consequences from it? 2) Also most US websites are blocked in China (Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYTimes, the list goes on and on...) Why is it that the US government doesn't take any action against that, where as China is freely dumping cheap manufactured products that are made in factories that violate human rights?

abhinavk 12y ago
AOSP (Android Open-Source Project) is open-source.
frozenport 12y ago
>>Why is it that the US government doesn't take any action against that Because the US goverment is in league with China[1], and American voters have a non-pragmatic view of unilateral free-trade? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fin...

xnull2guest 12y ago

This is likely because of Google's agreement with the US government to provide access to Chinese emails to officials as part of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and the Chinese hacking of the access systems put in place by Google for law enforcement to collect a list of active surveillance targets.

happyscrappy 12y ago
It is good that China is protecting their citizens like this maybe Europe can do it too.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

Not surprising considering the tricks they've been pulling of late. What can be said here? The people have chosen an autocratic government and often, without me even provoking them, will tell me how superior is is to western values, the same way Russians will also do. As an international traveler and sometimes international worker, this is fairly typical stuff. I see this kind of thing on VK and Facebook all the time. Everytime some autocratic regime cracks down the people go, "Please more sir! We dont need the Western pigs and their decadent values!" They buy into the anti-Western narrative pretty deeply. My personal take is that there's a great war for democracy going on right now and the final lines are being drawn. The weaker autocrats have fallen (mideast, Ukraine, etc) and the stronger ones are falling (Syria) but the strongest have double-down on oppression (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc). I think this political dynamic will be the defining narrative for quite some time. I also think a balkanazation of the internet is slowly happening. China is certainly doing it and Russia might follow. I personally don't have a big problem with this. Probably means less malware and cyberattacks for everyone. I think its obvious that easy access to information isn't this revolutionary thing, at least in autocratic regimes. People just seem to prefer state controlled media or narratives that fit in with their biases. Once China sets the precedent others will follow, especially if there's zero economic fallout from it.

edwinyzh 12y ago
"The people have chosen an autocratic government" - saying so is so unfair to us. Maybe people like me who desire for an unblocked Internet is a minority (when compared to the population in this country), but people who desire for safe milk and food, clean water and fresh air for their babies are not! But on the other hand, I must say that your observations described in your first paragraph are correct. Take the recent Hong Kong protest for an example, almost all people I know, including the highly educated people, are "tricked" by the censored local newspaper and are not on the same side of the HK people, and that made me sad and irritated...
- dragontamer 12y ago
  We in the US complain about our lack of choice in the political system. We have two parties, making our choices rather limited in elections. However, China has a one party system. There is no counter to the Communist Party.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

So if I want to start an email conversation with a vendor about some work I might need, they can't correspond with me because I'm on GMail? And this makes sense to the Chinese? But on the bright side, looks like China will begin a struggle to stop "organ harvesting", a euphemism if I've ever seen one. (Not that the effort is forecast to be successful.) From a meta narrative, it's interesting that there was a great push for centralization of everything, which Google benefited from. Now, due to political realities, we may be seeing another huge push for localization, even if it means owning one's own cloud server somewhere that one can VPN into.

kazinator 12y ago

Can mail server operators other than Google opt into this? It would be an administrative simplification for me if China would block itself from my port 25.

manlio 12y ago

Slightly OT, but I'm going to travel through China in a couple days and before reading this thread I thought I could get away with my VPN (hosted on my Digital Ocean VPS) plus eventually Tor, but now I'm not quite sure anymore. Could anybody shed light on this?

zirkus 12y ago
Not quite the same as what you're proposing but here's what I did. My parents were living in china for a few years and I set them up with a squid server on ec2 tokyo region micro instance with a script that would create a ssh tunnel to it and configured the browser to use it. Little hacky but it worked fine.
djvu9 12y ago
VPN is roughly ok as long as your IP address is not in the blacklist. But it could be unstable. The GFW may drop your connections from time to time. I am not sure about Tor but I believe it probably doesn't work any more. Private VPN/shadowsocks is now the majority I think.
- silviogutierrez 12y ago
  Out of curiosity: what does shadowsocks do that regular SSH tunneling doesn't do? Why is an entire program needed just to run a simple ssh command? I couldn't find any info on the matter.
  - djvu9 12y ago
    Shadowsocks is (arguably) easier to use for ordinary people and better informed. Most people don't even have command line experience before. After all this is one problem limited in one country which couldn't be freely discussed so choices may not be "optimal" in some sense.
    - silviogutierrez 12y ago
      Ah thanks. So it doesn't actually offer additional functionality, then? The best tool I've ever used was https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle , because it was far lower level than a proxy. Unfortunately, it's super unstable on modern OSX versions.

runewell 12y ago

I have only been to HK and Macau but never to the China mainland. Pardon my ignorance, but why does the Chinese government bother to censor the Internet? Are the people in China not happy with the progress that has occurred over the past few decades? Is the government really that concerned with their populace discussing politics or sensitive issues openly? Do Chinese provinces consider themselves to be separate and distinct or is it more like US states where the differences are superficial and the division is unimportant? It seems to me the US doesn't have much leverage regarding this particular issue. We would be best served working harder towards more affordable and flexible manufacturing automation so we can be more self-reliant.

edwinyzh 12y ago
I think the reasons include, but might not limited to two reasons: 1 - Prevent the people from reading and discussion sensitive issues - there are so many of them. 2 - Prevent the people from knowing universal values.
timguoqk 12y ago
To answer your questions: Chinese government obviously bothers and is very concerned, for many cultural and historical reasons that cannot be easily summarized. Provinces do not have so much power. It's completely different from US. China has been a centralized country since ancient time and the communist party is really good at executing the decision of the central government.
djvu9 12y ago
I think the Chinese government works more like a gang than the kind of government you are familiar with. The only politically correct thing is to maintain the ruling, and the real motivations are nothing uncommon: power and money, and most of the time the latter. The great firewall project is a big business for a lot of people (e.g., billions dollars business if not much more). Hardware providers look for the deals. Professors in universities look for funds (for themselves and for their students). And the biggest cut would be bribes for officials and commissions for pimps. The worst part is this business is sort of under table and there is not much control. All these people want this business to stay and grow under the name of glorious "reasons", and there is just zero motive for people to get in its way.

justicezyx 12y ago

Let's be honest. They are just trying to protect a extremely-valuable domestic IT market... Whining about censorship is always dodging the core issue of China's IT policy... But I guess, Google, for one at least, does not give a damn on Chinese market (pun intended)...

fidotron 12y ago

It's fairly interesting to contrast the reaction here with that whenever Uber is involved. Google violate laws in China, but apparently that's to be encouraged, yet if Uber do the same in a nice supposed liberal democracy they are to be criticised? As it stands end users are reduced to pawns in the emerging power struggle between governments and multinationals.

skwirl 12y ago
What law did Google break that caused gmail to be shut down? According to the article the Chinese government denies doing anything. I also don't think you understand HN very well. What is supported is not supported on grounds of legality but on what is viewed as good for people as a whole. "What is legal is what is right and what is right is what is legal" is the antithesis of how most hackers think.

roylez 12y ago

Chinese Gmail user here. Now the easiest way to access Gmail is via Mailbox. No kidding. It works on my android phone and Macbook, and should do as well on iPhone. The first time of use requires a proxy, but afterwards it is okay without any. My guess is email information is partially saved on Dropbox servers by Mailbox. I don't know for how long Mailbox would continue to work though. when it doesn't work, I will have to use a SSH tunnel every time checking emails.

footpath 12y ago

Here is an editorial from Global Times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times, a government mouthpiece known for its ardent pro-Party slant): http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/899197.shtml http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/899197.shtml Some select quotes: "The problems with Gmail access this time may be caused by the China side, by Google itself or a combination of the two. But Western media pointed the finger at Chinese authorities immediately, accusing them of strengthening its cyber censorship. This is far too simple a hypothesis. It should be noted that Google voluntarily quit the mainland market in 2010. The issue at heart is to what extent Google is willing to obey Chinese law, on which China's attitude is steadfast." "In this sense, it's dubious that China "blocked" Gmail simply over security concerns. Since both Google and China haven't given an explanation and meanwhile Gmail is a technically complex system, there may be some puzzling reasons behind the incident. "If the China side indeed blocked Gmail, the decision must have been prompted by newly emerged security reasons. If that is the case, Gmail users need to accept the reality of Gmail being suspended in China. But we hope it is not the case." The article's original Chinese version can be found here: http://tech.huanqiu.com/internet/2014-12/5313893.html http://tech.huanqiu.com/internet/2014-12/5313893.html Curiously, the English version is missing the following two paragraphs: "中美围绕互联网既有合作，亦有摩擦，双方的相互适应过程仍在继续。由于中美关系庞大而复杂，互联网问题只是其中一部分，外部变数的影响也是存在的。"(Third to last paragraph) My translation: In regards to the Internet, China and the US both cooperate and experience some frictions, so the mutual adaptation process of the two sides continues. Due to the complexity of the Sino-US relationship, Internet issues are only a part of it, and there also exist other external variables. "因此无论Gmail“失联”是谷歌还是中方的原因，或者是复合原因，使用者们不妨顺其自然，做多手准备。中国发展有过多难以计数的磕绊和插曲，这个故事又算得了什么。"(Last paragraph) My translation: Whether Gmail's "losing contact" is caused by Google or China, or a combination thereof, users should just go with the flow, and be prepared with other backup plans. China's development process has been met with countless stumbles and other interludes, so this story doesn't really matter in the end.

horacex 12y ago

this is so stupid. we are a startup team from China using Google's Apps service. So far most of mainstream mail provider like 163.com and qq.com can still exchange email with gmail. But without VPN we can't send/receive mails from mobile.

epynonymous 12y ago

i didn't rtfa, but this is nothing new, i've been in shanghai since 2007, afaik, google services (including gmail) have been hard to access, it was really after eric schmidt put the assault on china by making things public (circa 2010) that things started to get to really bad. from memory, 50% of the time, google services (search, gmail, apis, compute engine, office apps, etc) would not work back in 2007, in 2010 probably 80% of access would fail, and recently in the past year and a half, it's been almost 99% to now 100%. i've already started a backup strategy long ago (about 8 months ago) as the frustration was just started to drive me crazy, I migrated all my services to either local equivalents or microsoft (outlook.com), but there's only a matter of time before those perhaps also get blocked. of similar relation, ever since the snowden leaks, it seems that china has started looking to ban or outright limit foreign technology services used by the china government which is basically almost like everything, the nickname is qu ioe, qu which stands for out/oust, ioe stands for ibm, oracle, and emc. note that vpn still seems to work, and if you're traveling on a roaming mobile service, you can still access google services (and others like facebook, twitter, youtube), but if you're plugging into the hotel wifi without vpn, good f'ing luck. note that i also work at a foreign national software company in china, the office can access these services uninhibited since we have an mpls to the main office in the valley. if you're living in china and dependent on foreign services/apis like google then it's really hard because you must have vpn or some equivalent. i suggest even using a jumpbox.

epynonymous 12y ago
for the record, i don't work for microsoft, so note trying to shamelessly solicit outlook, reading back on my post, i imagine some would think so.
edwinyzh 12y ago
Hi, maybe I ask what's "mpls", did a Google search but had no luck.
- melchebo 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS_VPN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPLS_VPN

gebegb 12y ago

Oh yeah, let more people see through the nature of the RED empire. It's funny that they even hosted a world internet conference recently.

kaptain 12y ago

Any HN'rs who live in China use Fastmail? Can you share your experience? I'm thinking of switching over but my primary concern is whether Fastmail encounters similar problems to Gmail. (You might recommend using a VPN all the time, but that doesn't always work for me).

invaliddata 12y ago

I have friends and family who are Chinese. Although it is not a universal ttuth, the fact is that many Chinese see the west only as something to be exploited, and do not wish to play by the same rules. This applies to individuals who have come here to work, not just the government or Chinese businessmen. The sentiment is that China was exploited inygr past, and now it is time for payback. One deals with China and Chinese without this backgroud at one's peril.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
There is some of that, but it isn't "getting back." Its like going to Italy and getting ripped off as a tourist; there are plenty of people looking around for an opportunity for a quick buck on the gullible, Foreigner or Chinese. Then couple that with poor rule of law that make scams and unfair exploitation feasible, and you have China (as opposed to say Singapore, which is mostly Chinese but rule of law is strong and people are less hungry for a quick buck).

fan123199 12y ago

Gmail blocked shocked me a lot. I was optimistic about the future of China's speech environment by new Chairman Xi's comming, but from he got the power, the condition is not changed, still bad, and even worse. The internet block is more aggressive and now the gmail is blocked. This is my baseline because email is very individual services. I think it's time to think about immigrating abroad.

known 12y ago

This URL appears to be accessible from mainland China. http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=gmail.com http://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=gmail.com