hacking and gonzo since 2000

Plurk banned in China

Plurk has been blocked by the great firewall of China. We haven't been warned or have been in any contact with the Chinese government - - so the reason is blurry and unknown.

It's very unlikely that we will censor or suppress freedom of speech of Plurk users - as we see freedom of speech as a basic human right. It's known thought that other big corporations such as Google, Skype, AOL etc. are censoring for the Chinese government and probably indirectly putting people in jail.

We feel terribly bad for the thousands of Chinese plurkers that have been affected by this and in shock that their government can do such a censorship :-(

Please advise if you have any information on how to handle an unblocking.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
- Voltaire

Plurk · Political • 23. Apr 2009

13 comments so far

somebody ! :D 23. Apr 2009: you know you can't acces VEOH in bangkok ! :| it sucks :|

someone :3 23. Apr 2009: i think they should have warned you before blocking plurk right. i mean, it`s really not nice of them. it does look rude..

Atamert Ölçgen 23. Apr 2009

Sorry to hear that.

Internet censorship sucks. All kinds of censorship suck but this is the worst place, worst medium IMO.

Türkiye is still blocking¹ Youtube and many other websites. And it doesn't seem to be resolved any soon.

Good luck with Chinese Gov. :|

1: Actually trying without much success. You can easily evade it via OpenDNS.

Joe 23. Apr 2009: heh, time to get more IPs.

Aw 23. Apr 2009

As a Plurk user from China, sorry to hear that.

I think plurk can try to get more IP or different URL rules to avoid that. Like flickr is using farm4.flickr.com specially from Chinese traffic.

And, for the last, doing business in China you have to listen to its gov, no matter whether it's reasonable. :(

面经 24. Apr 2009: gfw is evil

anon 24. Apr 2009

if it's just a DNS block, advise your users to switch to OpenDNS. if it's a url-based filter, there is not much you can do, except:

Disabling the access from p.r.china to the chinese version of plurk (twitter has lots of tibet related message, but they are mostly in english; it's fine as long as it hasn't caught on in mainstream media).

Then try contacting the officials, but you need to contact the right ones, by which I mean you need to get some insider helps.

That's as far as I can help.

Alex 24. Apr 2009: Connection Interrupted
I use OpenDNS & I'm in China.
Tell ur users to use proxy or Tor. I'll contact my ISP.

Passy 24. Apr 2009: Weird world we're living in. German govornment currently thinks about a blocking list, too. It's announced to be childporn-only, but everyone knows that it's just a question of time when other sites will be on that list, as well. At least it's DNS-only in the first "phase" and easy to avoid.

Tory 25. Apr 2009: One solution would be to use tor. I do not know if my website link will work, but that is the website.
Or you can use OpenDNS.

SteamedFish 26. Apr 2009: OpenDNS won't work. They will filter DNS packages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Tey 28. Apr 2009: dang it... my friend told me that i have karma from 72 before plurk was banned. now 66 only... that sucks -_-.. i hope the banning of plurk will be removed... i dont want to go back to 0.00 karma :(

club penguin 19. May 2009: It's announced to be childporn-only, but everyone knows that it's just a question of time when other sites will be on that list, as well. At least it's DNS-only in the first "phase" and easy to avoid.