AmericanPapist Comments
You might want to check again. It now shows up as available. It only shows up as blocked if you leave a space at the end of the URL.
hmm, can you recreate that? I've tried my root "www.americanpapist.com" and the specific url "www.americanpapist.com/blog.html" with and without backslashes and each time it reads blocked for me...
This will never stop the computer-savvy ones. It shouldn't be too hard to just resolve to some secure port tunnel you could establish on a server in some other country, and access the web that way. I wonder what would happen if you were caught, tho..
Strange. I tried the Vatican's website three times. The first time it was available, the second and third times it was blocked. I'm not sure if that website is entirely accurate. But I would suspect that the Vatican's website would most probably be blocked by the communists.
It's not accurate. I lived in China recently and I accessed your blog while there, and I also know that livejournal.com IS working, because my friends who are in China are still reading and commenting on my blog. The firewall is a problem though.
hmm, maybe someone should double-check dom's site as well in this case. thanks for the input, I'll add an update to this post.
Well, if they're blocking http://www.popesonparade.com, they're certainly going to block you!
Terribly funny, and terribly sad.
I found this recently myself. When I tried I wasn't blocked. But, my hope is to someday be.
Anyway, even if this sirte isn't totally right on what is or isn't blocked, the point it is trying to make is. & that is that China has put blocks on certain types of websites that a free society would never tolerate, those that disagree politically with the government's policies.
I've been watching the Great Firewall making the blog rounds for the last three weeks. Seems to be a theme...
I fail to understand why anyone would want to be blocked? Is this some sort of P*ssing contest? Is this how one proves one's Catholic credentials?
You don't need to state the obvious to the Chinese, i.e. things of an obvious political nature, you think they don't know? Patronizing.
If Catholics were actually concerned about them rather than their own street cred it might be an idea to try something else other than making obvious and unneccessary inflamatory cracks about the government of the PRC, as I said, you think "they" don't know?
My two pence worth.
Hey Papist:
My experience in China was this: all blogspot.com hosted blogs were blocked, regardless of content (Catholic, pagan, what have you). However, typepad blogs worked, so I could read Amy Welborn, but couldn't pull up my own blog.
However, www.blogger.com worked, so I could *update* my blog, just not see it!
What I didn't know back then, but I discovered later (thanks to a bureaucractic fiasco last summer by which blogspot blogs were blocked in India!) that there are several sites through which one can surf anonymously, or using a proxy server. http://pkblogs.com was set up specifically to bypass a blogspot (only) blogger ban in Pakistan, but, apparently, it works behind China's Great Firewall as well (and it worked in India as well). There's also places like www.proxify.com and others (whose seamy interfaces lead me to believe that they are used mainly by those looking for porn, and not noble minded pursuers of free speech).
The greatfirewall tester site says very clearly that "false" blocking results can be result due to purely technical reasons. In my recollection, however, while the Vatican's website was available in China (it's largely in English and other European languages), the Archdiocese of Hongkong's Chinese pages weren't, while, I think, its English pages were!
thanks for the account, Gashwin. I appreciate it.
I asked my friends who live in China. Now it's ok. But last year did not work at all.
Commenting by HaloScan
