Why did they block Blogspot again?

Years ago, when I very first moved to the Mainland on a perminant basis, I was given a simply answer that could be used in situations like this. Three simple words: "This is China".

Anybody whom doesn't accept this as being a valid answer is clearly an ignorant foreigner who doesn't understand China.

Of course, I know all to well that many foreigners aren't being ignorant on purpose (you're foreign, you can't help it), so for your benefit I've prepared a much longer and more detailed answer that should explain things perfectly: "Because China has 5000 years of history".

There, problem solved.

Ivan, I don't exactly know what you're experiencing where you are. But it seems that blogspot is claiming that they have a significant number of unplanned outages this week due to some kinds of technical problems with a software update. Read this and let me know whether this is what you're referring to.

From where I am, I'm also experiencing a lot of problems with accessing some blogs this week. I don't know whether it's related to this technical problem with blogspot.

I'm on blogspot/blogger, and it's been messed up this week. Lots of 500 server errors.

ACB, thanks for that explaination. I feel enlightened!

It's true, blogspot has been spotty all week. But it was always on again, off again. Keir says it's been blacked out for three days now, but he can access it with a proxy server from Beijing, which tells me it's not a 500 error users in China are encountering but the Great Firewall back in action.

Richard.

I'm not an expert by any means and its been absolutely ages ages since I dealt with comms equippment so I might well be copletely wrong here, but 500 errors can occur if there is a DNS problem (converting the textual IP address that humans use into the numeric one that routers use), so it's possibly that Keir's proxy is getting Blogspot's details from a different DNS server than their Chinese IP (if its an overseas DNS, this would make perfect sense).

This could indicate that Beijing is poisoning the closest DNS, but it could also mean that that DNS is playing up because of technical problem copletely unrelated ot Beijing.

Before I went over to an NAT system, I used to get litterally hundreds of 404 errors, not because of blocking, but because my local trunk was so overworked that everything timed out.

Yeah, blogspot can be unpredictable but I think this is more than that. The last few nights I've been on MSN and had a friend in Shanghai check out blogspot sites there while I did the same from the US at roughly the same moment. The result: for the last three nights I could pull up the sites here but he couldn't from Shanghai.

My site is also on blogspot and according to my activity log, I'm getting traffic from everywhere, without interruption, except China. All my China hits are coming through PKblogs or Anonymouse, etc.

That said, earlier this week I had a couple of comments on the site from China saying that they could actually see the site normally. But that seems to be the exception or another possibility is that the blockage is being done at the ISP level so that some parts of China can view blogspot while others can't?

Here's another, somewhat related question: Can anyone tell me whether Dr Helen Caldicott's website, http://www.helencaldicott.com is accessible outside of Mainland China? (Same question goes for those INside mainland China, is it accessible?)

She's one of the foremost anti-nuclear-weapons activists in the world, and recently has been raising related warnings about nuclear energy. So, I wonder if she ran afoul of the Correct Path of Marxist-Leninist-Maozedong thought by promoting peace and environmental protection.

On the other hand, it seems that one of her other sites, http://www.nuclearpolicy.org is still available in the PRC, although that could just mean that the Communist pigs haven't spotted it yet.

Ivan,

Both of Dr Caldicott's websites are accessible from where I'm.

Hmm, well I guess that means the Chinese Communists just love their nuclear "Happy Bombs" and want to see more of them spread all over the world.

In a harmonious way of course.

I can get there, but don't think the commies could be arsed blocking it on purpose though, she really is captian obvious with respect to nuclear war.