China: Internet censorship from HELL! Flickr blocked.

I am soooo angry words cannot express how mighty pissed off I am to find one of my favourite websites, flickr.com is now blocked in China too.

Last night I accidently typed in flicker.com without realising my mistake and saw that some cybersquatter is trying to sell it, and rejected the latest offer of US$600,000. What an idiot.

Meanwhile, after I realised my mistake and went to the correct site, strangely, none of the images were displaying. None At All. Not my own, none in a search, NONE. I immediately assumed it was my computer or ISP being slow or something and just left it....

...to try again this morning, to find that it was still like that. I got suss. I got very, very suss. I went to my trusty Shanghai sites to find that it had gotten blocked by China. Interesting, it is also blocked in parts of the Middle East. If you do a google search you can read more about it.

Geez!!

As if it isn't bad enough that every time I find something through google for a wikipedia article I have to circumvent their blocking by going to answers.com first, and as if it isn't bad enough that I even have to go through another site to access this blog, my own blog, (and any other blogger blog, as well as livejournal blogs), but now I can't even view my own photos on Flicker!

Bastards.

There are always ways around this though. It's just a pain having to use them but better than nothing.

Someone has already invented a Firefox plug-in to view flickr here.

Why I like Flickr

* I love photography. I love looking at the beautiful, awe-inspiring photos from people's everyday lives, holidays, events, everything. I have only a handful of pictures up there but always planned to put more up when I got my next computer upgrade.
* I love that I can search for random things and find a RECENT picture of it. If I go through google images I have to search through tonnes of crap to find anything half decent of what I'm looking for. Some examples of things I searched for... when I was planning our wedding I looked for bouquet, cake, invitation, dress, veil, etc ideas. When I am holiday planning I liked to search for hotels as I can actually see what the room looks like inside for real, not some fake glossy brochure type outdated photo that is on the hotel's website. I like to look for places to go to, or things to do. I love I can search for almost any keyword and turn up a bunch of really interesting photos on that topic.

I just realised I don't know if that plug-in works for Mac or not. If it doesn't I'm going to cry.. booo hooo... :(

PS - if you are interested (which I doubt you would be unless you are in China), you can read more here on the flickr website for updates.