Tuesday 12 June 2007

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to search for hotels as I can actually see what the room looks like inside for real, not some fake glossy brochure type outdated photo that is on the hotel's website.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.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Excellent - your blog is back up - It'll be interesting to see how the Chinese censorship developes AFTER the Beijing Olympics. The closed society is going to go through one of their biggest influx of foreign influence, and it's gotta make some changes.

Unless - they are THAT powerful and each country coming back from the Olympics decide to follow communism - I doubt it though.