China blocks, like... everything ahead of Tiananmen's 20th
03 Jun 2009
As widely reported, 2 days ahead of possible protest over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacres, China has blocked via the Great Firewall virtually every internet service capable of open discussion or a concerted effort at generating a grass roots protest or demonstration.
At last check twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal, Blogspot, Xanga, Wordpress, Friendfeed, Windows Live, Bing, hotmail, Flickr, YouTube etc. have all been blocked just ahead of June 4th. Wow, I mean, that's amazing in my opinion. And deeply frightening.
Twitter users seem to be expressing their outrage, besides appealing to twitter to fully enable https access to the service to allow people in China to access the service, by using the #caogfw hashtag (which I'm told roughly translates to "fuck the great firewall" though #gfw is also occurring widely. Course most of the discourse is in Chinese so I can't read it...).
This is so disturbing in terms of the completeness and thoroughness of the censorship even after the Olympics.