Net Nanny Follies

Answers.com blocked unblocked in China

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn, May 28, 2007 11:11 PM

Answers.com, the NASDAQ listed for profit website that makes heavy use of Wikipedia content has been blocked by China's Net Nanny. Wikipedia has been blocked since November last year, after a brief period of being accessible. It seems that the new block was implemented to ensure Wikipedia content is not available at alternative URLs.

UPDATE: Answers.com is no longer blocked in Beijing (May 28, 23:11, news about block originally posted at 11:53).

UPDATE 2: May 29 — In the comments section readers in Beijing and Shanghai are saying that they cannot access Answers.com.

There are currently 14 Comments for Answers.com ~~blocked~~ unblocked in China.

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Comments on Answers.com blocked unblocked in China

Shhh...still works for me using China Telecom's VNet service, but if I search for some naughty topics, they get wise and pull the plug.

Posted by: chengdude | May 28, 2007 1:47 PM

I'm unable to use anonymouse. Has it also been blocked?

Posted by: chinaqanda | May 28, 2007 3:01 PM

oops, my bad, it's working just fine now. Doh!

Posted by: chinaqanda | May 28, 2007 3:13 PM

It is still working(18:25).

Posted by: Millie | May 28, 2007 6:25 PM

Bizarre that they didn't block wiki mirror , either the .be or the .us versions of the site.

Posted by: William | May 29, 2007 12:13 AM

Still blocked Tuesday morning on Beijing Netcom.

Posted by: Joel | May 29, 2007 8:22 AM

As of today - May 29 - answers.com is blocked again, in Shangahi. I use reference.com instead.

Another disturbing detail: News abt the poisened pet food from China in the US and hazardous Chinese-made toothpaste in Panama are not reported in China, as far as I know. This kind of slant in info abt China-foreign relations (China lighter than it is, rest of world darker) may haunt us.

Posted by: Aro | May 29, 2007 10:41 AM

why, I still could not access answers.com at my office in Beijing.

Posted by: plasmid | May 29, 2007 11:33 AM

no problem here in guangzhou, it still works perfectly well.

Posted by: Mike | May 29, 2007 5:18 PM

Answers.com is accessible in Beijing, it's about 10pm.

Posted by: Shaan Khan | May 29, 2007 10:04 PM

Answers.com still accessible in Zhongshan, Guangdong.

Otherwise, get an SSH shell account outside of China.
Run PuTTY.
Go to settings: Connection--SSH--Tunnels.
Fill in Source port=8080, Destination=Dynamic, click Add, then Open.
With PuTTY running in the background, go into Firefox's network settings and set SOCKS Proxy to 127.0.0.1, port 8080.
Now you can surf anonymously to anywhere.

Posted by: Ion | May 30, 2007 12:52 PM

I can access answers.com from Fuzhou. It's still giving me all the usual stuff, including entries from wikipedia.

Posted by: Uncle Angel | May 30, 2007 1:16 PM

Aro ... I can't believe that someone dare lie on facts that are so obvious. All major and minor Chinese newspapers reported the events, as well as the problematic blankets exported to Australia.

Posted by: Aro lied | May 31, 2007 6:36 PM

If you want to know why a website is blocked in one place, and not in another place, I have a report on my blog which I got from a tech friend in China Tele.

Oh and, the people's daily has reported on the "killer blankets" going to Australia, in my Wuhan edition they said that it was just one rare occurrence and the government is doing everything they can to stop it... whatever, the government issues false safety certs to products containing carcinogenic substances all the time.

Posted by: Gareth Hayes | June 5, 2007 3:05 PM