Of the Great Firewall

[Randy W]

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Hengqin New Area aims to skirt firewall

 

If passed, Hengqin will be the first region on the Chinese mainland where local residents can skirt the firewall and get access to blocked websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

"It would be very convenient to do business with our customers and investors from Hong Kong, Macao and foreign countries should the application be approved," Liu said, adding that most overseas investors care about Internet infrastructure in the New Area.

"By doing this, we are adopting suggestions garnered from overseas entrepreneurs who would like to invest in the New Area," Ye Zhen, deputy director of the Hengqin New Area's administrative committee, was quoted by the Shenzhen Daily as saying.

 

 

[Randy W]

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On another front . . .

 

China Carefully Curates Online Reaction to Bo Xilai Indictment

 

The conversation was notably different Thursday morning as comments under the main Sina Weibo news feeds largely parroted state-media editorials that described the indictment as evidence of the Communist Party’s effort to rein in corruption.

 

. . .

 

“I believe in the party and I believe in the government,” wrote another. “No matter who you are, if you break the law you should receive legal punishment.”

 

Those and many similar comments were left by accounts with few followers and only a handful of posts, suggesting they were work of what Chinese Internet users refer to as a “water army”–a group of anonymous Internet commenters who use so-called zombie accounts on social media sites to influence conversations.

 

Though often used in a commercial marketing capacity, water armies are increasingly being deployed to push propaganda directives. Their dominance of the discussion Thursday shows much better the government has become at getting its voice heard online since the early days of the Bo scandal, when the conversation was a near free-for-all and government spin efforts were widely mocked.

 

Censors, meanwhile, were taking down comments that challenged the party line.

 

[Randy W]

Oops - the two links are

 

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/798550.shtml

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/07/25/online-reaction-to-bo-indictment-carefully-curated/

[Charly1967]

Does Witopia still work for anyone here? I have been having a lot of troubles recently and after many years of being a loyal customer am considering a change.....

[Randy W]

Does Witopia still work for anyone here? I have been having a lot of troubles recently and after many years of being a loyal customer am considering a change.....

 

Witopia uses the standard OpenVPN UDP port 1194 for most of its servers, and only has a very small selection of "Best for China" servers. That's why it's so easy to block. Try using a TCP port, if you can (if you aren't already)

 

The UDP connections are always on, which makes them easier to detect (seems like they drop about every 5 minutes or so), but the TCP connections are more susceptible to packet loss (which is not a major problem).

 

Or switch to a different provider. Smaller is better, since one way they detect connections is by the amount of traffic to a specific server. Another way they can find the servers is to simply subscribe to the service.