Good afternoon,
Here's an interesting news piece on China today
Google Says Glitch Blocks China Service
By DAVID BARBOZA and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: March 30, 2010
SHANGHAI — Google’s search engine was apparently off limits for much of China late Tuesday, but the company said the problem was apparently a technical glitch of its own that caused searches to be blocked by China’s powerful Internet filter.
The disruption had led to concern that China had decided to punish the company for its decision last week to move out of Beijing and operate an uncensored Web site from Hong Kong.
Users trying to access Google in Chinese and English were able to reach the home page of the Web site but unable to complete a search. The screen displayed an error message.
Some users in Shanghai said late Tuesday that they had occasional access to Google’s Chinese-language site, but mostly the site was inaccessible.
But several hours after the problem became evident, Google issued a statement at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., that said: “Lots of users in China have been unable to search on Google.com.hk today. This blockage seems to have been triggered by a change on Google’s part.”
It explained that a search parameter, a string of characters that sends information about a query to Google, inadvertently contained code that China’s Internet blocking system — the so-called Great Firewall of China — associated with Radio Free Asia, a news service promoting democracy that receives financing from the United States government.
“We are currently looking at how to resolve this issue," the statement said.
On a Web page that monitors the availability of its products in China, Google reported that its mobile search service had been “partially blocked” in China since Sunday. But that page showed no problems with its search engine there.
China’s powerful blocking system has been known to cut off access to sites that run afoul of Beijing.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have all been inaccessible here for much of the last year.
Because Beijing seemed to be angered by Google’s strident comments last week and in January about the country’s strict censorship controls, many analysts believed it was just a matter of time before China’s sophisticated Internet filters blocked the Google site.
Last week, citing frustration with Chinese censorship controls and online attacks that seemed to be coming from China, Google officially pulled its Chinese-language search engine out of the country and relocated it to Hong Kong, which still operates like an independent state.
The move ended Google’s four-year experiment with operating a Chinese-language search engine from Beijing under Chinese censorship rules.
Shortly after Google’s announcement, the state-controlled Xinhua news agency quoted an unnamed official at the State Council Information Office calling the decision “totally wrong.”
David Barboza reported from Shanghai, and Miguel Helft from San Francisco.
