05.18.07
NickEve.com is banned in China
Since you are reading this, I know you aren’t living in China. Or, if you are, you are one of the sneaky ones that knows how to reach content that is otherwise restricted by the “Golden Shield” initiative of internet censorship.
How do I know this? Well because, as of today, NickEve.com seems to be banned in China.
I only noticed this because I was using internetsupervision.com today at work to check some of our sites, and looked at NickEve.com to compare stats. I noticed that this site was not being found from the data center in Beijing. At first, I thought nothing of it, but when I found I could reach my other websites hosted on the same server from Beijing, I became a bit suspicious. I had indeed written an Anti-War post the previous day, but there was nothing in there about China, so what was going on?
To check, I went to the greatFirewallOfChina.org website as well as a few other places where you can try to reach your sites from within China. Lo and behold, NickEve.com was inaccessible on all these sites.
In my mind, the big question is - why block me?
Do they not like primates? Do they not want people to wish my dad well on his exams? Was it blanket disapproval of the latest Warring States songs? Who knows?
My best guess is they somehow found the word Chinese in the bear farming article and connected this somehow to the language about war in the last post. Warring States, the name of my band, is also a period in Chinese history, but I doubt they would be looking for such subtle clues.
In any case, what is frightening is how quickly this happened. Yesterday I wrote a little post on the war, and and today I am banned. If this is how good the tracking technologies are going to be in our country someday, I shudder to think of how quiet we’ll all have to be to avoid the attention of the mob.