Wikipedia is back, but Apple?
By the benevolent grace of The Nanny we are again allowed to use Wikipedia. “Please Nanny, may I have another?”
Unfortunately, it seems an old problem has cropped up at the same time: accessing the main Apple website is splotchy for me here in Beijing. The page starts loading and then kinda dies – reminiscent of the NYTimes “block” that wasn’t really a block and really just had something to do with a rework to their front page that kept it from loading properly in China. Apple’s main page loads just fine via proxy. Apple’s China site loads fine too. Anyway, this started happening for me right at the same time when Wikipedia was unblocked, ie., a few days ago. Coincidence? Most probably. But it could also be that the GFW had an overhaul for more than just allowing Wikipedia that is causing Apple’s akadns stuff (I’m pretty sure akadns is the way Apple redirects all the traffic it gets to different servers) to go funny.
Anyone else in China like to confirm or deny what I’m seeing?
Tags China, GFW, Censorship, Apple
October 13, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Works fine here in Zhejiang. I don’t know what to tell you.
October 13, 2006 at 3:13 pm
On a similar note, are you able to access the Chinese version of Wikipedia?
October 14, 2006 at 10:25 am
Nope. In fact, it dies in like 2 seconds without even timing out, which I think is a little strange. It could be that now that I’m in Beijing I’m closer, in terms of physical network connections, to the main GFW itself; it could also be that Beihang University is killing my request. I’ve found the university here does not censor my apartment’s connection as far as I can tell, but the students dorms and classrooms are almost completely censored from every site that is not written in Chinese, which makes the fact that the classrooms are internet equipped completely irrelevant for teaching English – I’ll be posting with more details on this soon. The university might be censoring specific Chinese sites campus-wide though that it deems particularly “dangerous”. It would be hard for me to confirm that though.
October 15, 2006 at 12:42 pm
In addition to trying to access Apple from both the machines on my home network, I’ve also tried one more computer at a friend’s place here at Beihang, and with the same results: the page starts loading, but the images don’t load. I still need to try off the Beihang network to see if it’s a problem with Beihang or more widespread throughout Beijing.
I’ve also had a lot of problems accessing Hotmail lately. I can get to the login page, but when I try logging in it gives me a “The connection was reset error.”
October 18, 2006 at 11:53 am
[...] After confirming with other people in Beijing, it seems that Apple’s homepage is loading fine on other networks here and that the problem I have been having may just be affecting the network here at Beihang University. [...]