China Webmasters .ORG

Got a web server? Host a website? Then you've got a free secure connection to the Internet. A non-technical rundown, really quite simple.

Ingredients:
1. Server/webserver account with SSH abilities. (SSH is a method of communication that allows information to be exchanged over a secure channel. Encryption provides integrity and prevents snooping of data. (Unless someone has a really really powerful computer and a week to spare decrypting a single email).)
2. A computer with an Internet connection.
3. SSH software. Linux and Mac OSX users already have this. Windows users' best option is to download PuTTY, support and installation instructions on the website, if you don't like PuTTY more software here here.

The Flickr block was very very odd - in that it was so easy to get around both by the webmaster and by the user for websites where the webmaster was too damn lazy to adjust.

Basically, the 'Flickr Block' was a block against the servers (farm1.static.flickr.com and farm2.static.flickr.com) Flickr photos were stored on (with URLs as subdomains of Flickr) rather than the root, flickr.com.

Late last week reports that the Access Flickr plugin was starting not to work began to circulate. At the beginning of October Flickr introduced the farm3.static.flickr.com server - essentially a new server farm. The Access Flickr plugin was updated to re-write the URL of a Flickr request. Then the plugin designed to allow one to freely view a site stopped working again. Checking out the problem made it obvious... Flickr have started blocking access to photos via IP address, but at the same time the GFW dropped it's objection to Flickr. Nice co-incidence.

So, to allow visitors to view Flickr photos, drop those Flickr server re-writes and the Access Flickr plugin, at least that's what it seems like this evening.

I cannot access Youtube.

But what can one do? I don't care much for random questions about accessing a randomly blocked website, I care about how to run a website seamlessly.

I must expand on this in the future, but for now a quick synapsis: blocking of websites occurs across many countries:

The US, often held up as an example of a bastion of free Internet access occurs not so much from the consitution, more from the 'common carrier' status of telecom networks in the US - in short they carry stuff, who knows what they carry, but not filtering (supposidly) what is carried also means they cannot compete by charging different rates for different customers. [Of course different connection speeds, latency, etc, can get different rates, but the key point is Common Carriers are not allowed to filter stuff for different levels of service.]

In China, filtering happens. There have been cases brought to court about filtering not being consistent with the law. These cases, to the best of my knowledge, are undergoing appeal (having been heard) or have been rejected (with the plaintiff going to a higher court - all cases I know of undergoing appeal for hearing in the higher court also).

In China blocking happens. A block is different from a filter. In a filter the contents are checked to be compliant. In a block all traffic to a domain name and/or server is stopped. The recent Flickr block is an example and the seemingly new Youtube and Delicious blocks are also an example of this type of block. [Note the Flickr.com domain name was not blocked with the recent Flickr block, rather the URLs of the servers were blocked (while the IP addresses were not blocked, allowing even really really really lazy webmasters to keep serving Flickr photos).]

So, enough discussion, and please don't send emails to me asking for a proxy to access stuff because I will not give it to you. Pragmatic:
Want to serve embedded videos on your site that are accessible from China? Upload them to Youku.com, tudou.com, or one of the many YouTube clones in mainland China. Note that Youku is very slow from outside mainland China, so smart people may like to use a quick Javascript function to first determine whether or not the visitor if from outside mainland China, then show the version they uploaded to YouTube or YouKu depending upon their location.

Basic principal, as always, adjust your website to fix your users' needs. Don't expect your users to download Firefox and any number of dodgy extensions when it is easily fixed server side.

Will post tomorrow with useful code/patches/modules/hacks for the imposed pain. I can't wait for the Peoples' [sic] Congress to be over.

International domain names are coming. I've covered this briefly before but it is time for an update.

On the 9th of October, ICANN announced the launch of a test internationalised TLD. In short, .test has been translated into 11 languages. TLD is the part of a domain name after the final dot. On the 15th ICANN will open example.test - a single website accessible in a variety of languages. Both example and .test will be translated into the 11 languages.

This is interesting, and not soon enough in my opinion. International domain names are already available. The bit before the dot being internationalised is not unusual, but the bit after the dot, so for example youtube.com and youtube.公司 actually resolve to the same website hasn't been done yet, well not properly.

Background

To understand the current situation properly, we should look at a few examples and understand some of the techy side.

Perry Wu, just wrote a story complaining about bloggers in China: “Bloggers in China complaining recently about their inability to access weblog tools and websites like BlogSpot, Blogger, Wordpress, and FeedBurner should shut up or put up.” Harsh words indeed, but his tone cools further into the article and I actually agree with him on a pragmatic level, it is often quicker to solve the problem than complain about it.

Below is how to stop Net Nanny being a headache (I have written about all these things before, but here they are in a simple package):

I'm currently launching a, Dalian focused site, (not only me, but also Rick, Chris and Kerrilee) the site itself is a mix of 'open source journalism', revenue reciprocation, well, lots of things.

One of our aims is to make adding content as easily as possible, so RSS aggregation is a natural choice, and if you see our Dalian photos it's mainly RSS aggregation from web savvy photographers tagging their photos 'daliandalian', the RSS feed of this tag which we pick up.

The recent GFW block of Flickr was a pain, and while some people may be able to install the Flickr Unblockr plugin, many may be unable to do it. I ran across a solution thanks to this post. Basically, the URL is blocked by the GFW, but the IP address is not. This is an interesting strategy of the GFW in itself, as often IP addresses are barred rather than URLs.

If using Wordpress there's a pluggin here, if using Drupal install this module and edit the redirection according to the pic below.

It's nice if users are savvy, but many are not, so it's the webmaster's responsibility to make stuff work. The recent GFW Flickr block almost seems engineered to allow those informed enough to be able to avoid it, odd.

Feedburner has been blocked, according to this post on Ya, I Yee.

Of course, this only affects offline and hosted-in-China feed readers. No matter, perhaps time to switch to Feedsky.

Also, see here and here.

Blog Herald recently did a guest series (written by Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today) on tools to help fight plagiarism, focused on how to track-down a plagiarist, get through to their webhost, and expose other sites in their network.

Worth reading, so here are part 1, part 2 and part 3. Nothing too complex really, but nice to have a refresh of the options available. n the subject of plagiarism in general, I'd recommend adding Plagiarism Today to your RSS reader.

I recently downloaded 3D Traceroute and have been having fun with it. Traceroute is an age-old tool that lets the user follow the stages across an Intranet and/or the Internet, to see what nodes, or routers, the data passes through. It allows analysis to show where the connection may slow. I downloaded this package in particular because it presents the results in nice 3D and 2D graphs. Traceroute packages ‘ping’ each node along the connection path, showing the ‘speed’ to each node in the overall connection.

Here’s an example picture:

It shows the nodes (discrete) along the horizontal axis, and the time (continuous) along the vertical axis. Higher times are bad, because that means the time needed to connect to this part of the connection is slower.... What is causing slower connection times?