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.

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.

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?

Your website has been blocked. It needs unblocking, first you need to ask ‘why has my website been blocked’ then you need to work out ‘how to make it viewable’.

Ever see this? Nightmare!