Comments on: Flickr, YouTube, and Google Video Problems in China

By: Gareth BFG

Gareth BFG — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 11:56:37 +0000

Remember when google first came to China? It was constantly 'blocked on demand' to give copycat baidu an edge in the market. Same thing happened to ebay when Taobao made an exact Chinese replica of their site. There is now an exact copy of youtube in Chinese, and guess what, youtube now sucks in China. What about feedburner? As soon as the Chinese copy of feedburner started up feedburner feeds have been completely or partially inaccessible.

The GFW is not only about censoring political content anymore, its about making money. Welcome to capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

By: Lantian

Lantian — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:11:43 +0000

Looks like things are back to normal in my part of China. I phoned China Lian Xi, my adsl provider yesterday and asked if everything was fixed. They said yah. I didn't really believe them, but it's been two good days now.

Like John said, it's been sooo long.

Looks like some virus came with the package too, seems to take over my internet after about 10 minutes of use. GreAATE'rrrr. My advertised 2MB is no such thing, but I can usually get to all the sights and slowly download small to medium sized video. No way I can get a sustainable video news feed from say CNN, etc.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:51:48 +0000

I discovered this thread on Flickr forums earlier today that sheds some light on what happened.

http://flickr.com/forums/bugs/32504/

-Tim

By: ash

ash — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 09:43:10 +0000

Youtube seems to be working okay now. Wonder if Skype is back in action, might actually call my family seeing as I never called them all christmas.

By: zhwj

zhwj — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:02:58 +0000

In Beijing, I got YouTube back suddenly on Sunday afternoon and it’s been quite nice ever since (so this post was a nice opportunity to sniff at Shanghai). Other missing sites (the Haohao Report, for example) came back at the same time. Youtube searches have been problematic for a long time, so it’s not surprising that they still cause errors.

By: John

John — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:34:40 +0000

Micah,

Yes! YouTube works again! It has been so long... And Flickr works fine again too.

Thanks for pointing it out, Micah.

Can I get any confirmations from other parts of China?

By: Micah

Micah — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:10:23 +0000

Never mind, Youtube is actually pretty speedy. Here’s a video of the new Shanghai Best Buy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrzx3h32psM

By: Micah

Micah — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:08:23 +0000

@Jakob: Cool, I'm impressed.

Flickr seems to be OK today, but Youtube is still sloooow (and blocked (careful, that will cut you off from Youtube for a couple minutes)).

By: Jakob

Jakob — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:02:10 +0000

flickr is working again today. Remember, people, using allowu dot com can show you sites that are blocked – always… Or any other anonymiser, actually. But with allowu you can even log in, as it accepts cookies. Can’t live without it! Technorati here I come…

By: michael

michael — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:07:26 +0000

YouTube has always sucked over here in Xinjiang. Then, I switched to Wang Tong and everything was hunky dory for about 3 weeks. Then the earthquake fucked everything up again. Sigh.