Chinese Government is blocking my site

minkley · #1 (**permalink**) 08-25-2007, 01:42 AM

I recently moved a relative's business website to a new hosting company. Everything was fine, until our Chinese customers started complaining that they could send emails to us or reach our website.

The short of it is that our new ISP informed me that the Chinese government was blocking our IP# because they hosted some adult websites. Apparently they also will block any site that has a politcal or material which criticises the Chines government.

I was told I could request to have my IP address unblocked by the Chinese government, but I don't even know where to begin.

Has anyone come across this before?

nottheusual1 · #2 (**permalink**) 09-10-2007, 12:43 PM

Change /24's or change hosts. Even with the change, if the host has any adult content in the CIDR block they move you to, you will be blocked again.

The Chinese really aren't historically receptive to unblocking anything. They have no reason to help and no mechanism for addressing these issues. There **used to be** tools to check what the Chinese government was blocking, but due to the lack of proxies available behind the "Great Firewall" the service was discontinued.

Sorry, but I am absolutely unaware of anything that has transpired over the past 6 months to make it any better. It's actually gotten worse - even the University wonks that like to futz with this stuff have all but thrown in the towel.

Olympics, anyone?

minkley · #3 (**permalink**) 09-13-2007, 05:25 AM

The short of it is that there is nothing you can do about it. It's a growing problem. I think this is certainly going to be an issue during the Olympics. It's not just Adult content, its basically, data containing 'un-desirable words/ information' will get blocked. So just have content with the word 'Falun Gong' or 'or Hu Jintao sucks' and you could get blocked .

All programmers should embed comments like:-

// Falun Gong Rocks
// HU Jintao Sucks

in their scripts , so eventually, China will have no outbound traffic whatsover and spamming will probably drop by 80%

nottheusual1 · #4 (**permalink**) 09-13-2007, 12:37 PM

They are only aggressive on inbound traffic. They don't seem to care what spews out of the country's IP blocks...

Nice idea, though <<chuckle>>