you just never know: the reappearance of Wikipedia
Andrew Lih has an excellent post reminding us what’s important about the news that Wikipedia has suddenly, and unevenly, been "unblocked" in China:
It’s important to know there is no monolithically operating Great Firewall of China, even though it is a cute and useful moniker.
The “GFW system” depends on a distributed system of checks and
filters that depends on the particular ISP, the type of connection
being used, and the geographic locale. A commercial connection in Hubei
is different than a residential DSL in Guangdong is different than an
academic network in Shantou. Something blocked in one area of the
country may be totally fine in another. A keyword that is filtered in
one place could be allowed in another.
A reader of Andrew’s blog, Elen Wu, supplies a link to the Wikipedia access monitoring taking place on cnBeta.com, an online community of IT people who post mostly very technical news such as PPStream upgrades to 1.0.4.601, but also items of interest to a more general audience such as this piece on Google’s Dr. Li Kaifu’s analysis of Baidu at Fudan University Google Camp, October 10. Will definitely keep an eye on this homepage!
Andrew Lih’s post is one of the more accurate and straightforward descriptions of the Firewall that I’ve seen yet.
Though, I’m still getting “Connection Reset” (actually in “连接被重置” in zh-Firefox) when accessing http://zh.wikipedia.org/ on Shanghai residential ADSL.
Actually, about 2months ago, I was surprise to find I can get access to Wiki from our school net. When I got back home on weekends, it also worked.
But now it didn’t again.
Also from Shanghai.