From Ars Technica.

Savvy Internet fans in the people’s republic have known for a long time, however, that there have been simple ways to get forbidden information. One of those ways was the magical gift of Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. The Great Firewall can block specific web sites all it wants, but as long as there’s an RSS feed, many Chinese surfers can use feeds to access otherwise forbidden information.

Unfortunately, China appears to have finally gotten wise to RSS as of late—reports have been popping up from our readers and around the web of not being able to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year. More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “rss,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren’t blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless.

Workaround include accessing full feeds via online readers like Newsgator and using proxies.

Update: According to Jeremy Goldkorn on the Danwei blog (via China Herald):

Uh, no. All blogs on Sina.com, China’s biggest blog host have the word blog in the URL, and there are plenty of URLs and feeds that include the terms “rss” and “feed” that do not trip the Chinese Net Nanny’s filters. Ars Technica feed are inaccessible in China because it is run through Feedburner’s server (feeds.feedburner.com), which is blocked.

It’s pretty well established that, as big as China is, it relies on a combination of technical filtering, laws and social pressure to effect censorship of blogs and of the Internet in general. I’m not exactly certain what Mr. Goldkorn’s point is. Clearly, better reporting is…better than reporting that’s not as good. So. You know. That’s good. I believe the addition of feeds in general to the targets of filtering in China is still quite a bad trend for free speech, though.

Update: Apparently, Ars Technica was mistaken. We were going to spend a little of our vast budget on fact checking, but then we decided, hey, why not go to another conference instead? (Can you blame us? The hotel had roomservice!)