Im in Beijing and Youtube.com is unblocked but veoh.com is blocked. Please check this.

Can anyone else confirm?

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Your website is blocked also but i am using a proxy to get it but it doesnt
work with videos.CNET reports that China has unblocked YouTube. They also ask, did Google have a direct hand in the blocking?

Last Friday, YouTube was accessible but anything related to what we called T%%% to avoid filters would return a message to the effect of, “This content is not available in your country.” Though it would be relatively easy for Chinese filters to replicate this result, this may indicate some effort on YouTube/Google’s part. Mama reports that YouTube soon went completely dark, until just now.

Another glitch that emerged, which may suggest some sort of Google involvement, is that when Mama was sending Gmail messages, anything containing the non-redacted T%%%, or even its first three letters, would return an error message she’d never seen, saying that there was an error while sending…The YouTube messages are still vexing. Was YouTube cooperating or was this a very smart error message? To have a Google property that’s not Google China itself cooperating with Chinese censorship would be unprecedented, to my knowledge.

Today, It is allowed for anyone in Yemen to Access Free Kareem campaign. It seems that Yemeni Authorities had received tens of letters asking for releasing this site.

Unfortunately, they blocked my newest blog. It is bad to know that I could not access it from Yemen, and my friend too. I was thinking that it is a technical problem that my blog is new and there is nothing new or hard up to now. I only using it to write some comments and post my articles and reports published in the NP.  By the way, My blog does not contains any “sexy” contents, only my comments about Free Kareem site.

However, Lots of friends outside Yemen said there is no problem with them to open my blog.

Seven months ago, when the Parliament members asked the Minister of Media said that he wants to organize its role only, but it is free for all people in Yemen to get their own blog, and express their own view.

I want to say for His Excellency Hassan Al-Lawzi, it is only less than one week, and I did not finish my blog designing yet.

I hope that they will release it as soon as possible,

Since October, a host of websites have been blocked in Yemen. They include YemenPortal and FreeKareem. YemenPortal was accused of being a threat to national security (it’s simply an aggregator of local content, done for the administrator’s PhD program). CPJ reports that it may have been due to the content on the site.

(YemenPortal administrator Walid) Al-Saqaf said he believes his site may have been blocked after it posted citizen videos of a January 13 protest in the southern port city of Aden. The videos show security forces firing unprovoked at the crowd, he said, in contradiction of the government’s account.

FreeKareem, devoted to the imprisoned Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, was blocked for having “sexual content.” Yeah. Well. Not so much. No doubt defending a blogger who criticises Islam is the real issue.

Seven other Yemeni sites and who knows how many external ones have been blocked. The Yemeni sites include YemenHurr, Hour’s News, Hdramut, Al-Teef, Al-Yemen, AdenPress, and SoutalGnoub.

The only blog platform that is active in the country is Livejournal. Though the main page of Wordpress is accessible, the blogs on this platform are not accessible. Blogspot was also blocked for a long time, but recently it was unblocked. Maybe because there are almost no Uzbek blogs on Blogspot platform.

Access to Internet cafes is also restricted, according to an article in International War & Peace Reporting.

Visitors to internet cafés around the country say they have to submit a written list of web addresses they have visited, and administrators also demand to see any material that a customer plans to write onto a memory stick. Others say the USB ports for memory sticks and other storage devices have been removed from computers, while word-processing packages have been tampered with to block toolbar buttons such as “copy”, “save” and “send”.

Proxy servers are blocked in the country as well.

“The government monitors the Internet by means of a skilful mix of filtering technologies, cyberpolice surveillance and propaganda, in all of which China invests massively,” the report says. It then details intersecting lines of authority that help to keep the Chinese Internet a less than open environment. The fascinating aspect of this story is the banality of it all. The most populous country in the world is kept in halter by the use of weekly meetings between departments and ministries and memos issued to Internet companies.

It makes an afternoon trip to the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Motor Vehicles seem like a burst of song in comparison.

Another element of interest is the cooperation of an anonymous Internet company. It’s great that one is helping in this report. It would be of greater utility were this company and is competitors willing to speak out publicly and band together to push back against the censorship trend.

I’d like to see more business people, regardless of their nationality, stand up for the dignity of their profession, like Boyette San Diego.

As to the technical details of what happened when the tinhorns pulled the plug, Steve Gibbard at CircleID has a pretty detailed run-down. He’s says, “The connection between Myanmar and the rest of the world appears to be turned back on, at least temporarily.”

Update: ONI has published a bulletin entitled “Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma.”

The 45 megabit per second circuit connecting Myanmar to Kuala Lumpur that is Myanmar’s primary connection to the Internet came back up at 14:27 UTC today. It had mostly been “hard down,” indicating either that it had been unplugged or that the router it was connected to was turned off, with the exception of a few brief periods since September 28.

Myanmar’s country code top level domain, .MM, disappeared. It’s served by three name servers, ns0.mpt.net.mm, ns.net.mm, and ns-mm.ripe.net . . .

Looking at the rest of Myanmar’s connectivity to the outside world, MPT has the IP address block 203.81.64.0/19 (8192 addresses). Another Internet Service Provider, Bagan Cybernet, has the address block 203.81.160.0/20 (4096 addresses), but uses MPT for its international connectivity. Daily snapshots from the University of Oregon Route Views Project show both of those blocks in the global Internet routing table on September 27, but show them to have been missing since September 28.

Should a country be accused of blocking a site, the regime’s representatives might send out a graphic purporting to be a screenshot of that site taken in that country.

Here are a couple of ways in which a “clean” screenshot is created and shipped to a dupe.

In many countries with restriction on the Internet, people seeking to get around the blocks use proxies, or services that allow them to view, and in some cases, post to a banned site by viewing it through the frame of another, unrestricted site. So, to get this “screenshot,” you use a proxy, visit the blocked site and take a screenshot. You import that screenshot into a graphics program, such as Photoshop, remove any visual reference to the proxy (removing the I-frame) and voilà: clear evidence that the site is not blocked in that country.

Most countries that institute repressive online censorship measures for their people nonetheless allow regime members and favorites access to the Internet, whether by a dedicated line, a regime service provider or a special card that unlocks the Internet. This can be done as a reward but is often an element of financial necessity. These days, business is hard to conduct without the access to information that the Internet allows.

Naturally, most people in this position will not necessarily be averse to helping out the regime that treats them favorably. Of course, it might just as often be the regime members, and specifically the “intelligence” officers, of that regime doing the accessing, packaging and communicating with a credulous dupe outside the country.

Whenever you encounter “proof” that an historically repressive regime does not censor what it is said to be censoring, carefully consider the nature and credibility not only of that proof but the channel by which it is introduced into the court of public opinion.

Update: Some are reporting this tool as unreliable.

It was recently reported that European Commission Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini is interested in finding ways to filter the Internet for terrorism-oriented activities, including searches for them. In an interview with Reuters, Frattini stated, “I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector … on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism.” If implemented perfectly, such technology would block sites that include bomb-making guides and would block such sites’ potential readers from finding and accessing them. It appears that Frattini intends to explore ISP-level filtering options.

Ah, terrorism. The “insulting the prophet” of the Western world.