The Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred on June 4th, 1989, and it appears that the Chinese government is going to mark the 20th anniversary in its own special way. Within the country, access to just about every major social media site has been blocked.
China’s authorities have been known to block sites before, of course, and a number of sites were already off-limits heading into this week. But according to new reports, Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Hotmail, Twitter, WordPress, and YouTube – along with a number of other things like Bing – are now all unreachable.
The move has caused a significant outcry, with all sorts of people protesting the crackdown. In fact, “#fuckgfw” (with “gfw” being the Great Firewall) and “China Blocks Twitter” are two of the top trending topics on a certain micro-blogging site.
So here’s a little advice for anyone in China affected by the development. Ryan McLaughlin writes, “If you don’t have a good VPN, be sure to check out Hotspot Shield (free, but slow), or personalVPN/Witopia (minimal yearly fee, but fast). A VPN creates a secure tunnel that will allow you to view the Internet as if you were in the country the VPN is hosted in (US, UK, etc.).”
Hopefully the blocks will be lifted and this will become a moot point soon after June 4th passes.
