Approximately 5 P.M. today (March 8), many internet users in China found they were not able to visit Google.cn suddenly. Goolge China was down for more than one hour. On approximately 6:30 PM, google China was back to service. It is amazing that this kind of accident could happen to Google.
This afternoon, in Denver, Colorado, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known in US political circles as the “stimulus bill”.
The bill provides new spending, tax cuts and aid to state and local governments all totaling almost $800 billion US dollars, making it the largest spending bill in that nation’s history. Designed to create jobs and provide a boost to a sagging economy, the bill focuses on green, renewable energy and investments in health care technology.
Of immediate interest to us, however, is the accompanying website, recovery.gov, which — you guessed it — is using Drupal!
Drupal is no stranger to the political arena, and has been used for many campaign and government sites before. Recovery.gov, though, is a definite coup for Drupal — there are not many Drupal sites that have their own post on Whitehouse.gov. Or on the Huffington Post. Or is featured on CNN all day long. Or has its own YouTube promo by the US President. Unbelievable!
http://buytaert.net/obama-using-drupal
Liu ZhengRong, the Deputy Secretary of Internet Bureau of People’s Republic of China State Council Information Office, was interviewed by People.com Media channel on 27th Feb. According to Liu, till Feb. 24th, 2962 websites distributing illegal contents and 276 pornography blogs were closed during the Special Operation for the Crackdown on Online Porn and Lewd Content . Another 103 websites were denounced and 55 network service providers providing internet access service to these sites were published. After the special operation, the network environment has been dramatically improved, Liu said.
China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) accounted that its new pricing police on .cn domain name recently. Domain registers can register .cn domain names at the price of 18-30 RMB.
It is said that regular .cn registration fee has been raised to 30 RMB/year from March 1, 2009. However, by depositing a fund, registers could register .cn domains at the price of 18 RMB/year. Those who have registered the one-year .cn domain could renew at the cost of 5 RMB.
.cn domain name has become the 2nd popular top-level domain name in China. It is said CNNIC adjusted its pricing policy to reduce operating cost and gaining more revenue.
More about .cn domain registration please look at http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2007/06/04/4628.htm
1. What is ICP license?
ICP license (ICP stands for Internet Content Provider) is a permit issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to permit China-based websites to operate in China. The ICP license numbers for Chinese websites can often be found on the bottom of their front page. continue reading »
If you expect traffic from China, there is nothing worse than finding out that web visitors are unable to connect to your website. It is known that there are thousands and thousands of sites that are out of reach from Chinese visitors. Most of them are not specifically banned because of ill content, but rather victim of random blocking by the GFW, or because they share the same IP (shared hosting) with a site that has been blocked. continue reading »
GFW is the short term for The Great Firewall of China, which is part of Gold Shield Engineering launched by Chinese government. The purpose of GFW is to filter information which the government considers not proper to spread in China, including pornography, violent, and political sensitive information, in other words, it is built to “purify” the cyber world in China.
Inside GFW, people complains that many excellent and usefully websites are blocked. These sites might be blocked simply because they are hosted on shared servers and one of the other sites on this server contains sensitive information.
Google, Youtube and many other sites were also blocked because they contain “ill” information.
With the biggest population and the growing economy, China is considered the biggest markets in the world (if not ye, it will be). Everyone would like to take a share in the market, but there are so many things in china are different with international standards, hosting business is one of the things.
In China, many hosting companies are not running with the same operating system with their oversea competitors. Basically, the problems are
1. Technical support, most supports are at very low level and only few of the companies provide 24X7 service.
2. payment methods, credit card payments are usually not supported. Instead, direct deposit or alipay (a Chinese online payment transaction company) are widely used.
The national anti-porn campaign in China is intensifying. Following the shut down of 55 websites during Spring Festival, CIIRC (China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre) announced on February 2nd that another 68 porn Web sites have been closed, bringing the total number of blocked sites to 1,575. On the same day, 148 blogs containing pornography and “lewd” contents were also closed.
A principal of the Special Operation Office for the Crackdown on Online Porn and Lewd Content said that more than half of the closed websites were from southeast Chinese provinces including Jiangsu, Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong. The telcom operators in these provinces provided internet access services for these illegal websites.
He also stated that the porn Web sites gained profits mainly through charging fixed telephone or cell-phone users to log onto the site. Low threshold of website running business and lack of supervision are two of the reasons that make the porn websites grow.
He emphasizes, anti-porn is still very arduous task. Further measures will be made to crack down the online porn and lewd contents, leaving no space for them on the Internet. No enterprises should provide channels for the porn websites to get income. And those who provide internet access or income collection channel will be Held accountable in accordance with the law or relevant regulation.
The principal also emphasizes, any forms of distribution of pornography on line are prohibited, and distributing pornography by bloging is also illegal.
If you are going to build a website in china ( host inside china mainland network ), two kind of licences you may need to apply before you start to run your site.
1- for non-profit from internet website, such as personal blog, company site, forum etc, you need to apply (or called check in with Gov monitor ) a licence to make sure your website under all Gov law. All in one word, no sensitive political topic, no horn things!!
2- for those websites which want to make money via internet, such as selling shared hosting, running IDC, providing information based on a member fee, you have to get permission first. There are many conditions, you need lots of money ( 1 million RMB ), employees, office, and have to prove you know how to operate online business ( lots of document work ).
China want more controls of internet, but it looks a impossible … So get a local guys for more information if you want to host in china, that will be easy.