Mutant Palm

Arianna enjoys wuxia cosplay in her free time

Shorter Arianna Huffington:

• I can’t read Chinese, and don’t know anything about Tiananmen, but no one will know if I don’t give a link or translations of ZYJ’s blog. Also, cliched rhetoric is bad if you’re George Bush, but it’s perfectly fine for summarizing China. And maybe Tank Man was someone else, but that would screw up my conclusion that I arrived at without knowing what I’m talking about in the first place.

Shorter Time 100 Editorial Board:

• All bloggers are the same, so let’s just get some known US blogger to review these crazy chicken scratchings. Michelle Malkin’s Asian, isn’t she? Oh, she’s busy? Um, Greece Los Angeles is like China, isn’t it? I think Arianna’s been to Koreatown…

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard, and used regularly by SadlyNo!.

First off, it looks like my guess that MySpace.com is blocked in China is right. At least, Shanghaiist and their commenters are seeing it too. It’s suspicious that MySpace.com would be blocked soon after the launch of MySpace.cn. Dot-com has been available, more or less, for a while, and a fair number of savvy Chinese users created accounts at MySpace.com, such as punk bands. Now, right after the launch of MySpace.cn, they’re all forced to migrate over to .cn – a sudden leap, assuming they keep using MySpace, in registration and pageviews. Otherwise, the government said “Right, so let’s narrow this channel a bit”.

That’s not the only narrowing though. I’ve been playing around with some verboten words on MySpace.cn for a while. Some terms, particularly in Chinese, get blocked by the GFW presumably at the router level – before they ever reach MySpace.cn. Unlike Google.cn, though, the search results look the same (so far) if that doesn’t happen. But I’ve been encountering what is beginning to look suspiciously like censorship: The “Page Under Going Maintenance” sign.

The “Undergoing Maintenance” sign appears when you open a profile that is, well, undergoing maintenance. You see it in MySpace.com sometimes, it’s normal enough. Some pages that contain verboten topics open just fine, others have consistently been other maintenance. One thing about MySpace.cn, though, is that it completely duplicates accounts across international MySpace. In other words, if you take a profile link, say:

http://profile.myspace.cn/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=125043500

and change it to:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=125043500

You’re looking at the same persons page, just that the menu bar and template change languages. The example above is a page with alot of censorship no-nos in it. The .com version opens fine (with proxy in China, w/o in most other nations). The .cn version gives you “This page is undergoing maintenance. If this is inconvenient, we’re very sorry!”

Which wouldn’t mean much except it seems to happen to a fair number of verboten pages. Not all, but many. It’s hard to test them all from China since I now have to proxy the .com pages and it’s slow as molasses sometimes. So here’s a list of some “maintenanced” pages that I haven’t checked in MySpace.com:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=135332659
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=135332659
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=122628624
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=17397486
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=170257091

On the other hand, there’s plenty of other things that get through. But the maintenance pages seem worth keeping an eye on…

The Unofficial Google Earth Blog has occasional goodies related to China:

• A 3D model of the Buddha at Lantau Island in Hong Kong.
• A Chinese placename layer. (Haven’t checked how good this is yet)
• Photos of Japanese and Chinese subs spotted in Google Earth.
• And you can now dig a hole to or from China. Alot of the east coast ends up in Argentina.

Also, the Tsim Sha Tsui Clock Tower lives – as a 3D model.

A couple of weeks ago a vicious rumor spread through the Chinese Internet, according PCOnline (太平洋电脑网), reported access to Google.com had disappeared for some users. It wasn’t true.

So in this grand tradition of spreading rumors, I say: MySpace.com may possibly perhaps be blocked. Visual Traceroute shows a failure to connect beyond CHINANET Shanghai. Through May 8th, MySpace.cn reported that 31,826 users registered. Redline China has determined there were over 41,000 registrations by May 9th based on MySpace.cn editor Wu Kong’s friends list, since he is automatically friended to new registrants. This isn’t terribly scientific, since Chinese users can delete him from their friends just like Tom. Tom, along with a number of other non-Chinese MySpace users, are also among Wukong’s friends. Whatever the number, it doesn’t seem to have impressed anybody yet.

It is still possible to access questionable profiles through MySpace.cn.