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Q: Is the BBC website being blocked?

I have now not been able to access any part of the BBC website for about a week here. It seems BBC has been blocked or are any of you able to access it without a VPN?

9 years 22 weeks ago in  Web & Technology - China

 
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No, same problem for me. Have to use vpn to update the app on my phone. Just tried main site & won't open. 

 

Cant think ink what I've read on their lately that could have upset Beijing 

Nessquick:

Same here.

 It start somewhere one or 2 weeks back, when there was article about clashes started. Short one , just notice, with promise of comming updates. than even this dissapeared, and second day or so, BBC app can't update without vpn.

9 years 22 weeks ago
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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Yup, same here, and since a while. When watching the BBC on cable TV, it was cut every time it's about corruption (like when Bo was being judged), troubles in Xingjiang ... Anything that have a risk to not follow the party line. Because of HK events, it happened a lot lately. It makes me mad every time, being told what to watch and not watch like I'm 5 years old.

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Shifu

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The BBC is being heavily censored now. It is blocked on the internet and the Tv channel is censored. I read a story about it on the BBC.

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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I'm in EU. No block here! What do you want to read?

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141024-edward-snowden-in-his-own-words

Citizenfour review: Edward Snowden in his own words

(PR)
Citizenfour, Laura Poitras' exciting and newsworthy portrait-of-a-whistleblower documentary, is something all too rare: a movie about a seismic event that seems to take place right at the centre of the earthquake. For most of the film, we're inside the anonymous, white-walled confines of a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013, where Edward Snowden, the former CIA system administrator, discusses his decision to leak thousands of classified documents that revealed the US National Security Agency's vast surveillance apparatus. The interview with Snowden, which takes place over eight days, is conducted by Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first broke the story; after a while, they’re joined by Ewan MacAskill, also of that newspaper. To borrow Woodrow Wilson's line about The Birth of a Nation, it's like seeing history written with lightning.

What makes Citizenfour riveting, as well as the most indispensable documentary of the year, is that Snowden has been a ghostly presence in this story so far. Now that we can finally see and hear him, he turns out to be an immensely thoughtful and compelling figure, an enlightened tech renegade who never wanted to be a conspiracy-thriller hero. Depending on your politics, he’s either a freedom fighter or a scoundrel, but even if you think he's the latter, it would be hard to watch Citizenfour without being a little impressed by his low-key, arrow-straight fortitude.

Snowden had followed Poitras’ work in documentaries, such as My Country, My Country, her outcry about life in Iraq under the US occupation, and he knew her name appeared on a top-priority NSA surveillance list, that meant her every move was being tracked by the agency. He figured she would be sympathetic and contacted her in a series of anonymous emails signed “citizenfour”. Early in the film, Poitras builds her status as an NSA security risk directly into the structure of the movie, flashing documents that chart her movements at airports, with the not-so-oblique suggestion that this could happen to you too. It's chillingly dramatic, a Bourne-like motif of intrigue that has the effect of making us realise that no, this is not just a movie.

Snowden, who turned 30 when Citizenfour was shot, is far from a radical rabble-rouser. He was raised in a military family, and in his designer glasses and T-shirts, thatchy hair, and young man's stubbly goatee, he looks like a hip young college professor. And he is clearly scared: when Citizenfour was filmed, he was living with the awareness that he would probably be sent to prison, and this charges everything he says with paranoid meaning. Snowden wears his potential martyrdom modestly. He comes across as a desperate citizen who has grasped, with creeping dismay, that the NSA reacted to 9/11 by amassing records of every phone call, e-mail message, and data search made in the US. Under the presidency of George W Bush and then Barack Obama, the organisation became a kind of surveillance vacuum cleaner, disregarding the very concept of privacy as a means to stop terror. By comparison, the days when the CIA would spy on people by sticking a recording device in a lamp seem nearly medieval.

Poitras is a skillful yet rather prosaic filmmaker. Citizenfour has a few true-life suspense moments, like the scene in which Snowden nervously responds to each phone call to his hotel room as through his cover were about to be blown. In the end, there isn’t that much to the movie apart from what Snowden has to say. Fortunately, that proves to be enough. Even if the NSA’s motives were defensible, Snowden perceived that with the new, omnipresent data-gathering system in place, the American government had pushed past the boundaries of acceptable conduct– that given the wrong leader, the country could begin a slide into despotism. That’s why, once he perceived the scale of the NSA’s actions, Snowden felt he had to reveal what he knew. He saw it as his duty: America's new system of mass snooping was itself a secret that had to be revealed.

But there’s a contradiction at the heart of Citizenfour. At one point, as the story is breaking, Snowden makes the observation that it would be a grave mistake if he became the story. That, he claims, would take the focus off the NSA. He's right, of course. And by going underground before being granted asylum in Russia, Snowden was able to avoid the limelight. But that's not the case in Citizenfour. The film offers nothing new in the way of information about America's octopus-armed surveillance state. What's new in the film is Edward Snowden's personality. And though that’s obviously a vital dimension of the story, watching Citizenfour, we're so caught up in the drama of Snowden’s presence that it's hard to say if he ultimately advances the issue of NSA surveillance or turns it, in effect, into a form of personality journalism. The film raises the question: is the NSA something that people would even care about without a poster boy? One desperately wants the answer to be yes. But the news-junkie high of seeing Snowden in Citizenfour makes you wonder if the answer may ultimately be no.

★★★★☆

Nessquick:

Man, You are sick :D

9 years 22 weeks ago
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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Is google blocked also without VPN? I can not access google by using http://91.213.30.151/ anymore.

SwedKiwi1:

I am able to access Google through http://91.213.30.151/ but it is not possible to get any search results. Any of these are always blocked. 

9 years 22 weeks ago
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ChineseAmerican:

Before I can access http://91.213.30.151/ without using VPN and is able to get search results. But now I can not even access http://91.213.30.151/ anymore.

9 years 22 weeks ago
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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Yup. BBC is a no no. Since last Tuesday.

 

And no big surprise really.

 

I have been following it with interest.

 

I post on a British Isles forum as well as here. When the HK  protests started, I was reading posts about how the news was censored in China. The BBC itself said it was banned on the mainland. But  It was not banned at all. We still had full access. I was taking screen shots of BBC on my phone (no VPN) and posting it on my home forum.

 

The BBC even ran an article that featured a photo of tank man. I took a screen shot and posted it to UK.

 

Still not banned. But they were reporting that they were banned.

 

I don't know what they eventually got banned for, but in my opinion the BBC wanted to be blocked. Because they were reporting that they were banned when they were not.

 

It's lazy reporting.  Because the story about their ban would add to the story about the protests.

SwedKiwi1:

It sounds strange that BBC were reporting themselves to be banned in mainland China. Is it possible that the website was banned in parts of the country (Beijing, Xinjiang, etc.) and not in others? 

 

Otherwise it is just sad to see another great source of news about China blocked. 

9 years 22 weeks ago
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estern:

Different parts of the country are not always completely the same.  Where I am (Wuhan) the BBC was blocked from before when they started reporting they were blocked.  I guess wherever you are you managed to get a few more days.

9 years 22 weeks ago
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ScotsAlan:

Yeah. I am in GZ, so maybe they did not block it here on account of the news getting in anyway. But China daily has been covering it anyway..

9 years 22 weeks ago
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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Android App is dead. It says it updates but does not.

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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The annoying thing is that it's even blocked my BBC Sports App as well.  Sure, go ahead and ban the news - I get that but don't take away my sports!!!

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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Geez.. Many thanks for the post. I had thought it was the computer playing up or internet signal. I have been using the BBC news as my homepage for the past 8 years. There has been at times some difficulty in opening the page, which it would maybe do after 2-3 days, but this time it's bee a week or so. Looks like I need to select a new homepage in the meantime. 

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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We can read slugging of FaceBook in EU:

 

http://rt.com/news/199292-journalist-facebook-surveillance-government/

 

‘Facebook a gift to intelligence agencies’ - Laura Poitras

 

Poitras also talked about the release of her new film, Citzenfour, which potrays the eight days that she spent in Hong Kong with Snowden, after he began leaking sensitive NSA documents. The film opened on Friday in selected cinemas in New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.

 

Is it correct 'film' or 'movie'? Poitras is "un 'merican"angel

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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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This is why, I think, the BBC is blocked: 

 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-10/27/content_18805962.htm China Daily reporting on a BBC article for early last week which claimed that the HK occupy protestors had been to the Oslo Freedom Forum two years ago to learn how to protest from outside forces! What is copied from the BBC article is accurate UNTIL you read the original (which is not linked). At the bottom of the original article it clearly states: "Clarification: Hong Kong's Occupy Central insists that its members have not attended the Oslo Freedom Forum nor received any specific training from the organisations mentioned in the article. 

OCLP has openly held "non-violent protest" workshops in Hong Kong but these were wholly organised by OCLP, without any support or intervention from foreign organisations."

 Original BBC page here though you'll need a vpn:http://m.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29708917

SwedKiwi1:

Good link and a very possible reason for BBC being blocked. Although it seems to be a case of BBC either being blocked because it is reporting on the situation or because  it is conflicting with the one-sided view of the Chinese media. 

9 years 22 weeks ago
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Hotwater:

I thought the same originally but other UK news sources are also reporting on the protests & not being blocked, yet....

9 years 22 weeks ago
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9 years 22 weeks ago
 
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