2014-12-29
Google China headquarters in Beijing, July 18, 2014.
ImagineChina
Google’s webmail service, Gmail, is now completely blocked in China, as the authorities prevent traffic routed via Hong Kong from reaching its 620 million netizens, experts and Internet monitors said.
“Chinese users now have no way of accessing Gmail behind the GFW,” the Internet monitoring group GreatFire.org said in a post on its blog on Monday, in a reference to the complex system of blocks, filters, and human censorship known colloquially as “The Great Firewall,” or GFW.
Before Dec. 26, they could still send or receive emails via email clients even though Gmail’s web interface is not accessible, the post said.
“Chinese users now have absolutely no way of using Gmail, except using circumvention tools.”
Previous disruptions were sporadic, and largely designed to make it look as if Gmail’s own servers were unstable, it said.
“GFW has been doing it gradually and now it finally completed the grand mission of completely eliminating Google…in China,” the group, which monitors the GFW, said.
Internet performance monitoring company Dyn Research also said on its Twitter account on Sunday that all Gmail traffic via the former British colony is affected by the block.
Dyn’s vice-president of analytics Earl Zmijewski told the International Data Group (IDG)’s news service that all Gmail traffic to China through Hong Kong is affected.
Only users who have the software and some technical knowledge will be able to evade the block, he said.
Sharp fall in traffic
According to Zmijewski, the traffic is being censored at the level of IP addresses, a method often used by regimes to block content to a particular region, IDG reported.
Meanwhile, Google’s own measurement of China-bound traffic showed a sharp fall starting on Friday, the company’s real-time traffic measurement tool revealed.
Government censors last blocked Gmail temporarily ahead of the 25th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
