roc wrote:

According to several Wikipedians living in Mainland China (excluding Hong Kong and Macao), the GFW block on Wikimedia has been upgraded to a new a level, it seems that:

• Official Wikimedia proxies are blocked;
• "zh.wikipedia.org" becomes a URL-level keyword for GFW.

The upgrade was noticed and reported as early as August 7, 2006 9:30 UTC.

This upgrade coincided with a Beijing News (新京報) report on Wikipedia.

Sources cited: the forwarded message below (in English), and a discussion at zh_wikipedia@googlegroups (in Chinese).

More information should be available.

Please feel free to post messages in Chinese on this discussion thread, they will be translated into English. (本討論線中的中文信件會被翻譯為英文.)

If it is not appropriate to discuss this matter in public here, we may continue the discussion in private methods, please advise.

Best regards and wishes.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: mingli yuan mingli.yuan@gmail.com Date: 2006/8/8 上午 12:52 Subject: [Wikipedia-l] GFW upgrade block level for Wikipedia To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org

After a report from Xinjingbao(The Beijing News, http://www.thebeijingnews.com/ ) on Wikipedia, yesterday afternoon the Great firewall of Chinese government upgrades its block level for Wikipedia. Today many Wikipedia users in China report that they can not access Wikipedia via the official proxy provides by MediaWiki Fundation.

This is a another bad news for Mainland Chinese Wikipedians again. Seems hopeless for them. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Well,

Two sites in Korea and China have been mirroring the entire English wikigadugi site and I have been allowing them to do so based on this situation in China. I was also constantly under DOS attacks from various folks on ChinaNet, all of them from ranges in Bejing. They are still getting content and images from me second hand, and I have blocked most of ChinaNet, including two large schools in Bejing whose students sole purpose seems to be to destroy my site through ssh hacking and DOS attacks. I moved the ssh ports to the internet network and blocked most of these ranges in the firewall for all ports except port 80 READ commoands. Over the past month, these sites making mirrors of the english version of wikigadugi have only downloaded about 20% of the total English Wikipedia. I am guessing someone over there is build a mirrored library of the site in South Korea for use in China. I am happy to help them.

Jeff