Just two months after doing a bunch of work to get the J-School’s web site unblocked in China, where censors had kindly blocked the entire server rather than just the China Digital Times domain, I’ve just learned that all of Birdhouse is now similarly blocked. We host a few China-related sites here, though to my knowledge none of them are hard-core political.
As if the censorship itself isn’t bad enough, the “block entire server IP” methodology is so grossly overreaching and unnecessary that it almost seems like an intentional attempt by the censors to punish not just the domain operator but also the host — inconveniencing dozens or hundreds of other innocent domain operators on the same shared server just to make a power point — and possibly to force the host to start saying “no” to people who want to operate China-related sites.
Time to start allocating more IPs…