Frank Haley reports for FGGAM News:
China blocking access to Gmail
China is blocking all access to Gmail, Google’s email service, according to Internet analysis firm Dyn Research.
Reports surfaced on social media, particularly Reddit and Twitter, that Gmail was blocked in China the day after Christmas. Now, an internet analysis firm called Dyn Research has confirmed the outage.
“China has a number of ways they can block content. One of the crudest ways is to just block an IP address, and when you do that, you block all the content available at the IP,” Earl Zmijewski, Dyn’s vice-president of data analytics, told Mashable.
The firm has confirmed the IP addresses in Hong Kong that Gmail is routed through have all been blocked. The only way for Chinese citizens to access Gmail at this point would be to use a virtual private network (VPN), which routes a user’s Internet connection through servers located in other countries. Neither China nor Google have commented on why the service has been blocked or what will be done.
China’s censorship of the Internet has long been known, and it was found last year that the country’s version of Twitter, Weibo, can delete controversial posts in real time. China also blocked Instagram in Hong Kong during protests in September.
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