Merhaba,
We spent almost a year in China and I don’t remember experiencing the frustration of blocked website the way I have since we’ve returned to Turkey this year. China blocks facebook, but I don’t really do facebook so didn’t really notice. And on occasion .gov site were blocked but nothing I couldn’t get around and access another way. Even our website, www.mydoramac.com was blocked for a time. Again I could find the info, text was one place and photos another. And I could use the magazine database from my Roanoke County Public Library and my Library Card. How great is that! But here in Turkey all sorts of things come up blocked. Today on Google News there was a link to a Rolling Stone article about Mitt Romeny and Bain. When I tried to acces it, I got another of those Access Denied pages. As we were leaving Turkey last year, academics and journalists, and lots of just "general public" were protesting Turkey’s planned censoring of the Internet by forcing every provider to pick a filter whether they wanted to or not. Turkey calls itself a democracy but you can’t tell that by Internet Access. This article focuses on Rolling Stone being blocked in China and it is one comment that points to the same problem in Turkey. I tried to pull up a site that spoke about the problem in Turkey and, you guessed it, Access Denied. In case anyone from the Turkish government is reading this, I don’t feel protected, I feel insulted that you don’t think I’m intelligent enough to make my own decisions or evaluate information that I read. Shame on you! As for blaming Rolling Stone for the block, how would that cause comments about Rolling Stone access in Turkey to also be blocked?
Anyway, that’s my rant for today.
Ru
Access Denied! That’s the message greeting China-based readers of Rollingstone.com, the online version of the iconic music and cultural magazine Rolling Stone. But this isn’t the work of the rampaging Net Nanny but rather a deliberate block on Chinese IP addresses that seems to stem from the publishers. That ain’t very rock ‘n’ roll.
As it’s a geolocation-based restriction, let’s say it has been geotarded, which is my favourite etymologically-edgy epithet. This is usually done by music or video content providers who want to stop certain regions from accessing licensed content, but it’s rarely done by news or topical sites. We reached out to Rolling Stone for comment late yesterday, but have yet to get a response.
The geotarding seems to cover the whole of mainland China but not Hong Kong, as I was able to confirm by using a HK-based IP proxy. Going to any page on the website brings up an error message, such as:
Access Denied. You don’t have permission to access “http://www.rollingstone.com/music/” on this server.
And then there’s a long reference number, as shown in the top image. The Twitter user @beijingdaze, who first alerted me to this, says that access was normal to the site very recently and the geotarded blank page has only showed up in the past two days.
The magazine version of Rolling Stone was launched in China in 2006 (left) only to be shut down due to licensing issues a few weeks later. In now sells under the ‘InMusic’ name.
In this unusual scenario, there are a few possible reasons for Rolling Stone making this very un-liberal exclusion: perhaps the site was the victim of a hack attack that emanated from China, and therefore wanted to lock itself down; it was done to protect the copyright of new music or video on the site; or, it’s some technical error that no internal tech staffers have spotted.
The magazine version of Rolling Stone was launched in China in early 2006 only to be strangled by interminable red tape just a few weeks later. The publisher Wenner Media persisted, and it was resurrected with a different name and a fresh publishing license a short while later. It’s currently sold branded as ‘InMusic’ magazine (as pictured above).
Tags: China, culture, georestricted, geotarded, Music, Rolling Stone, Web
About Steven Millward
Steven follows the shininess and brilliance of gadgets, social media and other cultural phenomena across Asia. Specialist areas of research include e-commerce, Android, smartphone adoption, and apps in general. He’s currently based near Shanghai. If you have any tips or feedback, contact him via email, or on his Weibo or Twitter.