Why you can't read our website in China anymore...
When Internet users in China fire up TheAtlantic.com, check out product specifications on Sony Mobile, or add a Firefox plugin, well, too bad. The Chinese authorities have blocked those and thousands of other sites—and just as the People’s Republic hosts the World Internet Conference, to boot. All of these have one thing in common: They use edgecastcdn.net, the content-delivery network (CDN) of Verizon’s EdgeCast, says Greatfire.org, a group that promotes Chinese Internet freedom.
Charlie Smith of Greatfire says he’s seen “nothing on this scale ever before,” though that’s “because so many companies use EdgeCast for hosting.” (“Charlie Smith” is a pseudonym, used by a Greatfire member because of the Chinese government’s sensitivity to the group’s efforts to expose and undermine censorship.)
It’s not that The Atlantic or Sony had just uploaded subversive content. What Smith thinks is going on is that the Chinese government tried to block certain sites served up by EdgeCast. But EdgeCast serves up content for tens of thousands of sites, and the Chinese authorities seem to be blocking many others as well. (CDNs cache websites’ content on servers that are physically located closer to users to speed access times, absorb traffic spikes, and provide more efficient delivery of the data.)
EdgeCast said in a blog post that this week it’s seen China’s content “filtering escalate with an increasing number of popular web properties impacted and even one of our many domains being partially blocked … with no rhyme or reason as to why.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/why-you-cant-read-the-atlantic-in-china/382883/
