Items Tagged With CNN

It's 12:40am and just wanted to jot down a very interesting and ongoing flurry of "tweets" -- @kaiserkuo's favorite word -- regarding whether or not CNN is blocked in China. This is a summary of how the stream went down:

• Ken from Shanghaiist couldn't access CNN and informed Mashable and TechCrunch via Twitter
• Mike Arrington asked if CNN was also down in Hong Kong
• I asked Joey in HK if it was out for her
• Thijs confirmed it was out in Beijing
• Anguslau then tweeted it was out in HK
• Marc and Chris said CNN was on in Shanghai
• Ken then confirmed CNN was back on again
• Mengli said it was definitely blocked for him in Zhengzhou
• Alex said it was working fine in Dalian
• Andrew said it was jittery in Beijing but working ok
• Thijs confirmed it was still blocked for him
• Ken tweeted he was wrong, it was in fact still blocked for him in Shanghai
• Guerel says CNN.com was working in Kunshan but CNN TV was blocked.

wow. talk about dizzy. all this in a span of an hour with posts on TechCrunch, Mashable and Gawker going up on the topic. the only problem is, it seems as soon as posts are published, the situation changes again...

...as i was saying before, it's blocked! ...oh wait, it's unblocked...no, it's blocked again! ...oh no i think it's unblocked... wait, wait...it's blocked for real! ...no wait, i think it's really not...

(sigh) blocked or unblocked...i say just unblock it all already as creating all this confusion by patchy instances of censorship isn't exactly helping them to win the PR game either...

Wow. Saw this in a passing tweet from someone in China on Twitter really late Sunday night (technically Monday morning at 2am-ish)

As I'm writing this, mainstream media hasn't picked up on it yet. Once again, Twitter breaks news first. Here's a screenshot of what the Sports Network site looks like right now.

Update 1: Andrew Lih got in contact with The Sports Network in PA and got more info. My insomnia and Twitter addiction also got a mention on TechCrunch. Twitter friend @mrrich based in Beijing also comments on his blog here.

ok, here is where i'm a bit confused...i assumed there was a CNN affiliation which is why the Chinese hackers brought The Sports Network site down to begin with. The original link that the tweet referred to was http://sports.si.cnn.com

i just assumed (and maybe the Chinese hackers did too?) that The Sports Network was owned or affiliated with CNN somehow.

either way, IMHO it's a bit careless also of Sports Network to come right out and call them a "political entity" -- that only serves to fan the flames without proof that it really is a political entity.

Update 2: Just checked the Sports Network site at 4:10am (don't ask why i'm still up) and here's what I see live:

...ok wtf, as soon as i tweeted about it, it went back to the error message. i swear i wasn't seeing things. I grabbed the above screenshot with Skitch and DM'd @TechCrunch to further confirm that poor Sports Network was a target by association with CNN. The "HACK" and cnn.com image was actually animated on the site. Wow. If this is a sign of things to come, it's not looking good for other sites.

Something tells me they thought they were hacking CNN's site. I'm not sure what the exact affiliation is between CNN and SportsNetwork.com but they're apparently being targeted as a result of wanting to target CNN.

Wishful thinking but I hope things calm down soon as the Chinese nationalists need to understand that actions such as this only serves to add to the downward spiral before the Olympics.

Update 3: Here are some good blog posts and resources with more insight into the anti-CNN movement among Chinese internet users and hackers.

• Sina.com's anti-CNN banner (Imagethief)
• Chinese hackers strike again... (Shanghaiist)
• China.Alltop.Com (English language China blogs from those with firsthand insight)

If you're on Twitter, another great way to stay up to date is to follow all the folks that @ChinaList (see them tweeting away on the right of this blog?) is following. It's a list I put together of English speaking Twitter junkies, many who are westerners living/working in China with first hand insight on what's going on there. A lot of good folks to strike up a conversation with if you want to stay up to date before traditional "news" gets around to covering it.

here is a cache in Google of what the link for http://sports.si.cnn.com page looked like before:

here's what the Google cache of the http://sportsnetwork.com URL looked like before:

...even all the previous syndicated news on Sports Network's servers are getting error messages. If you do a search on Google News for "Sports Network" all their links lead to pages that look like this: