drupal.org blocked in China

By ebenfarnworth on 10 May 2014 at 15:50 UTC

Over the past few weeks I have been having problems in China accessing drupal.org, drush stopped working for module updates and installs. To confirm this I then used http://www.blockedinchina.net to check and it confirmed that the site is inaccessible in China. But they have not blocked wordpress.org or joomla.org as of writing this post. I know that the firewall sometimes block site addresses and sometimes blocks whole server IP's, if its the later then maybe someone working for drupal.org could test if there ip is blocked in China and if it's just the IP then consider changing it so that users in this part of the world can access the site without going through a VPN.

Comments

Looking for solutions

joshuami

he/him

English

Portland, OR

commented 14 May 2014 at 23:04

Several sites seem to confirm that Drupal.org is blocked by some, if not all, ISPs in China. In asking around, it sounds like this has happened in the past in response to content posted on groups.drupal.org. We do not condone censorship of this type, but there are limited ways for us to respond.

In the next couple of weeks, we will be moving Drupal.org over onto a CDN. That CDN has edges in China, so we hope that will open us back up to China.

In the future, please feel free to post an issue to our webmaster queue if you experience blocking of Drupal.org. We do not actively monitor the general discussion forum.

Cheers,

Joshua Mitchell
CTO, Drupal Association

I wonder if this isn't a

Jaypan commented 17 May 2014 at 09:25

I wonder if this isn't a result of "The Day We Fight Back" initiative. An initiative about freedom isn't likely to sit so well with the Chinese government. Is it possible that this initiative resulted in the blocking of 1.3 billion possible users?

I asked my friend anh he said

mesut10 commented 19 May 2014 at 16:26

I asked my friend anh he said Drupal still running normal

https://zh.greatfire.org/blog

stefan.r commented 18 November 2014 at 11:58

https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites

The Chinese censorship authorities have DNS poisoned *edgecastcdn.net, which means all subdomains of edgecastcdn.net are blocked in China. EdgeCast is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN) in the world and provides its cloud services to thousands of websites and apps in China.

We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet. However, we can now reveal publicly that the authorities are doing just that - attempting to cut China off from the global internet.

We have seen instances of “collateral damage” due to “collateral freedom” over the past few days and have received emails from some smaller website owners wondering why their non-sensitive sites are being blocked by the great firewall.

What's going on?

The disruption to EdgeCast’s service was noted by the company on their website on November 14, 2014, although we noticed a problem on November 12 and the first poisoning on the 13th. The company's status update still appears on their site:

Please be advised, we are experiencing issues with content delivery in the China region due to suddenly increased restrictions imposed by the Chinese Government. If you are receiving reports from end users not able to view content from within China, please contact our network Operations center to discuss the options available to you.

Some of the recent victims of collateral damage, all EdgeCast clients, include:

The project website of Drupal (drupal.org) is blocked. Drupal is used as a back-end framework for many websites worldwide. Administrators of those websites in China will face disruptions when trying to update Drupal or install extensions.