Block on Times Disappears

UPDATE: In a spirit of fairness to all (especially those guys & gals sitting in little rooms staring at screens, trying to ferret out all the dangerous info on the net), the New York Times is unblocked, as of this cold Monday morning in Beijing. Good thing! We were all getting tired of proxy servers and their pop-up ads!

NY Times Blocked in China

Its all over the news in the outside world, even on the Times own website, but you can't read all about it here in Beijing. Altho accessible early on Friday morning, the New York Times' website soon blanked out. Concerned expats who check in on the website regularly were soon checking in with each other to find out whether they were the only ones with access problems but soon found that they were all in the same boat. A quick experiment with any number of proxy servers, which allow access to banned websites by bypassing the government's web filters, showed the Times' website to be functioning perfectly. Mobile access was, curiously, still unblocked as of Saturday evening. In addition, the Times global edition, the International Herald Tribune, was also freely accessible. In the memorable words of Kurt Vonnegut, "And so it goes . . ."