China is that kind of country which today praises your technology but tomorrow bans it because a piece of content appearing on it offended the country's authorities. It happened again
today when it seems like YouTube became unavailable for the local consumers who get the famous "The server is taking too long to respond" error. According to Techworld.nl, lots of Chinese users encountered this error but the Mountain View company didn't issue a statement about this problem. However, it might be only a server glitch or maybe one of the Internet service providers is affected by a problem with their connection.
However, the same source reports that other technologies which were reported as banned in China re-became available. Blogger, Google's blog technology which was blocked in the past due to some insulting blog posts that appeared on it, is now available to all the users but nobody said anything about it until now. Moreover, Flickr, the Yahoo photo sharing technology which was also banned in China, was restored and can be accessed by anyone who lives in the Asian country.
The folks from Techworld.nl tried to explain the ban: "the current blocking may be related to the Communist Party Congress, which began Oct. 15 in Beijing and ends Sunday. Held once every five years, the meeting is the Chinese government's most important political gathering, used to create five-year plans, which are the bedrock of China's centrally-planned economy. It is also often used to reshuffle government positions or for leaders to consolidate their power."
The Chinese authorities are extremely exigent when it comes to the content available to the local residents, a lot of websites being banned due to offensive content appearing on the web. In addition, the local government implemented some virtual cops to patrol the portals and warn users every time they try to access prohibited content.
