14 DAY TRIAL // The Chinese government is again surprising the entire world as it decided to ban all the RSS feeds in the country but there is no official confirmation on this matter. Since August, the rumors talking about a potential Feedburner feeds ban in China have been quickly spread on the web but this time, it might be something really serious. As Ars Technica reports, there are a lot of tricks to bypass the restriction but let's get focused on the Chinese government's decision which is again censoring the content accessible to its residents. The authorities have always been alerted by any blog or website which discussed a sensitive matter for the country and they quickly banned them or even worse, they sent the author to the court.
Ars Technica sustains some of the feeds were already banned but recently the China's Public Security Bureau took the decision to ban all the feeds accessible to the local users. "More recent reports tell us that the PSB appears to have extended this block to all incoming URLs that begin with "feeds," "rss," and "blog," thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites-including ones that aren't blocked in China," the same source wrote in the article published today.
The decision is somehow motivated by the content available to the Chinese users because, as I'm sure you know, the authorities want to control all the information distributed in the country. Moreover, the local ISP always tried to restrict the access to this information by banning popular services such as Blogger or Wordpress. Well, the RSS feeds was just one of the tricks which were used to receive the censored information so it is quite obvious the government decided to ban it.
In case you missed the news, the Chinese authorities also decided to filter the content provided by the most popular country's portals by adding two virtual cops which inform the users about a certain infringing content which they are about to access.