I confirm that the google search sites are all blocked except the chinese one. The strange thing is that google news were not blocked 2 min ago (I could access to all google news sites, US include) but are inaccessible now ...

No problem for Gmail neither for other google services.

Update: google news are accessible again, including the Hong-Kong`s one. But the search sites are still all blocked..

No problem so far. Where you live?

-Who else in China is seeing this?

-You mean your blog or the fact that google IS blocked now?

If you mean ur blog, there r many ppl here booked ur rss.

If you mean that fact, yes, man, yes.

hecaitou: which city do you live? I'm in hangzhou, I have been using google.com the whole day and NOW I can still search with it. I never use google.cn.

I meant if Google.com is blocked...

Randy, what are your reasons to not use Google.cn?

I live in Beijing, and google.com has been blocked for me for about the last 3 weeks or so. Gmail does still work, but google fails consistently (news, search, images, ..... everything).
I have been checking the web for reports of this, and only now I find this blog. It confirms at least that its not just me.

Philipp: most of my searching is english, it looks like that google.cn doesn't give me as much/good results as google.com in english search.

I am near Shanghai, but strange thing google search (google.com .co.jp .uk .fr ...) is accessible again now ... Seems they push the on/off button during the hole day. Game among censors ? Anyway I also noticed that google language tools was very very slow or periodically innaccessible, anybody who also noticed it ?

Luke&NouNou:
check out this link(in Chinese if anybody else is intrested): http://www.smth.org/bbstcon.php?board=Google&gid=17420.
I'm not sure if they are kidding or not, if the story is true, that's really ridiculous.

Randy what does the site say?

My reason is similar with Randy.

And what more is that google.cn only have only a few services, (web SEARCH , IMAGE SEARCH , NEWS) , but RSS reader(reader.google.com) and ADSENSE, and others are not available

Philipp-
That's a forum thread discussing the recent cencorship of google.com. It tells some guys' stories how they got from the blacklist to whitelist-input the Chinese words Ba Rong Ba Chi(a slogan by the president, in English: Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces) into the google search box and press shift+enter, or click this google search link: http://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%85%AB%E8%8D%A3%E5%85%AB%E8%80%BB, you will get whitelisted.

NouNou: "Anyway I also noticed that google language tools was very very slow or periodically innaccessible, anybody who also noticed it ?"

I seldom use google's language tool, I just tried it to translate this thread's posts from english to chinese and it took about 7 secs. The translate service page opens very fast as well.

Randy- That story seems a little ridiculous, as you said. Can't read the chinese version, but my feelings are that its untrue.

Google is not blocked. (yet :))

The Chinese gov is just messing with their DNS records.

Your DNS chinese server will not give you the right IP address of www.google.com

To solve this problem, what you have to do is go to the folder Windows/system32/drivers/etc/ and add the following line at the bottom of the file "hosts":

127.0.0.1 localhost
72.14.207.99 www.google.com

This way your computer will not ask the Chinese DNS server for the google IP and it will go there directly to 72.14.207.99

This solutions worked for me and for a bunch of friends that live in Shanghai :)

Let me know if it works for you!

BTW.

Make sure to include a "TAB space" between
"72.14.207.99" and "www.google.com"

I live in Dalian and google.com has been inaccesible for maybe 2 weeks. gmail sems a bit flaky today.

DNS seems to be the issue. I can access http://72.14.207.99/ in the browser but not http://www.google.com/ .

I had a look at the DNS with nslookup. So, google.com's address is probably wrong. The hosts file fix does work but u will need to restart firefox. Internet exploder doesn't seem to work tho...

$ nslookup
*** Can't find server name for address 202.96.69.38: Server failed
Default Server: ns.lnpta.net.cn
Address: 202.96.64.68

> www.google.com
Server: ns.lnpta.net.cn
Address: 202.96.64.68

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www-china.l.google.com
Address: 66.249.89.99
Aliases: www.google.com, www.l.google.com

> www.gmail.com
Server: ns.lnpta.net.cn
Address: 202.96.64.68

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: googlemail.l.google.com
Addresses: 64.233.185.19, 64.233.185.83
Aliases: www.gmail.com, mail.google.com

>
> google.cn
Server: ns.lnpta.net.cn
Address: 202.96.64.68

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: google.cn
Addresses: 64.233.171.99, 216.239.57.99

>

at least I still can access www.google.com in china without any problem.

I'm in Changchun, and all of Google's foreign search engines have been blocked for about a week now. Gmail seems to come and go as well as google news. But as of this morning everyting is back working again, google.com .co.uk .de etc and gmail all work fine. Seems someone upstairs is messing around with something... wish i knew more

72.14.207.99 gets me to Google.com...
but results just get me a "document contains no data".

I hear that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has even come out and told Google that they have to abide by the laws of countries they operate in, including laws on restricting the flow of information... (Can anyone confirm this?)

Yeah Piggy, something of the sort was said, in the language of politics of course (so it wasn't said directly, and not even directly targeted at Google Inc):
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-06-09.html#n81

Isn't Google.com accessible in China now?
http://news.portalit.net/fullnews_Google.com-Back-In-China,-Google.cn-Soon-To-Be-Abandoned_1645.html