A random bit of miscellanea: based on Matthew Felix Sun‘s recent experiments, it seems that this website is blocked in China. It’s no surprise that some of the images are censored in the Flickr sets– there’s a known issue [Wikipedia] with certain Flickr image servers– things on farm2.static.flickr.com and farm4.static.flickr.com seem to be available, but not farm1, farm3 or farm5.
But if you try to go to crescatgraffiti.com in China, you get “Page not available“, along with a bar asking the user if they’d like to translate the (unavailable) English-language page into Chinese.
I’ll admit, I’m a bit puzzled. The site has nothing to do with the Chinese government and very little to do with politics, and there’s only one piece of graffiti that mentions Tibet. Maybe it falls under websites that contain “obscenity, pornography, and criminal activity”– admittedly, the inherently-criminal UChicago graffiti does include plenty of content that is arguably obscene and/or pornographic.
Go figure.
(P.S. After posting this, I noticed today’s date. No April Fools here, though, folks…)
3 Comments
Hey I just asked my friends in Shanghai, and they reported that it is not blocked now.
The Wikipedia link you referred to above is very helpful.
I tested mine and found out that indeed all my unblocked images are on servers with even numbers ( farm4.static.flickr.com ) while blocked images are either on odd numbers ( farm3.static.flickr.com or farm5.static.flickr.com ). They must have done something to the serves in whole sale.
Thank you,
Matthew Felix Sun
Thanks for the update, Ben! I wonder if maybe the site wasn’t being blocked as such, but if it was a packet filtering issue leading to sporadic blockage.
Post a Comment