Nokia's Xpress browser has been blocked by China's Great Firewall

WP Central

Nokia's Xpress service for Lumia Windows Phones

China isn't a friendly country to internet companies. We know it's got a problem with Google, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and millions of sites with .tw, .jp and .hk domain names. Now Nokia's brand new Xpress service has just joined "Red china hates you lot" club.

It works like this. The Chinese Communist Political party evaluates all websites and services, i past one, according to whether they similar it or not. The ones considered "unharmonious", as the authorities tends to phrase it, will be kept exterior the land with an extremely advanced internet censorship system nicknamed the "Great Firewall", or "GFW" for brusk. Basically the GFW works like this:

Block sites & services by domain proper name. (Rarely happens)
Block sites & services by server IP accost. (Nigh mutual trick. Instance: Twitter)
Sniffing the byte stream and reset individual HTTP connections upon finding "unharmonious" contents. (Example: Google)
DNS hijacking. (Case: Windows Telephone Marketplace for most of 2022)

As to what makes something "harmonious" or "unharmonious", there'south no clear definition. "Unharmony" could come up from pornographic content, violent images, strong languages, ideas that don't go well with the government's political propaganda, etc. Anyway, every bit long every bit the governors don't like it. More often than not it's about political reasons.

WP Central

Nokia'southward Xpress service features server-side information compression, which means the Xpress server retrieves data, processes information technology, and relay the packages to users. This effectively breaches the IP address blocking part of the GFW. Because what should originate from, say, the Twitter server, is now coming from Nokia's server, which is not in the IP blocking list.

Large Brother won't similar it for sure. Xpress surfaced in the Marketplace around yesterday (Beijing time). The boys at WPDang gave information technology a try, found it working nicely (by which I mean breaching the GFW) as expected, and hollered the skillful news around a bit. This morning they woke up to notice Xpress not working whatever more. The dutiful harminiators behind the GFW work fast and with a flick of finger they threw the Xpress server into the IP blacklist. Problem solved.

xpress

Moral of the story:

Doing business organization in Cathay could be pain in the [beep] for cyberspace-centric companies.
Big Blood brother doesn't care how big y'all are. Google? Microsoft? Apple tree? Nokia? Actually the bigger y'all are, the more than attention (the bad kind) you get.
We guess Nokia will have to forget about Xpress for Chinese Lumia owners, or cook up a GFWed special version for the particular market.
If yous are in People's republic of china, and have institute some great tool for GFW-scaling, keep information technology really, really tranquillity. Spread the news and your play tricks might just fail.
If you are well-nigh to come to China for whatever reason, DO Buy A RELIABLE VPN SERVICE before boarding your flight, or it could exist too late.

To know more about which sites are blocked by the GFW and how Chinese people (too equally ex-pats in Mainland china) feel about it, just track the hashtag #fuckGFW on Twitter. Enjoy

This post is written safely backside my trustworthy VPN provider, with one extra VPN service for support plan, and a paid HTTP proxy for the ultimate failsafe. Permit's pray this one doesn't get WPCentral blocked past the GFW. Amen.

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