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China Telecom blocks FeedBurner RSS feeds

Categories: China
Feedburner Blocked
China Blockpage (China Telecom) Screen shot of blocked FeedBurner via williamlong.info [1]

It has been reported [1]that people who are using China Telecom are unable to access FeedBurner [2] feeds. FeedBurner, which has been acquired by Google Inc [3] since June, 2007, is the leading provider of RSS [4] feeds, powering hundreds of thousands of blog, podcast and news feeds (August 27, 2007: Feedburner [5] is feeding 535,003 publishers who've burned 913,490 feeds).

Moon-Blog [6], who has done a traceroute from China to check the block, found that the traceroute failed at the backbone level in China, blocked by 202.97.33.110 IP. “This IP address is a main router of China Telcom. It’s confirm that the Greate FireWall’s IP blocking works,” he said, adding that “because Feedburner provides content from countless websites. It could conceivably carry some information the Chinese authorities think it shouldn’t. So they try to blocks it.”

tracert Feedburner
Trace Route FeedBurner done by Moon-Blog [6]

This goes beyond blocking blog services like TypePad and is important to watch. This might be a sign of bigger trouble for RSS in China,” wrote Steve Rubel, the author of Micro Persuasion [7].

RSS and news aggregators, like FeedBurner [2], Google Reader [8] and Bloglines [9] allow Internet users to subscribe and view content from specified sources. In countries engaged in Internet filtering, RSS aggregators are being used to bypass filters and access content published on blocked websites.