Global Voices Online

Isaac at the Harvard Global Voices gathering, photo by Jeff Ooi.

As some of our readers have pointed out, Isaac Mao's site - isaacmao.com - is being blocked. Isaac gives part of the story on his backup site, helpfully titled “Not isaacmao.com”:

The site of isaacmao.com has been blocked due to it's 'sensitive' content. I don't know how long it will take to return. I'm starting emgergency processes now, and will update information in this backup site. Thanks for your attention and kind queries.

(Anyone ever linked to my site for the “sensitive” post about Great Firewall, please kindly trackback here to tell more people what happened)…

Don't worry, it's not so sad thing, it's fun enough~! No experience, no understanding.

The “sensitive content” in question may have been Isaac's very funny April Fools post, where he said that isaacmao.com had been blocked, and suggested people visit other, non-offensive websites, including net memes like “How to Fold A Shirt” - his post read, in part: “Isaac Mao was exiled to Siberia… what do you want to visit now?”

Or, it may been the diagram - hosted on flickr - that Isaac linked to, with his speculations on how
the Chinese firewall operates. (Flickr is becoming an increasingly useful tool to help our Chinese friends evade the firewall. In the event that Isaac's flickr post is blocked, here's a copy of the diagram hosted on our servers.)

Isaac believes his blog is intact, but his ISP was ordered to stop resolving the isaacmao.com domain name. He's now working to get the domain name to resolve to his backup blog. A number of people (Global Voices included) have offered Isaac hosting for his blog outside of China. Isaac's planning on keeping it in China, seeing situations like this as an excellent chance to learn more about internet filtering in China:

To my personal blog, I'm not so eager to move my blog to oversea's hosting. It's so good to study this space with more local experience. (from a recent email from Isaac.)

One issue Isaac's situation raises is the idea of “blogger adoption”. We may want to look into a system that allows bloggers in relatively free countries to “adopt” blogs in relatively unfree countries and keep backup copies of those sites. When a site is blocked, the adoptive blogger could post a mirror of the site based on the backup. If anyone is interested in trading ideas on how we might hack together such a system, please drop me a line at ethanz AT gmail DOT com.