China unblocks some websites

Many websites — including some hardcore porn sites — that had been blocked in China for years were accessible on Friday, although some observers cautioned that the appearance of openness may be a mistake and not a change in policy.

Some of the newly unblocked sites include Voice of America, the video-sharing site Vimeo and the URL-shortening site bit.ly.

The video-sharing site YouTube remained blocked. But an unrelated pornography site — YouPorn — was suddenly available.

So too were many other Chinese and foreign-language porn sites. Reports said they have been unblocked for days and in some cases, weeks.

Some analysts said the unblocking is likely a mistake. "I think it's totally just a glitch," said Kaiser Kuo, a technology analyst based in Beijing. "These things have happened often before. [Censors] screw up and some site will suddenly become available for a day or two days and then be back to normal again.

"It's almost certainly not deliberate policy," he told The Associated Press.

Censors still busy

There was speculation that censors may be more preoccupied with blocking content relating to Friday's anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Indeed, China on Friday suddenly blocked the social networking service Foursquare, which lets users send location messages to friends over cellphones.

There was some suggestion that China's net censors noticed that Foursquare users may have been trying to organize some kind of location-based protest related to the massacre.

A poster on the ChinaGeeks blog said Facebook and Twitter remained blocked inside China.

The Telegraph's Shanghai correspondent, Malcolm Moore, reported this week that friends had told him that many porn sites had been unblocked several weeks ago.

"The friends who first told me the news speculated that with the recent spate of extreme violence carried out by middle-aged men … the government might be allowing pornography in order to vent some pent-up testosterone," he wrote. That was a reference to the many incidents of school stabbings that have shocked the country.    

China blocks access to material it deems illegal under its "Great Firewall" policy. Censors routinely block sex sites, as well as sites that give news about Tibet, anti-government or anti-Communist party activities, as well as any other news it views as subversive.

China has more than 400 million net users.