In a last ditch effort to get my feeds working again, I wrote Feedburner. Their response, despite not being what I was hoping for, was at least honest. They’ve basically given up, and so shall I.
Hello,
Unfortunately, at this time we don’t have any new information to share and any blocks you noticed a week or two ago are likely to still be in place. We’re working with Google China staff to see if any possible resolution might be available, but the only ‘workaround’ to try at this point would be something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2864 (gladder) for potential subscribers.
We will be sure to post something in the Known Issues and Workarounds section of FeedBurner Forums should a significant update become available. If you need to get publishing now, however, we suggest you seek other alternatives.
Thanks for your persistence,
—
Matt Shobe
Google Support – FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com
So, I’m going to implement some of the (mostly in-house) alternatives that I discussed previously, and say farewell to Feedburner, at least until the [*chingov*] realizes they’re being assholes and blocking a service that really needs not be blocked.
For anyone that’s still using our http://feeds.feedburner.com/LostLaowaiBlog feed, please make sure you update it to http://www.lostlaowai.com/commentary/blog/feed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
thanks for the update, ryan. it really is excessive and asshole-y of Net Nanny to put the pinch on feedburner. it was the last thread of accessibility to my blogspot blog inside the PRC (well, there’s always Tor and stuff).
at least google gave an honest answer, even if it was a shrug of the shoulders. don’t expect them, however, to actually speak up (publicly) on this touchy issue any time soon.
Ryan – Actually, we have a bit of an update for you. This appears to *not* be a function of being blocked, rather it appears to be a routing error with China Telecom. We’re attempting to resolve this with China Telecom asap, we’ll post more info in our forums once we hear anything. But as far as we can tell, this is not Chinese firewall issue.
–Rick Klau
Google (FeedBurner)
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Hey Rick, thanks for the info. I find it pretty amazing that the “routing error” is affecting one specific site that allows access to hundreds of other sites that are affected by the Chinese firewall.
Does anyone else see the fishiness of that? Perhaps it will amazingly be resolved sometime mid-October? I mean, how does a routing problem take as long to fix as the darn underwater cables that were damaged in last year’s Taiwan earthquake?
Whatever the source of the error, it sure is one big pain in the ass.
Google often has access errors (especially when sending multiple requests within a short time frame), and seeing that Baidu never has the same issues, my guess is that even if the GFC isn’t specifically blocking feedburner, others are interfering with it either for political reasons or just to give a leg up to competitors.
It sure has worked to get all of us bloggers in China to stop using Feedburner.
Feedburner is suffering what ebay, google, youtube and a few others have suffered.
The Chinese government has invested in copycats of US service companies and wants to eliminate the competition. They cant outrightly do this or there will be problems, the answer? “technical” problems.
Remember when google was blocked ‘on demand’ and ebay was down or very slow for days at a time? These were all ‘DNS problems’ now we have ‘routing problems’.
Feedsky is the company which has copied feedburner and has private investment from government officials in the MII which is responsible for maintaining ‘safe’ internet for Chinese citizens.
Fuck you CCP.