The great and inscrutable Chinese firewall has blocked Chinese net users from using Google's web search Thursday, the company reported on its monitoring page.
UPDATE: Chinese users are a bit confused by the news stories saying they are blocked because they aren't, and Google tells TechCrunch that its China censorship dashboard was just wrong and is not updated in "real time" (e.g. not to be relied upon).
"Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it’s possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage," Google told Techcrunch. "That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally."
/UPDATE
The reported new block on Google's now unfiltered Chinese-language search page comes just a few weeks after the search giant finessed a license to continue operating for another year in China, despite refusing to any longer censor its search results at the behest of the Chinese Communist government.
After four years of operating a censored search engine in China, Google decided in January that it would no longer continue to so. That decision was made in part due to a hacking attack on Gmail that targeted Chinese human rights activist and in part because censorship of Google's services had grown, not declined, over time.
To strike a compromise, Google first began automatically redirecting Google.cn web searcher to its uncensored search site in Hong Kong, google.co.hk. Then in June, under threat of losing their .CN license, Google took a further step, requiring users to Google.cn to click on an image of a search box, which then takes them to Google.co.hk.
That looked to have settled matters for awhile, but today's new block shows the Chinese government may have quickly tired of that mutually-agreed-upon fiction. The government already bans YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services wholesale -- as an attempt to control what their populace can read, write and learn.
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