GreatFire.org is a great resource for checking which websites are blocked within China. For example, via that tool, you know that the Great Firewall blocks eight of the world’s 50 most popular websites (as ranked by Alexa): Facebook (2), YouTube (3), Blogspot (8), Twitter (9), WordPress.com (18), t.co (29), IMDB (41), Blogger (44) and fc2.com (47). You can learn some other cool things such as “On Mar 10, 2012, when we last tested, China’s Great Firewall did not block bbc.co.uk,” but it did block the site on October 2, 2011 (Occupy Wall Street — before China realized this movement really didn’t matter) and November 14, 2011 (either of these articles? “China ‘to give Tibetan monks welfare benefits’”; “Obama to China: ‘Act like a grownup’“). You can also find which sites have been acting slow, such as PayPal, and which were recently unblocked (Tumblr), and which get redirected (AVG.com, to its Chinese site). You may also be interested to note that China’s Net Nanny is sophisticated enough to block http://www.twitter.com and https://www.twitter.com. Anyway, go have fun with it.
