The Great Firewall of China blocks RSS Feeds

There are things in life that one cannot just ignore. A few posts back there were some unsettling news that surfaced about China blocking RSS feeds, original post here. Based on the article from Ars Technica, China’s Public Security Bureau or PBS have extended the block to all incoming URLs that begin with “feeds,” “rss,” and “blog,” thus rendering the RSS feeds from many sites—including ones that aren’t blocked in China, such as Ars Technica—useless[Source].

This is an alarming development. And given the reports that alleges that Cambodia’s military has began to cut access to the Internet is doubly alarming.

So this is how you censure the Internet.

Aside from raising howls and waves of protest at China. What can be done?

One clear course of action would be to outsmart the Golden Shield Project, which also known as Great Firewall of China, and its operator the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China.

Ars Technica provided some answers:

So what is a feed-deprived Internet user in China to do? Well, there are a few workarounds, some of which may be simpler than others. Some of our readers in China tell us that web-based feed aggregators, such as NewsGator Online, (sort of) help provide access to RSS feeds. One reader says that if he has the aggregator set to display the full post (or however much of the post is made available) and clicks through to read more, everything is just fine. On the other hand, if he has it set to just display a stub from the feed and clicks the title to read more, “that is when you get the ’server stopped responding’ error so familiar to users behind the [Great Firewall]!”

We’ve heard of other nefarious tricks to get around the firewall, too. One involves an SSH connection to somewhere outside the country, such as the US, in order to have unrestricted access to RSS, the web, you name it. Another involves the popular Firefox extension gladder, which is a proxy tool that advertises itself as a “Great Ladder” to get over the Great Firewall. Finally, the Tor tool is also popular; it allows a client computer to access the Internet anonymously through a network of virtual tunnels—a series of tubes, one might say. This would allow Chinese users to eventually gain access to the Internet through a Tor node that is located outside of the country. [Source]

What could be other solutions? Mash up web feeds and send it as email?

What other solutions or tricks could there be?

Here are posts that also discussed the issue:

China Curbs Web Access; Web Users Fight Back

China now blocking RSS feeds

China Blocking All RSS Feeds

China Blocking RSS Feeds

China’s Great Firewall turns its attention to RSS Feeds