To their amazement, they are able to access Twitter and Facebook through Amazon’s Kindle without having to manually evade the firewall.
Chinese bloggers told the media they were surprised to get access to sites banned by the Chinese authorities.
“I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter and what a surprise, I got there,”
“And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt,” one blogger said.
The bypass is possible because Kindle software routes traffic directly to Amazon’s servers. But it wouldn’t be difficult to stop it.
“If this doesn’t have encryption the authorities just need to turn on the firewall to stop it but if there is encryption the government would have to talk to the carriers and order them to stop forwarding traffic without access to the encryption keys,” a professor from University of Hong Kong said.
I wonder if this is a guerrilla campaign set up by Amazon. If it were, it’s an ingenious one. The forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. Even though the firewall bypass is possibly short-lived, I’m sure bloggers in China are generating a lot of buzz about it. The Kindle isn’t officially available in China but it could be purchased via Taobao, a Chinese auction website.
[Source: BBC]
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