CHINA:INTERNET GIANT Google says the Chinese government is interfering with its e-mail service in China, part of an intensified crackdown on the internet following online calls for protests similar to the "Jasmine Revolutions" sweeping authoritarian governments in the Middle East.
Google said its engineers have determined there are no technical problems with its Gmail e-mail service or its main website, but that the service was still experiencing difficulties.
“There is no technical issue on our side; we have checked extensively.
“This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” the company said in a brief statement.
China has some of the world’s strictest internet controls, a system often called “The Great Firewall of China”. Beijing blocks many popular social media sites, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the government has intensified those efforts after pro-democracy protests erupted across the Middle East in January.
Generally, Beijing denies any state involvement in the cyber-attacks, and has previously called such accusations groundless.
Chinese officials say any attempts to stage a Jasmine Revolution in China are doomed to failure because Chinese people enjoy the benefits of a strong economy and treasure peace and stability, but they are clearly taking no chances. The government stepped up web censorship and thousands of police were deployed at sites set aside as protest areas. The St Patrick’s Day parades in Beijing and Shanghai were cancelled amid security concerns.
Gmail users are still able to log in to their accounts, but are unable to send e-mails when logged in to the service, or access address books.
The Buzz instant messaging function is often not working as well.
Google said the blocking appears to be more sophisticated than other problems experienced by users in the past because the disruption is not a complete block.
Another worrying development in the intensification of the crackdown is that the campaign seems to be attacking virtual private networks (VPNs), which many in China use to get around the Great Firewall.
One of the most popular, Witopia, said it had received a lot of complaints from China, while VPN Express was also down.
Relations between Google and the Chinese government have been strained since Google said in January last year that it would no longer co-operate with the government’s requirement to censor search results for banned sites. It also complained about major attacks on its website by Chinese hackers.
In addition, a blog posting earlier this month by Google about security said the company had “noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.”