Those Chinese censors are at it again… and this time the popular Flipboard app is the victim.
The censorship is a bit ham-handed, blocking Twitter and Facebook access both in China and worldwide.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue Sunday announced China’s move via Twitter. “Guess we unwittingly poked a hole in their wall which has now been shut down… Presumably unless we block Facebook and Twitter ourselves in China.” The censorship strikes at the heart of the application’s ability to aggregate content – Flipboard’s use of Amazon servers. Along with Twitter and Facebook, the move by China also halts access to Google Reader, Instagram and Flickr, according to Monday reports.
Flipboard doesn’t appear to be the main target of those behind China’s Great Firewall, a complex collection of technology aimed at turning the Internet’s fire hose of information into a manageable trickle. Instead, censors appear to be going after the ability to bypass the firewall using a VPN connection. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said China-based visits to the social-networking site have more than doubled, despite the service being blocked since 2009.
