According to several reports and data from Google, the search engine is fully blocked in mainland China as of
today.
Also fully blocked are ads and mobile access. Image search is partially blocked, as are Google Docs, Google News and Google Groups.
Other sites and apps that were previously and remain blocked include YouTube, search suggestions, Google Sites, Blogger and Picasa.
Google and China have been at odds since at least the beginning of this year, when a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” was conducted on Google’s corporate infrastructure; the attack originated in China. As a result, the search engine, which had been serving censored search results to comply with the demands of the Chinese government, announced it would no longer be modifying search results.
The company said it would even be willing to pull out of China altogether if search results were to be censored.
However tense relations were between the company and the country, negotiations continued — even past the point where some felt that Google’s stand for freedom of information had been compromised. Our Ben Parr wrote in March:
After Google was hacked, it was put in between a rock and a hard place. Its actions, while still bold, will not change how things are done in China. Its indecisiveness with how to proceed has made the pressure on China all but evaporate.
Today computer components are connected to each other using copper cables or traces on circuit boards. Due to the signal degradation that comes with using metals such as copper to transmit data, these cables have a limited maximum length. This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other. Today's research achievement is another step toward replacing these connections with extremely thin and light optical fibers that can transfer much more data over far longer distances, radically changing the way computers of the future are designed and altering the way the datacenter of tomorrow is architected.
