China is deploying what critics call its "Great Firewall" to block RSS feeds coming into the country, as part of the communist giant's ongoing effort to regulate communications flows.

Ars Technica reported late last night that web users have begun complaining about not being able "to access FeedBurner RSS feeds as early as August of this year."

RSS feeds are automated news headlines that make aggregating and processing large amounts of web-based news much more efficient than trying to click and scroll through separate web sites. RSS stands for "really simple syndication" or "rich site summary," depending on whom you ask.

The revelation of China's RSS blockage comes exactly one week after Myanmar's junta—not coincidentally, China is its biggest patron—abruptly switched off the country's Internet access and cell phone network in a bid to halt the flow of information about its brutal anti-democracy crackdown from reaching the outside world.

China has a long history of regulating the Internet in an effort to limit negative information from either reaching its one billion citizens, or leaving the country.

Blog juggernaut TechCrunch was particularly unamused once it discovered that its own feed has been blocked. The site's Duncan Riley points out that this move could amount to a violation of global trade rules because its has the effect of unfairly blocking foreign competition.

Riley noted that the irony of the RSS blackout is that it comes "at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia."

Riley asks if it "would be fair that online industries are either excluded from the [global freed trade agreements], [or] that access rights are ignored by China under those agreements?"

Riley sounds the call for pressure on the U.S. government to treat Internet traffic as a legitimate business.

"Western Governments are still generally not focused enough on the benefits of online business in a broader economic sense," Riley writes, "so unless there is some serious lobbying, or more understanding leadership, our industry will likely be forgotten in the clamor for mineral, industrial and agricultural trade."

Totalitarian governments around the world are discovering that controlling the web servers that power information flow is just as great a strategic imperative as controlling roads, bridges, and other critical infrastructure nodes.

China and Myanmar know that cracking down on web traffic makes life much more difficult for democracy activists trying to shed a light on their undemocratic policies.

As numerous observers pointed out this week, these states are waging a losing battle against the clock. Despite Myanmar's best efforts, photos, videos and text reports about the country's brutal crackdown have continued to trickle out—albeit more slowly and less frequently. And Ars Technica suggests some workarounds for beating China's RSS firewall:

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 U.S., 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. [A Chinese language version is here.]

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.

by Sam Gustin