BBC - (Un)Blocked By China, and a take on Access Denied

Today the BBC News website ran a story about theOpenNet Initiative's new book, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. 

[The Book] challenges the long-standing assumption that the internet is an    unfettered space where citizens from around the world can freely communicate and mobilize. In fact, the book makes it clear that the scope, scale and sophistication of net censorship are growing.

"There's been a conventional wisdom or myth that the internet was immune   from state regulation," says Ronald Deibert, one of the book's editors.

"What we're finding is that states that were taking a hands-off approach to the internet for many years are now finding ways to intervene at key internet choke points, and block access to information."

OpenNet Initiative team members spoke about the book at their recent book release party - you can find the archived video here.

BBC News has itself experienced such internet intervention as a target of the great firewall of China.  Today, however, some good news: it appears access to the BBC News website has been unblocked.

Beijing has never admitted to blocking access to BBC news stories - and there has been no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked.

But Chinese users trying to access pages on the site have almost always been redirected to an error message telling them: "The connection was reset.

It now appears that this is no longer the case, and access to the site is much easier.

Despite this recent progress, the story notes foreign journalists are still having difficulty reporting from Tibet.  We've rounded up a cross-section of perspectives on the recent protests and blockages in Tibet here.