China appears to have poked a hole in its Great Firewall, allowing access to the BBC News site, according to reports and a test at WebSitePulse. Traffic to news.bbc.co.uk jumped from 100 people a day to over 16,000 on Tuesday, Auntie said. The upcoming Olympics is likely to test China’s censorship and human rights practices to the max, and blocking the BBC would not have looked good. The Chinese BBC site remains blocked, however.
Meanwhile, after banning YouTube last year for containing content deemed offensive to its founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has now banned photo slideshow widget app Slide. The company, which claims 84 million apps installed on Facebook, said it “contacted the government of Turkey in an effort to resolve this situation”.