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Reports: TypePad unblocked in China

Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.

Graham Webster
Formerly a journalist and consultant in Beijing, Graham Webster is a graduate student studying East Asia at Harvard University. At Sinobyte, he follows the effects of technology on Chinese politics, the environment, and global affairs. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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Graham Webster

Various TypePad-hosted bloggers are rejoicing as their blogs become visible again in China.

As with any such event, we're not sure how long this will last, and we're not sure why it happened. Tim Johnson, a McClatchy Newspapers correspondent based in China, writes:

I'm celebrating, of sorts. For the first time in maybe a year, this blog and others on the typepad.com host can now be seen within China. They are no longer blocked.

Why did the blocking suddenly end? I have no idea. Someone just flicked a switch.

The last sentence gave me an idea. What are the odds that, literally, somewhere, someone used their finger to, say, remove a fly who was sitting atop one of the routers or switches that make up the Chinese internet blocking infrastructure. And what if that caused a defect in stored data, erased some buffer, anyway just sort of fudged things up in the right way to let loose TypePad for the masses.

Just a thought.