So this happened sometime over the weekend and I almost missed it because I don't check Instagram nearly as much as I used to: mainland China blocked it. Fully blocked, not the usual "load painfully slow behind three proxies" situation you get with a lot of foreign apps there. Gone, like Facebook and Twitter have been gone for years.
The reason isn't complicated. Hong Kong has been in the streets since Sunday, students mostly, protesting Beijing's plan to vet who gets to run for the territory's top job in 2017. Riot police showed up with tear gas, people showed up with umbrellas to block the pepper spray, and within about a day "umbrella" had turned into shorthand for the whole thing. Somebody's already calling it the Umbrella Movement, which is a pretty good name honestly, better than most protest branding I've seen.
None of that is unusual as far as protest coverage goes. What got my attention is how fast the photos moved. Twitter's blocked in China, Facebook's blocked, so for a lot of mainland users Instagram was one of the last wide-open channels for images to leak through the firewall in something close to real time. People in Hong Kong were posting tear gas clouds and crowds of umbrellas, and apparently enough of that was crossing over that censors just pulled the plug on the whole app rather than try to filter individual posts. Weibo's reportedly been scrubbing hashtags related to it too, but you can moderate text searches. Moderating a photo app in real time is a different problem, so they didn't bother trying.
I've thought about this kind of thing before in a lazy, abstract way, like "oh interesting, the firewall is really a moving target." Its different when it's an app you actually have open on your phone right now, with people you sort of follow (a couple of Hong Kong-based photographers I picked up years ago through a design blog) suddenly posting things that read like actual news instead of brunch. Makes the whole "just a filter app for pictures of food" pitch feel pretty thin in hindsight.
I did the thing everyone does when this comes up, which is go dig out an old VPN app on my phone that I hadn't opened since a trip a few years back, just to poke around and see if I could still remember how any of it worked. I couldn't, really. Half the configs were dead. Kind of a reminder that "just use a VPN" is one of those sentences that sounds simple until youre the one trying to explain OpenVPN profiles to your mother over the phone from six thousand miles away, which, yes, I have actually had to do.
The bigger thing rattling around in my head is how casually this kind of block can happen now. It's not some big Great Firewall production with press releases, it's just a switch getting flipped on a Sunday night because a photo-sharing app became inconvenient for a few days. A hundred million-plus users on one side, and the decision gets made in what's probably a pretty small room. I don't have a tidy point to make about that, I just keep noticing it.
Separately, and much less dramatically: I spent a chunk of Saturday patching Bash on basically every box I have anything to do with, because of that whole Shellshock mess that broke a week or so back. Ran the vulnerability test one-liner on a couple of old shared hosting boxes I forgot I still had SSH access to and got the "vulnerable" response on both, which, cool, great, love that for me. Patched, tested again, moved on. Nothing exciting there, just the kind of unglamorous maintenance that eats a Saturday afternoon and that nobody ever writes a headline about, even though it's most of what actually running anything on the internet turns out to be.
Anyway. Keep an eye on the Hong Kong stuff if you haven't been, it doesn't look like it's winding down anytime soon based on what's showing up in my feeds this morning. And if you run any old boxes you've been ignoring, go check them for Shellshock if you haven't already. It takes ten minutes and you'll feel better after.