Easy come, easy go.

After all of the happy stories in the last little while about the CBC website being unblocked in China, a CBC employee was not amused to learn that the Radio-Canada site has now been blocked in China again.

Cedric Sam, an Internet Analyst for Radio-Canada, posted an article about this on his own blog in French. Here is a translated summary of the article:

“For six months, the website of Radio-Canada was blocked to internet users in Continental China. A week after Hubert Lacroix sent a letter to the Chinese Ambassador regarding this situation, the Chinese were allowed to view Radio-Canada.ca and CBC.ca.

“While on a trip in the Chinese province of Guangdong, I noticed that while in Shenzhen Radio-Canada.ca was not accessible. A “server not responding” message appeared when I tried to access both the portal site and the news site, while CBC.ca was accessible.

“Two friends in Beijing confirmed with me the next morning that the Radio-Canada website was not available there either.”

CBC president Hubert T. Lacroix spoke to Parliament’s Heritage Committee Thursday afternoon. I was recording the speech on my computer as it streamed but, uh, I ran out of hard disk space. <sigh>

Never mind. The federal government probably would have asked me to take down video of the committee hearing.

(UPDATE: As Mike mentioned in his comment, the Heritage Committee has now posted the video online.)

After the jump, the text of his speech.

Relax, enjoy, and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

(more…)