 My talk here today is called tales from the closed web working with wordpress censorship in China Such a little bit a little bit about myself So as was mentioned, I'm a technical success manager at WP engine I basically work with our with our enterprise customers on their their Ability to succeed technically so it's like kind of broader scale than support but I've been at WP engine for almost three years and And an undergrad I lived in Singapore for a little while and then after that I lived in South Korea for a year as an English teacher and then after that I Was in China for almost three years and then since then I've been in Austin, Texas working at WP engine So I've had kind of been around and you know I've I've spent a lot of time in Asia and I've kind of developed that I wouldn't say necessarily infinity for it But I have a lot of information that I feel like would be really helpful for a lot of people So here is here's the view of Shanghai. This is that what's called shu jia hui This is like that the amazing area where they build a lot in the last couple years And this is actually not too far from my apartment But when I moved to China, this is what I saw when I got there after visiting some friends who were living there And I decided I want to move there And so when I did I had a lot of different jobs that kind of took me on this weird path that ended up with me Working at WP engine first of all I was an English teacher for about nine months at an elementary school These are some first graders learning English in the middle of the summer and as you can tell I'm a little bit tired from teaching like about 20 first grade Chinese kids And then next I as I have a degree in journalism. I spent some time writing and doing freelance work This is an article that I wrote about You know going down to Hong Kong and doing a visa run and where you should drink at bars in Hong Kong while you're waiting for a visa to get ready And then also I was a secret diner for restaurants Who wanted to get their restaurant food quality up to Western standards? This one wasn't up to Western standards This is a these are called dessert nachos, which looks like they're made by buddy the elf It looks like those are those are regular like Doritos types chips right there that are that have ice cream and Marshmallows and all that fun stuff on it and then in my last year there I was a technical editor at Microsoft at the Shanghai campus and this is a photo from from the campus as you can still see There's still even though China is working to get beyond the kind of manufacturing economy You know with things like Microsoft you can still see little bits of like the big shipping containers and ships in the background But in my downtime some friends and I we decided to start a website called the homebrew Shanghai And so when I was living in South Korea I was a homebrewer because the only beer you can get was like a very watery logger that was made locally in the country So my friends Danny and Jesse there were doing some beer research as you can see we wanted to start a homebrewing resource for our friends and Just anyone who wants to find out where to get anything to homebrew your own beer and so we started this website and it was Somewhat successful we had a message board via BB press set up on it and we were able to kind of cultivate a community But because we were writing all in English, we really didn't take a ton of you know into account for the local population We was successful enough at the time that we were featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal but You know that kind of takes me to the whole thing of we didn't we weren't building for the local Chinese or anyone who couldn't speak English could not speak English So and they kind of Helped us understand some things about the way the internet works in China because the internet works in ways that you probably are not too Familiar with or maybe they're totally different than you expect. So first of all These are the main resources that are blocked in China. So when you're trying to build a website These things are going to be some problems Wikipedia is blocked Instagram is blocked Google's blocked Facebook's blocked SoundCloud Wordpress.com YouTube Twitter Dropbox you name it and then when I refer to Google I mean like Gmail Google Maps Google fonts all that jazz And so this is a fact of life if you've ever visited China or you've ever spent a period of time there that These things are just websites. You can't access and it becomes a fact of life when you live there And it's called the Great Firewall of China officially the Chinese government calls it the Golden Shield project Which is this network of systems that does a myriad of things that I will discuss But you know so when you're building a site you kind of have to take some of these things to count I'm going to be discussing what you need to know in order to understand how to build a site that's blocked in China And you know how you can make sure that you were able to get your readers to view the sites in China and You know on how to design around it So the first of all is like as I mentioned like all those big websites are blocked in many of these and many top Alexa websites in China are blocked and It's done through a variety of tools They're kind of hooked into the DNS of the DNS infrastructure of the Chinese internet a lot of that comes down to DNS poisoning and filtering You try to go like facebook.com and it ends up saying you get a connection reset But this becomes extra precarious given that China has the world's largest internet population we're talking over 800 million users if you have a successful app you have more users and than Facebook does almost immediately and To kind of piggyback off of that in the internet in China is probably the most Sophisticated and pervasive form of censorship known in history not even just on the internet and it's one of those things that You feel it in a lot of a lot of ways that that you Want to do things during the your daily life essentially is that like I finally need to keep keep in touch with my Chinese friends It's not on Facebook. It's not on Twitter It's on a series of other apps that I need to connect them with because they're not able to to have access But when you are a foreigner living in China most often times you use a VPN or virtual private network in order to access There are things like astral IP vanish that you use to get around it It's kind of an open secret the government knows about it every couple months one of them will get blocked and stops working you have to cancel your account and That's what you do to like get on YouTube and Facebook and keep updated your friends and family It's just a kind of a paywall essentially to the the greater internet at large So then the question becomes is but why like why did they do all this well like first of all Like there is an economic incentive for trying to do this Most of all it removes a lot of foreign competition So if you can't use Twitter you use sign a web or if you can't use Facebook You use run run if you can't use WhatsApp you use we chat So what it does is it opens up for local local businesses to kind of grow and China can expand its its local market And secondly which is what most people think of when they with when they think of the purpose of the Great Firewall Is it prevents anti-communist party sites and gatherings it prevents people from talking ill of the government It prevents people from talking about things that are not true or creating rumors that are just basically causing problems for the government at large and thirdly is that It allows for a lot of monitoring and management and control because you have all these local sites like Weibo and you know We we chat or also knows way sheen that you can force these companies to abide by the local laws And then fourth Lee is it's kind of the most nefarious thing that's kind of generated out of the Great Firewall is it's promoting the idea of Internet sovereignty is that China and Russia and a lot of other countries are kind of going this idea that the internet is not something that transcends global Boundaries or nation states that the internet is something that should be defined by the boards of your country And this is something that's This is going to be a big problem in the coming years as more countries begin to adopt models Similar to what China is having especially now that Facebook is working with the Chinese government to develop any new some new censorship tools I don't know if anyone has read about that in the last few days And then lastly which is like a most extreme cases is the fact that the internet is blocked And allows that every internet user in China is a zombie to help promote DDoSing attacks so if anyone's ever been DDoS from China There's a good chance the Chinese government kind of allowed it to happen via the Great Firewall But so this is like kind of the nut of what makes up the internet in China and so as I'm trying to develop a website for for people to kind of gather and Discuss things it becomes a problem because you kind of get put on list and when I was a teacher We had to shut down our message board for teachers because the police didn't like the unlawful gathering online of these teachers To discuss things so the company I was working for said we had to turn off our message board And so then a friend of mine who works for brewery in Shanghai again more beer This is the story of my life, but a friend of mine who runs a brewery came to me a month before this event called Shanghai Beer Week and said Hey, we want to have China's first-ever beer week. We have a lot of events coming up We want everyone in China and Shanghai to be able to come and and view the site and so That becomes opens up a whole bunch of big questions that need to be answered so it's a first-ever beer week and We had to host the site outside of China because we host inside of China You have to register your site with the local government and your website has to be registered a company Locally and then you have to submit documentation to the local government about who the board of directors is for the corporation So this is a whole long process that we didn't want to deal with so we said let's just host it in Singapore It's easier and we need to reach foreigners and locals life and it can't require VPN That means we can't have Facebook assets. We can't have other assets that kind of load externally So the first problem is is I installed jetpack on the site and because wordpress.com is blocked Which connects to a lot of assets from wordpress.com? It ends up getting blocked and so we can't use things like You know wordpress.com they can't use jetpack comments. We can't use a lot of other Issue I can't use a lot of other tools that we would want to use and this is still a problem to this day And then eventually we kind of did we're able to figure out what the next steps are what we need to know First of all we discovered is that you should not rely on any external APIs or functionality on your site Don't call out to wordpress.com don't call out to Google fonts Don't call out to any of those things only have content loading directly from your server itself because what it does is it allows you to Control all the content because the internet is kind of rickety a little bit is that if one site is moving slowly Because it's been purposely throttled by the government then it could throttle your site itself And so in this case is you want to load everything you possibly can it in one place you want to avoid politically, you know sense of discussion obviously and You want to know your list of block domain? So like I said don't host things don't have a like button on your page because it calls to Facebook and That site is blocked and it's gonna slow down your site and as I mentioned jetpack Wordpress.com functionality wordpress.com is entirely blocked so you can't even create your own personal blog there Anything related to Google and the SSL is like the trickiest one is that due to the nature of SSL? The government can't block a website or a single page on a website if it has SSL So China ends up just blocking the entire site a good example was Wikipedia when they went to full encryption last year The entire site got blocked previously only articles about Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong or other things were blocked individually But not all of Wikipedia. So when they moved to SSL the entirety of Wikipedia.org was was blocked So all these things we ended up having a very successful first year The site was at the time Google Maps was not blocked in China And it was it was a great event lots of we had 40 different breweries show up from around China Different bars in it being a great event. I you know, and it was something I did for two years when I was living in China and In the end, I think what I learned About developing a site in China is first of all, you need to know your block plugins you to avoid Foreigner social media sites or services avoid SSL usage and you are responsible for users meaning content that can be blocked or You know if your site ends up getting blocked and use overseas hosting if you can't get your site registered locally And we're only got a bit a minute left. So I got a speed through the last couple slides here. Sorry about this So quickly knowing the system some extra little tidbits 96% of all web traffic in China is from servers within China itself That means that there's not a ton of traffic going out and then coming back in River crabs So river crabs are the people who help block content 50 centers are people who are paid Trolls by the government to say good things about the government and then big mamas are the corporations like sign a webo that do the things that You know enable for the system to exist and lastly to avoid getting blocked Just remember these to avoid the three T's and those are Tibet Tiananmen and Taiwan don't talk about those things The last thing is if you do get blocked confirm Go to blocked in China net great fire org View DNS info and if you're hope if you're still blocked talk to your host Check out to see if there's another site on your server that's getting blocked If your domain itself is blocked and if that doesn't fail change your host and change your server So I can't have to skip the last slide. So because I'm over time way I have about 30 seconds. So I'm gonna show it anyway So in order to help support WordPress in China I would say continue to support non English WordPress. That means be a polyglot, you know Study Chinese help everyone out contribute to WordPress core in China keep publishing You know the more content that's out there is always the better and third go to WP dash way calm Which means WordPress University? Is the sole Chinese community on discussing WordPress and WordPress issues? They discuss plug-in updates and other similar issues in the community, but that's that's all I got. Thank you