China blocks Yahoo, YouTube

China has blocked access to Yahoo and YouTube in its bid to censor international coverage and control the unrest in Tibet.

Since Saturday, Chinese surfers have been denied access to the video-sharing site YouTube.

The authorities are wary of amateur footage making it onto the web which could focus the world's attention on the mountain kingdom.

Likewise there are reports of news pages that have been made inaccessible on Yahoo. In addition the Guardian website has been shut down completely to Chinese surfers as of today.

News aggregators like Google News have also been affected by what is known as 'keyword filtering'. Chinese surfers attempting to load a page which contains words such as 'Tibet' or 'Dalai Lama' will see the site stall.

Flickr, the photo-sharing website, Wikipedia, and US newspaper the LA Times, are among the other sites to which access has been cut off.

Protestors in Tibet have been given until tonight to give themselves up before the Chinese army takes steps to quell the violence.

www.yahoo.co.uk
www.guardian.co.uk
www.youtube.com