XML News from Friday, May 14, 2004

Recently I've received queries from several readers of Chinese translations of Processing XML with Java asking why they can't get to this site (which provides errata and updates for the book, among many other things). I've now confirmed my suspicion that the Chinese government is blocking this and all other sites hosted on IBiblio. I suspect IBiblio's support for Tibetan freedom and independance might have something to do with this. There's probably a way to get around the firewall, but off the top of my head I couldn't tell you how to do it; and of course even if I did, the people who need to know couldn't read it here anyway. :-(

Pointless it may be to post it here, but Bil Hays suggests, "Assuming that ibiblio is completely blocked, the best thing would be if he could get an account with shell access on any other machine in the world that isn't being blocked to china, and isn't blocking ibiblio. Then he could use ssh to that machine to build a tunnel to ibiblio, mapping a local port on his machine to port 80 on ibiblio through the intermediate server. It would be a longer round trip, tho. If you haven't looked into this kind of thing before, I know it sounds complicated, but it's not really. I've got some theory up at <http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/help/network/info_sheets/tunneling.html>."

Wes Felter and Fred Stutzman both suggested using the Tor overlay network. According to Felter, "It goes without saying that it's probably illegal in China, but I suppose people who are bypassing the firewall know the risk."


RenderX has released three schemas for XSL Formatting objects: a DTD, a validating XSLT Stylesheet, and a Relax NG schema.