Residents of mainland China got a rude awakening today. According to The Telegraph, popular voice over IP (VoIP) app Skype has been declared illegal in the country. The only Internet voice calls that will be legal to place are those made over the two government controlled telecoms, China Unicom and China Telecom. This effectively ends Skype's ambitions to break into the rapidly growing Chinese market.

This is far from the first western online product the Chinese government has blocked. Service like Twitter and Facebook are banned as well. Google even closed down servers in China early this year amid the censorship controversy. While Skype calling mat technically be illegal now, it is uncertain what actions the Chinese authorities will take against it.

As of now, most users still report being able to connect to Skype, and most can still download the client. Skype has said only that Chinese users should look toward their Hong Kong partner Tom Online for VoIP services. Though, many fear that Tom Online is monitoring traffic.  

In the wee hours of the morning today, WikiLeaks went offline. Was it a coordinated DDoD attack? The authorities raiding WikiLeak's servers? Nah, their DNS host just got sick of dealing with all the traffic. Since releasing the newest round of leaked US diplomatic cables, the whistle blower site has been the target of repeated DDoS attacks. Hosting provider EveryDNS said it dropped WikiLeaks to protect the other 500,000 sites under their care. Some have suggested government figures may have influenced EveryDNS.

WikiLeaks was initially only reachable via their IP address, but within hours, had secured new hosting. WikiLeaks is now being hosted in Switzerland at WikiLeaks.ch. This domain name is being served by the Swedish Pirate Party, but the routing is still being done by EveryDNS. So WikiLeaks has now effectively been forced off two hosts in less than a week (attempts to use Amazon cloud hosting failed). Will this site find a permanent home, or is nowhere safe?

In recent days, residents of Turkey have had unrestricted access to YouTube for the first time in 30 months. Now a court in Ankara has ordered the site banned again because the video sharing site hosts clips featuring former opposition leader Deniz Baykal. Turkey's Telecommunications Minister has been instructed to request the removal of the clips, and block the site if Google does not immediately comply. 

YouTube was originally banned in May 2008 after the courts took issue with some clips on the site. Specifically, some videos were found to be insulting to Turkey's modern founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, This is considered a crime in Turkey. Turkish users have been able to access YouTube through proxies, but the experience is degraded. Bloomberg is reporting that the site is still accessible right now, but that could change at any time.