reCAPTCHA also just doesn't work in the most populous country in the world. translate.google.cn does, but Google's reCAPTCHA does not. This is a big pain point. Thanks for the link to turingtest, I will certainly test it.
The United Nations estimates the current population of China around 50,000 more than the population of India. Given the uncertainty of these numbers, I can't exclude that India already has the most numerous population.
You're correct, quite a lot of things are not accessible in the most populous country in the world.
However, federated things are accessible. The big names Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Google are blocked, and the services below them. However it is a blacklist of blocked not a whitelist of accessible. Putting google analytics traction in a header of a federated blog, meaning it's actually not federated, is indeed a stupid pain. China internet is restricted, but it is only restricted 'enough' for the current power.
Edit: And that seems good enough for now. Wechat 'moments' and use of Tiktok, from my observation of friends or even taking the train, are on a steep decline. Wechat's future seems mainly as a commercial P2Passist or very simple blog platform. Both dropped the ball and mobile payments will not disappear but the tide has turned (NFC, anyone? this was an already solved problem. The only real challenger bank China has is China Merchants Bank but they're after merchants, the clue in the name. For customer service and being one to perhaps pull a rabbit out of the hat, China Construction Bank. I have no idea how BEA didn't grab mobile payments.
Hmmm.. ok.. I could and should write something on this a lot longer.
The government facilitate corruption. The government is a hegemony.
Aside from that broad shot, 10 years ago you enter the aforementioned square freely, not only after going through a 'police' security check, bags x-rayed, IDs checked.
reCAPTCHA does not work in China mainland (it does in HK, but that's different for now). But translate.google.cn (note the .cn) works fine. Similar visual recaptchs used on Chinese services tend to focus on Chinese characters on a low resolution picture background. Training for street names? I don't know
Resolving to google.com does not resolve (gmail does, a bit, IMAP but only every few hours or days, depending on connection sans VPN).
Look under the section "use recaptcha globally" -- this is what I was referring to. However it's not clear to me if this approach enables use in China or not.
I pinged recapture.net and got a 50ms response time. Baidu would give a 20ms response time. That's on WiFi. That leads me to think the server responding to these pings is in certainly in mainland China, I think in Alibaba's IP range, but probably not a CDN. Interesting, thanks.
I find it ironic that out of all things google, it was translate.google.cn to be given an exemption. There is a meme going around that this was country's chief censor's personal decision.
