I am a QQ user, which is part of Chinese social media. From Tencent 腾讯 in China, QQ is a simpler messaging and social media ecosystem than WeChat 微信. In the past couple of months I have been noticing more content is blocked to me here in Canada. More concerning is that China is beginning to use new protocols on the internet that are unique to China.
Geoblocking is regularly used by Chinese stores. I search for their products on Baidu, find images but cannot go to their web pages because they detect that I am not in China and block me. While this is annoying, at least I can understand the technical mechanism. They do not want Western eyes looking at their web pages, and that is their prorogative.
Chinese QQ QZone’s photo image display javascript gets in the way of saving large images
On Chinese QQ QZone people have walls similar to FB. QZone uses an image display script in your browser. If the image is large when you right click and you can save the image as .PSB or .JPG, but it will not render in your browser, as .PSB is an unknown file type. I believe QQ’s javascript manipulated the image so you can zoom and move around, but this gets in the way if you want to see the original pic and zoom for yourself.
I use the QQ messenger program from Tencent in China. While its big brother WeChat has a very broad ecosystem, QQ is much smaller and has limited function. As I wish to limit such a program to only messaging people in China, QQ fits the bill for me. Both QQ and Wechat are standalone programs that can run on Windows, Mac or Android. There is no version for Linux.
Both QQ and WeChat have a huge following in China. QQ has 805.5 million users, while WeChat has 1,040 million monthly active users (MAU). As of the second quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.23 billion monthly active users [worldwide].
