It looks as though ZeroNet, the difficult-to-censor network, has had its website blocked in China. A quick visit to Greatfirewallofchina.org reveals that Zeronet.io is unreachable in Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang Province, and Yunnan Province. The move comes in anticipation for the start of the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress.
It should be noted that the ZeroNet website doesn’t constitute the entire network, the Github repository which the ZeroNet website linked you to when you were looking to download the software is still accessible, and the underlying infrastructure of the network is still working to some extent, although this has attracted the attention of the government too.
According to the source, the boot.zeronet.io tracker is affected by an IP ban, but other trackers are not affected. However, this could limit someone’s ability to initially connect to the network, although, connections made before the ban should be unaffected.
The recent block could suggest that ZeroNet is now moving from the territory of a fringe project into the realm that other networks such as Tor and I2P occupy. There are far fewer users on ZeroNet than the two million figure which Tor boasts, but it is definitely being utilized by several thousands of people now, with a particularly big following in China.
Source: Github