However, a separate Yahoo photos service is still up and running for users in China. Could this possibly be because Flickr is blocked in China?

If you try to visit the former Yahoo Photos homepage, you will be asked to log in to Yahoo if you aren’t already. You will then see a message saying that Yahoo Photos is closed. If you try to view a photo that used to be in a user’s album, you will either see the same message, or will see a message saying the account is locked. Yahoo albums included in Yahoo! 360 pages either show a broken image icon, or display the thumbnail which just takes the user to one of the messages described above when it is clicked. Yahoo are probably going to replace the photo function of Yahoo! 360 with Flickr at some point, but at the moment it looks quite bad.

Chinese user’s albums, however, are still up and running. There are hundreds of thousands of pages on photos.cn.yahoo.com. Yahoo Photos China appears to be integrated with a blog and other features. However, if visitors are logged into non-Chinese Flickr accounts, when they try to view a China user’s gallery, they are redirected to the “Yahoo! Photos is now closed” message in their own locale, making it difficult to view photos belonging to Chinese users. If a photo page is accessed directly, by clicking it on a blog page or following a link from a search engine, it can be viewed, and the gallery browsed using “next” and “previous” links. Browsing top-level albums, however, is only possible after logging out of Yahoo. You can try it yourself by visiting any of the albums found by a Google search.

If anyone who doesn’t know otherwise tried to view a Chinese user’s Yahoo album, they would believe it had been closed down along with services in other countries. I don’t use any Yahoo services other than Flickr, yet they had remembered my details and took me to the “closed” message. Yahoo seem to think that people only ever view photos from people in their own country. Yet again, this is an example of corporations putting barriers between users in different parts of the world in what used to be the world-wide web, just as they are attempting to do with online radio.

Yahoo might not be entirely responsible for Flickr being blocked in China (although given their attitude towards it, they are not entirely blameless); but that doesn’t mean they have to prevent the rest of the world from viewing photos from China. And the very fact that they have a separate photo service for China shows that they are accepting that Flickr will not be usable from that country for the foreseeable future.

I am going to re-think my own use of Flickr, and may well return to hosting all my photos myself. I’m not happy with Yahoo’s business practices. But also, the closing of Yahoo Photos – a popular site that hosted around 2 billion photos – shows that if you rely on a particular external service, you can never be sure that the service won’t change significantly or even disappear completely. Instead of paying for a Flickr Pro account, perhaps my money would be better spent on increased web hosting capacity. At least my site is visible to visitors from every country. I suppose it could always fall victim to state censorship, but not to arbitrary segregation by a commercial company.

As a footnote, I should add that obviously I can’t test Yahoo sites and accounts in combinations of every locale. So please let me know if there are any other Yahoo Photos sites up and running, or if you notice any restrictions placed on Yahoo users from a particular country.

China isn’t the only country that blocks access to Flickr. Other states such as Iran and the United Arab Emirates don’t allow their citizens access to the website. Fortunately, an Iranian, Hamed Saber, has written a Firefox add-on, Access Flickr, that will allow the site to be accessed from all these countries.

A while ago, I began using the Flickr API to display Flickr photos from within the photo gallery on my website. Unfortunately, that meant that users without the Firefox add-on could no longer view all the images on my website either. Interestingly, the Chinese block appears to work simply by blocking DNS lookups to the Flickr image server. If the server is accessed by its IP address, it works fine. Access Flickr ensures that the IP address is always used. For the sake of users without the add-on, I have now changed my gallery to perform the DNS look-up first, then reference images by the IP address. This should allow at least users in China to view my photos as they could until this month. If anyone has any issues with the gallery following this change, please let me know.

Some articles appear to suggest that it’s ironic that Flickr has been blocked in China in the same week that they added support for seven new languages, including Chinese. In fact, they have added support only for traditional Chinese, with the target markets being Taiwan and Hong Kong (where Flickr is still accessible). China, where simplified Chinese is used, was never the intended market. More significant is that the block occurred at around the same time that shareholders at Yahoo, Flickr’s parent company, rejected plans to oppose internet censorship in China. Some people predicted bad things would happen when Yahoo bought Flickr. If using a Yahoo service makes my photographs less accessible to any potential website visitors, I may have to have a rethink and keep my photos elsewhere.

• Related article: Chinese censorship in action

The track in question is A Public Affair by Jessica Simpson. What is most surprising is that the record label is none other than Sony BMG, which had a lot of bad press last year after selling CDs that used virus-like techniques to hide copy protection software on people’s Windows PCs.

Yahoo! say they have “been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now”, and that “DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist.” Sentiments I’m sure many music fans would agree with.

But before we get too excited, the track they are offering is customised, with a chosen name inserted into the lyrics. There are hundreds of names to choose from on the website. The track also costs $1.99 instead of the more usual $0.99: Yahoo! say this is paying for the personalisation, not for the lack of DRM.

However, isn’t the personalisation in reality a form of DRM, and an effective one at that? If someone buys the version of the song with the name “Aaron”, it’s not so appealing for anyone who was hoping to hear “Zena”. While not as restrictive as proper DRM, it still places limits on the number of people would want an illicit copy. Whether Sony BMG would be willing to allow their standard, non-personalised songs to be released in this format is another matter.

So will we see further DRM-free downloads from Yahoo? Only time will tell.