Opera plugs hole in Great Firewall of China

Opera has sealed the hole its Mini browser tunneled through the Great Firewall of China.

With the international version of Opera Mini - the company's Java-based mobile browser - Chinese users had found a way of freeing themselves from local net filters, accessing sites otherwise banned by the government. The browser shuttles all net traffic through compression servers located outside the country, and naturally, those servers lack Chinese filters.

But on Friday, as reported by the BBC's Beijing bureau, Opera switched all Chinese users from Mini's international version to a Chinese version that uses local compression servers - and local filters.

Chinese Opera users, the BBC says, no longer have access to Facebook.