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Lady Gaga -- the flamboyant and provocative New York-based pop singer -- has been removed from a Chinese government blacklist, allowing her chart-topping new album "ARTPOP" to go on sale legally in China.
In
China, the pop diva's songs had been on a blacklist since 2011, when the Culture Ministry deemed her work to be "creating confusion in the order of the online music market, and damaging the nation's cultural security."Singling out songs from her album "Born this Way," Chinese authorities identified six Gaga tracks -- "The Edge of Glory," "Hair," "Marry the Night," "Americano," "Judas" and "Bloody Mary" -- as among 100 foreign songs to be placed on a blacklist.
Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" and the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way" were also included in the sweep.
Millions of Chinese netizens were prevented from accessing huge swathes of the Internet Tuesday, with many rerouted to a website owned by a U.S. company with ties to a group outlawed in China.
The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a state-run department, blamed a "malfunction in root servers" that blocked access to top-level domain names in China such as .com and .net, according to a post on its Sina Weibo account, the Twitter-like micro-blogging service.
Security analysts quoted by the official Xinhua news agency said this could have been the result of a cyber attack by hackers -- though this has not been proved.
Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) confirmed it owns the web address users were redirected to but denied any involvement. It said the company's IP address is already blocked in China so users would have been met by a blank web page.
