Some sensitive sites still blocked
The mainland government has yielded to mounting international pressure for it to loosen censorship of the internet and lifted restrictions on several banned websites - but the promise of unfettered access has still not been fulfilled.
Journalists in the Olympic Village and the public logging onto the internet elsewhere on the mainland were able to access some of the sites previously blocked, such as Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the BBC Chinese language service and Hong Kong newspapers Apple Daily and Sing Tao.
The limited relaxation of 'the Great Firewall of China' led International Olympic Committee vice-president Gunilla Lindberg to declare that 'the issue has been solved'.
'The IOC Co-ordination Commission and Bocog [the Beijing organising committee] met last night and agreed [to not censor]. Internet use will be just like in any Olympics,' she said.
Her comments came as President Hu Jintao urged foreign journalists to obey mainland law and write objective reports - something foreign media argue they can do only with absolute freedom to surf the internet.
But attempts to log onto a host of other sites - including those about or by Chinese dissidents, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, the Tibetan government-in-exile, the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and Taiwan - failed repeatedly.