I am in China. Often pages load very slowly. I believe it was Frank Bell who advised me, direct the google links to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts.

for example,
127.0.0.1 accounts.google.com

and many other links to google pages.

This is very effective, pages then load much faster because they don't try and load google stuff, which is blocked anyway.

I thought I would tell people on ubuntu forums about this, for users in China.

The mods there told me my post was 'encouraging people to circumvent China's strict internet policies' and they put my post in jail.

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure, such manipulation of hosts just blocks google, which I'm sure the Chinese Govt would approve of.

Am I seeing this correctly? All I know is, the dictionaries I use, such as mdbg.net load much faster with this kind of hosts.

You're correct in that adding those entries into your hosts file is not circumventing China's blocking. It also only affects you so they likely prematurely pulled the trigger if what you state is true. I believe China is a large market for Canonical so it's not in their best interests to condone circumventing Chinese Government policies. But again, that's not what you are proposing. The solution is to solve slow load times because those domains are blocked correct?

That's it!

I already had a lot of links in hosts. Lately mdbg.net has been loading veeery slow or timing out, then I noticed Firefox was trying to load accounts.google.com
I added that to hosts, and now mdbg.net loads perfectly, no trouble!