Real-Time Testing of China's Internet Filters

mrbnsn writes "The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is conducting a study of Internet filtering in countries worldwide. As part of this study, they have put up a web page where you can get a real-time report on whether any URL you submit is blocked by the Great Firewall. Check whether you'd be able to read your favorite web sites in Beijing!" I've also heard that there are some "western" hotels that have non-blocked connections. Anyone from China care to tell us what it's like?

And so begins...

[Nailer]

...the downfall of Chinese civilisation:

Testing complete for http://www.stileproject.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China

Extensive testing by worried geeks...

[MavEtJu]

Extensive testing by worried geeks has shown that slashdot.org is still accessible from the Chinese part of the Internet. Further tests are scheduled for the next couple of days to make sure it stays.

Re:All SourceForge sites blocked

[spongman]

I would have thought that a country that has a 1-child-per-family law would want to encourage the male population to jack off as often as possible.

Re:list of blocked

[billbaggins]

I don't believe China would have the balls to block Sourceforge and OSDN.

Huh? What does that mean? Why would this take "balls"?

Y'see, whenever someone in China opens up a pipe to a blocked site, they have to run over really fast and stuff a ball in one end of the pipe so that the information can't get through. They can retrieve the ball after a timeout convinces the browser that the site doesn't exist, but if a site is really popular and a lot of people request it in a short time, they can actually run out of balls to stuff in pipes, the firewall breaks down, and they all burn to death. So they have to be very careful which sites they block.

But only today

[xant]

The Chinese government is reading /. today to find out what good sites they missed.

Re:And how can we stop this?

[Fred Ferrigno]

Stile Project [stileproject.com] (a haven of rather vile material) and Camwhores [camwhores.com] got around it just by using standard load-balancing techniques [slashdot.org].

Meh, if there's any site worth blocking, it's Stile's.