Real-Time Testing of China's Internet Filters 253
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?
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
I prodded the "Great Firewall" when I was there, and realized some sites were cut off, like the CNN. Besides Yahoo and some other sites have tailor made pages for the Chinese. I made a SSH-tunnel back home to god old Norway though (no restrictions on protocols/ports it seemed, only some IP-adresses), so I had no problems. I don't think it would be much of an obstacle for most slashdotters
Re:And so begins... (Score:3, Informative)
- Starting testing...
Great. All the sleaze you want, but one of the premier search engines is off limits. Decline of civilization indeed -- perhaps the result will create an interesting test case for future anthropology and psych students.Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://google.com. Result:
Reported as inaccessible in China
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
hotel with internet access.
slashdot [slashdot.org] was accessible, as was google [google.com], which IIRC was even nice enough to talk to me in the appropriate language [google.com]. Some bits of yahoo.com [yahoo.com] were accessible, but not the webmail or news. CNN [cnn.com] and BBC News [bbc.co.uk] were both blocked, as were quite a few other news sites, and unsurprising things like Amnesty international [amnesty.org].
I say blocked, but what I mean is that when I tried to access these sites, the connections would always just time out while others were fine. I can't remember what happened when I tried to ping them.
I had no trouble downloading an SSH client and using it to connect back home.
All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:5, Informative)
Geocities appears to be completely blocked.
The Chinese government doesn't like Playboy or sex.com - hmm, do we see a correlation between repressive government and antisexual morals there? Nah, couldn't be.
I have no idea why they censor {Insert Something Funny} [insertsomethingfunny.com], an obscure weblog [weblogs.com], an anti-tobacco group [gasp4air.org], the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society [cpawscalgary.org], Columbia Earthscape [earthscape.org], or Columbia University [columbia.edu].
Google is on their shitlist. No surprise given its cache and large index. The Wayback Machine isn't - I'd expect that to change in the long term. Anonymizer is accessible as well.
Peek-A-Booty and Freenet are not accessible, of course. It appears that all SourceForge sites are blocked (unless the testing engine is slashdotted and not working properly, but other sites are reported as accessible). I presume this might be because Freenet is hosted at SourceForge.
Re:wrong (Score:5, Informative)
http://slashdot.org - Reported as inaccessible in China
http://www.slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
Throw your result in (slashdot.org accessible), and what we get is either a filter on the fritz, or else this tester still has some bugs to be worked out of it. According to the FAQ, China's filter is based on IP address. Does slashdot's homepage have multiple IPs? (sorry, too lazy to check).
For whatever it's worth, it seems that Saudi Arabia is not known to block slashdot [harvard.edu].