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Google Disappears In China
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 02, 2002 01:55 AM
from the man-vs.-state dept.
from the man-vs.-state dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "The censorship in China was finally getting better since people were 'allowed' to read the CNN news now (except for certain articles). But since this weekend it seems that a new web page has been censored in China. Since this weekend it looks like everyone in China is not 'allowed' to use google.com anymore. google.com was also gaining populairity in China as the better search engine (which also works fine in Chinese). But now I guess it got too popular and thus not allowed. Or does it have anything to do with Yahoo signing the agreement to censor?" Comments to yesterday's post "Real-Time Testing of China's Internet Filters" also noted that Google has gone missing within China.
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Google Disappears In China
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Cache (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cache (Score:4, Informative)
The probably best documented case of this is the "Operation Clambake" exclusion which was restored after heavy protests. But there were copyright issues involved so this might nut cut the cheese all the way.
What worries me more is the exponation of companies towards insane or just plainly stupid government regulations. Sometime in February a single state within Germany (which is a federal republic composed of 16 states after all) ordered their local Internet providers for exclusion of questionable material, which in this case primarily concerns fascist/white-supremacist sites like stormfront.org. Checking google.com with the query "stormfront.org" delivers a link which is clearly a site in question. Sending the same string to google.de returns nothing. Softening the query to just "stormfront" gives a couple of hits on google.com, including the nazi site. Same string for google.de gives a bunch of sites, none of which is questionable in content. Most of them are sites discussing the current situation on this case.
For the german-speaking crowd, or for those who can get their hands on a decent translator) here are some heise.de articles covering the situation:
This is a sad state of affeirs, and you won't have to go as far as China to find behaviour which should be immoral to the pluralistic and open community the planet pretends to be nowadays.
the reason (Score:5, Insightful)
p2p (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:p2p (Score:5, Informative)
How long before we'll be forced to use it ourselves, i wonder?
Google.cn? (Score:3, Interesting)
They could call it google.cn...
Waitaminute (Score:4, Funny)
Wow... now that's what I call a strange can of worms.
Absolutely untrue! (Score:3, Funny)
Whoever said that china disappearred from google was a complete fucking liar.
Blocked? Just use google (Score:5, Funny)
Err... Never mind.
Rumors (Score:5, Insightful)
In China there are some search engines like Yam [yam.com] which is google based and use google's queries. Even if you haven't heard of Yam, you might have heard of a China based search engine company suing Yahoo for stealing queries. Yam is more popular than Google here.
If they block Google they might have to block Yam as well, which would then be a real chaos.
Not Rumors (Score:5, Interesting)
Yam is accessible, and so is Yahoo.
Too bad China overlooked Google proxies [soapclient.com]...they exist you know.
Fight The Man (Score:3, Informative)
To the Chinese Government: don't think you can get away with this. We are watching you. Remember the IIS fuck China worm? Remember when Americans penetrated Chinese censorship sites [wired.com]. One particularly activist group is the Cult of The Dead Cow, as they are involved with a US-Canada-Europe anti-China-human-rights-abuses hacking group [wired.com], the Hong Kong Blondes.
Its only a matter of time until the Internet disappears in China, and the Chinese government succumbs under its own agenda.
From inside the lines :) (Score:5, Informative)
First it was www.google.com that went down, then the country specific versions, now the wwwN.google.com types.
IP addresses work for viewing, but a get/post doesn't work, so no searching.
From what I can see, the firewall is just dropping packets on those ports at the 80,443 addresses.
You can ping google, and see what open ports are on, but a raw GET on port 80 or 443 does nothing.
Net Scan returns this:
IP Address : 216.239.51.100
Resolved : www.google.com
Operating System : probably Unix
Time to live (TTL) : 42 (64) - 22 hop(s) away
Open Ports (2)
80 [ Http => World Wide Web, HTTP ]
H 400 Bad Request
Content-Length: 1210
Connection: Close
Server: GWS/2.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 06:45:23 GMT
443 [ HttpS => Secure HTTP ]
Looks like its back to the dark old days of proxy's again.
Lawrence
www.shanghaiguide.com
More on the Great Firewall of China (Score:5, Informative)
The government of the PRC, through Zhonghua Telecom, continues to filter traffic going in and out of China.
The filters do not work. This is old news. Proxy servers are everywhere.
Here's the secret which doesn't seem to have gotten out of China yet, the filters don't have to work. They're not designed for the users.
Contrary to popular belief, China is not run as an absolute dictatorship. It's run by a circle of maybe a few dozen people who's opinions really matter. Like any good-sized group, there's a lot of disagreeement about how much (or little) openness there should be to the rest of the world.
The filters exist to appease the more close-minded members of the circle and to let them know that the best efforts are being made to keep bad stuff out of the minds of users.
My best guess about Google disappearing is that one [sina.com.cn] or more [sohu.com] companies [263.net] who are providing portal and search services in China have been complaining to the Ministry of the Information Industry [mii.gov.cn] about loss of market share to Google. The solution? If Google gets blocked, the market share for locally-produced Chinese portals goes up!
Is this good policy? No. Probably not. I've seen protectionist policy used all over the world and it's generally not the consumer or even the producers who benefit. It's a few well-placed friends of the folks in power. At least in this case, there's always another open proxy server which someone "forgot" to close up to work around this bit of government silliness.
Happy hunting all!
j.
Shouldn't this scare the shit out of you? (Score:5, Funny)
They are blocking 2 Billion + people of an Internetsite that's something like the cornerstone of online information!
Don't you also think that a lot of powerpeople in the US and elsewhere envy the chinese powermongers for this? What will the world look like in 10 years from now, when books are getting scarce and drm is all over us like a polyester safari suit and each of us will be paying hard bucks only to view data - and even that will be censored?
Pretty grim if you ask me...
What I'm saying is: This is not the least bit funny!
Re:censorship--it's all the rage (Score:5, Insightful)
He was part of a rally in Times Square, and they arrested him. Sucks that we live in a country without peaceable assembly.
Wait...I think it was actually someone I didn't know who was killed in Tiananmen square [christusrex.org] for a pro-democracy demonstration.
I think I got it straight now. The US is NOTHING like China when it comes to censorship. We don't imprison and kill people because we don't like what they say. We certainly don't use full force; on the contrary, our main censorship punishment is fines, or at the very most, a minimum security prison sentence. Of course, you have to consider that we are not trying to censor, our goal is to avoid copyright violations. You can say anything you want, as long as it isn't libel (untrue statement of FACTS - all opinions are allowed).
Don't belittle our freedom or China's suffering by such a comparison.
Which is better: censorship or propaganda (Score:5, Interesting)
Basicly, if the media wants, they can brainwash majority of people in believing anything they want.
In the case of censorship, you know atleast, that you don't have access to unbiased information - and you know that if you want to create an unbiased opinion, you need to do it yourself.
But, as we have free speech, it is easy to leave thinking to the media, and let someone else form your opinion. So, to some extent, I think that the fact that media is controlled by tiny interest groups, is maybe even a bigger threat than censorship.
Re:Which is better: censorship or propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
> of views, it has problems all its own.
The problem is that majority of people think that they have formed their opinion after inspecting a wide range of views (as there's free speech, this must be the case, right?) - when in reality their opinion was formed by only 1 or 2 views that reflect the view of a very small interest group or they formed their opinion based on biased "information".
You saw it in TV news, it must be true - effect.
Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
And every one of these articles I see reinforces that belief.
Translated from the Official China News Service (Score:5, Funny)
"Google was long known as a tool for hackers and perverts," said Truth Minister Chu. "It didn't serve any purpose for the greater good of the people, which is why it presumably went out of business without even a goodbye. Every economist knows this rude, erratic behavior is common among companies that can not find a way to serve the needs state."
Most good citizens won't even miss the Web site.
"It was too boring," said Jie Zhang, a rice farmer. "There was only one picture on the whole site and it was promoting the self-serving ideals of capitalist branding. Plus many of the pages were in other languages, so the site was useless to me. I'm glad I couldn't understand it, because I wouldn't want to be imprisoned for reading dangerous materials."
Many citizens said they have never used Google; they remain true to the official Chinese search engine: http:///www...
(If this had been a real news story, I would have linked to the source. If you still take it seriously after reading this, you deserve to be laughed at. A lot.)
Sites inaccessible in China (Score:5, Informative)
Does the US currently have any plans for a "regime shift" over there?
My testing result (Score:3, Informative)
test 1: As all of you already know, www.google.com access was filtered, although i can still visite it through ircache proxy (sv.us.ircache.net)ï¼OEbut if i input some FORBIDDEN WORDS to search, it instantly stops, and what i get is "connection reset by peer", and in short time it is not available.
test 2: About the havard testing page, they have a link contains all of the inaccessable sites, but i even can not fully open that page, why? That site is not in the ban list, but it contains some FORBIDDEN WORDS, such of "frxxnet"(i think this is the main reason why they banned sxxxxxfxxge.net).So my explorer just stops after shows the word "frxxnet".
My opinion is, they are doing pattern matching in packets to stop sensored words, that surely stopped most sites & proxies & emails from working. I think the only thing we can do is build a ssh tunnel outside....FXXK!