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?
ROC (Score:1)
And so begins... (Score:3, Funny)
Testing complete for http://www.stileproject.com. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
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: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.
Re:And so begins... (Score:3, Informative)
Stage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://google.com. Result:
Reported as inaccessible in China
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
Poor bastards.
Re:And so begins... (Score:1)
Reported as inaccessible in China
But there isn't much use for search engine like google if you can't access the pages you've searched for. I think the question is basicly about general access to every page on net, not about access to specific sites.
Re:And so begins... (Score:1)
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
While on this topic..... whats the 2nd best search engine - finding life without google to be difficult
- HeXa
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
Perhaps it is a DNS problem resolving google.com, I will try again tomorrow and see if the name works yet.
- HeXa
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
Hmm. Maybe did the people running the root servers put up a website on those machines?
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
To fix this problem, you need to edit your local hosts file to manually resolve google.com. If you let me know what OS you run, I can tell you exactly how to do it. This will only work if they're only filtering google.com the name, and not the IP address. But if you get the site by putting in the ip, that's probably what they're doing. How dumb!
Of course, you could use a search engine to find out how as well.
I'm the stileproject admin (Score:2)
About a year ago, we had www.stileproject.com resolving to 6 different IP's in a round-robin DNS arrangement.
Someone from China reported to us that we got blocked by the
I'm not exactly sure why, but eventually they either gave up, or decided that the site's content wasn't worth banning anymore because they dropped it and nobody's emailed me in many months saying they were having problems.
And yes, we've had several people from China send in subscriptions (always in cash, wrapped in a dozen sheets of paper) for camwhores.com. I think no matter what country you're in, there's some huge appeal of foreign porn.
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
- HeXa
Re:And so begins... (Score:2)
It would also be interesting to post results... (Score:2)
And how can we stop this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And how can we stop this? (Score:2, Interesting)
A mini cache with the most subversive web pages that could fit in 2MB could be automatically distributed to hundreds of web sites.
You can walk around the so-called "Great" Firewall [harvard.edu] right now by using existing web caches. [archive.org] Can you imagine how bad they'd lose if there were thousands of caches of subversive pages?
Re:And how can we stop this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And how can we stop this? (Score:2, Funny)
Meh, if there's any site worth blocking, it's Stile's.
list of blocked (Score:2)
http://code.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html
wrong (Score:2)
Starting testing...
Slashdot is accessible apparentlyStage one testing complete.
Stage two testing complete.
Testing complete for http://slashdot.org. Result:
Reported as accessible in China
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].
Re:list of blocked (Score:1)
When I ran the test for slashdot.org [harvard.edu] I got the result:
Testing complete for http://slashdot.org. Result: Reported as accessible in China
Re:list of blocked (Score:1)
http://code.law.harvard.edu/filtering/lis
Uhh, no. That's just a list of sites. Eventhough it says something in effect of "these are blocked", it's probably a typo. I don't believe China would have the balls to block Sourceforge and OSDN.
How do I know that's a stupid list? Look at this entry below:
Maybe Chinese hate people who post "First Post" and are trying to reduce spam? Who knows.
Re:list of blocked (Score:2)
Anyway...
Re:list of blocked (Score:3, Funny)
Re:list of blocked (Score:1)
Because this user believes in CowboyNeal's supah powah!!!
The Real Point (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course in the mind of lunatic GOP nationalists nobody in the world outside of the US ever had an idea about freedom or human rights. But the Berlin wall failled and so will the great firewall.
The criticism that will bring down the communist party is local. That is why they are so afraid of an AIDS activist who described how careless officials spread AIDS to whole villiages collecting blood plasma.
Outside comment can play a useful role but politicians who agrandize themselves by claiming to have brought down communism in other countries are largely hot air bags.
Re:The Real Point (Score:2)
Re:The Real Point (Score:3, Insightful)
A speach that went down well in the US but you miss out the start of the phrase, "Mr Gorbachev". Gorbachev did far more to end communism in the USSR than Reagan could.
The Soviet Union collapsed because the Communist party had visibly lost control and Gorbachev was clearly not prepared to reassert it by force. The loss of control began in Poland and spread through Eastern Europe. It was the students from East Germany that tore down the wall, not Gorbachev or Reagan.
If huffing and puffing from US politicians would blow down communist regimes then Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea would have fallen first. Instead they are still standing and it is pretty obvious that the regime is using the external hostility as an excuse.
Cancel the sanctions against Cuba and the regime would be lucky to last more than five years. The right is keen to spend money on broadcast propaganda to attack Cuba but completely ignores the propaganda effect of tourists carrying fat wallets. Of course the Cuba sanctions policy is not about bringing down Fidel and has everything to do with getting votea in Florida so the effectiveness is not exactly the issue.
Re:The Real Point (Score:2)
Not unless you are a communist sympathizer.
The only thing keeping those regimes alive is the ability of the leaders to blame the US for the results of their own incompetence.
Same thing just happened with Iran. After 9/11 the democratic reformers had an ideal opportunity to take on the unelected mullahs who were then on the defensive. His Inadequacy gives his idiotic 'Axis of Evil' speech and that is all over, the mullahs are back in control and everyone has to denounce the great satan again.
Attacks from US politicians to boost their own ratings do nothing for reform.
Chineese comunism is going to be dumped in the garbage can of history sooner or later. They have already dumped the economic theory and the political part will follow soon enough. Ironically the main thing that holds the party in place is fear of a return to the instability and famines of Mao's great leap forward.
Sure it works? (Score:1)
Both http://www.taipeitimes.com and http://www.chinatimes.com.tw are reported as being accessible in China.
Also, I believe it is 4 star and above hotels in China that do not have restrictions on Sattelite TV and Internet access.
Re:Sure it works? (Score:1)
e-gold shows as blocked from the Harvard computers, but either a LOT of Chinese use proxies to get around the blocking, or the filter-tester just doesn't work as they say/think. Chances are good that the Chinese government is big enough to pay for custom censorware, so maybe that explains it.
JMR
Speaking ONLY for myself!!!
Secret fibres HK-macow (Score:1)
Re:Secret fibres HK-macow (Score:2)
I'm in HK and, trust me, there are no restrictions on the internet here.
As for cables to Macau, it would make some sense to run cables across the Pearl Delta from HK (it's not that far) just to avoid going through the Mainland, and because it's a shorter line. It would have been done a long time ago, though, well before Macau was handed back to China.
Macau was only returned to China in 1999, *AFTER* HK (1997), so I can't see any advantage - if there was a crackdown, HK would have been first.
Some of the sites on the 'inaccessible' list were for pro-Taiwan HK newspapers, so sites in one part of China are blocked from the main part.
ah-wai
Gotta have them whores.. (Score:1)
Reported as accessible in China
Whoohoo!
Apparently stileproject works too.. lol.
No sourceforge in China? (Score:2)
Re:No sourceforge in China? (Score:2)
Re:No sourceforge in China? (Score:2)
Re:No sourceforge in China? (Score:1)
Google is accessible, so project homepages etc. can still be read via the google cache, but often it is a PITA.
Of course I'm very unhappy about this, and cannot understand why. Maybe it is because of the `forge' in it, maybe they want to prevent IP leakage, or it may just be a mistake that no one cared to report. I want to send some interesting patches to PrBoom, but don't even know where to send them.
Re:No sourceforge in China? (Score:2)
cph [at] cph [dot] demon [dot] co [dot] uk.
If you have a more specific contact request, then let me know and I will try to find it.
Regards,
Stephen
Re:No sourceforge in China? (Score:1)
RIAA/MPAA should look to China as a role model of the American teenager if they keep pissing the "consumer" (I'm not a teen but I'm mad as hell) off.
Up here in Canada, we have succeeded in a 15% decrease in music... Congradulations my fellow Canadians... Are CDs are 50% cheaper and we still pirate more...
Per capita, more broadband, at a cheaper price, but it appears that when Canadians say boycott, more of us carry it out!
Look at what is powering their lookups: (Score:1)
Re:Look at what is powering their lookups: (Score:1)
It's likely that they just have some perl script that identifies itself as IE.
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:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:1)
Re:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:1)
Re:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:3, Funny)
Re:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:1)
This one's easy - they're pocketing cash from the tobacco companies here in the States. Why can Philip Morris keep paying out billions to states and families here? Because they can be assured of a market of 8-year-olds enjoying their most luscious products in Third World countries. At last count, some report said that a large percentage (I don't remember how much) of children 6 and above in China are regular smokers. No surprise given all the unrestricted advertising in the country by Big Tobacco.
Tobacco is banned for people under 18 (Score:1)
As for the percentage of young regular smokers, I find it hard to believe. No one in my middle school or high school dare smoke in public.
Re:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:2)
Re:All SourceForge sites blocked (Score:2)
The Great Firewall is not that bad. (Score:1)
Seriously, if Znet/NPR are not blocked in China, I don't see what the big deal is. Either Harvard folks coded that url checker with QBASIC or China is a Great place to live in.
Re:The Great Firewall is not that bad. (Score:1)
Re:The Great Firewall is not that bad. (Score:1)
My friend and I once invented a programming language and wrote a compiler for it in QBASIC. It's nowhere near complete enough to be useful, but it does actually build
Does this test actually work? (Score:1)
http://slashdot.org - Reported as accessible in China
But on the Inaccessible Sites page [harvard.edu] I see:
# http://slashdot.org - 8/29/2002 11:39:06 AM
Something wrong with the test?
Re:Does this test actually work? (Score:1)
It is much easier and more reliable to just edit the URL in the brower's URL field at the top.
Sigh... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Site not reachable from US testing location. Check URL and web server.
I guess somebody up in the Chinese government got tricked into going over to goatse.cx and got a real scare...
Re:Sigh... (Score:1)
wow. That was original.
Re:Sigh... (Score:1)
Re:Sigh... (Score:1)
Actually that's not the case. I've been with
I try not to linger on one account for long.
Hope that explains it.
Re:Sigh... (Score:1)
I think that means that the Havard Law School has a filter which blocks goatse.
Unfortunately there is no censoring in the US.
So scared that they forgot to block it? (Score:1)
Extensive testing by worried geeks... (Score:4, Funny)
But only today (Score:3, Funny)
What's the point? (Score:2)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2)
Maybe that's not the point... (Score:2)
2. Maybe the point is to remind Chinese citizens they can filter any part of the Internet whenever they want. This keeps the censorship precident active, in the event they want to *really* lock down on unfavorable opinions.
3. Maybe they want information to slowly seep into the country to reduce the risk of information shock.
These sort of arguments apply well to content protection schemes. It doesn't have to work 100% to work.
I think you got it. (Score:2)
I see the same kind of thing right here in the good USA. I just got burnt for "excessive" personal internet usage at my engineering job. My peers don't know what a google search is much less slashdot. Trying to explain that this a software news site and that I read it in part to keep up programing skill would be futile. Other people listen to online music, read CNN and other less work related things with impunity.
As freedoms and personal dignity wane here, the rest of the world will suffer that much more.
Look for your ability to post anything that would require filtering anywhere to go away. As multinational publishers and telcoms continue to gobble up the web, your ability to publish uncensored pages goes away.
Anyone else want to build alternate networks? Think light and radio based backbone nodes with 811.b local distribution. No, I don't want to republish RIAA crap, swap porn or other Warez. What I want is the ability to publish MY content without AOL/McDisneySoft looking over my shoulder at my big five megs of advert wracked Geo Cities "web" pages.
When all the censors finish their work, what's left will be a serries of billboards not worth browsing.
End Rant.
I'm in China, it's not that bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my main fears about coming here was the internet access. I was afraid that they would block any western site that could talk about democracy or badly about China in any way. Could it be possible that I might not be able to, gasp, read slashdot for an entire year? After I got here I found at that isn't the case at all. I can get to Slashdot, CNN, Yahoo, pretty much every site that I use on a regular basis. The only one that really pisses me off is sourceforge. Out of all the sites to block, why the hell did they pick that one? Maybe because they figure that if anyone does find a way to write a piece of software that could get around their firewall, that would probably be one of the first places it would be posted. I can't seem to come up with a better answer. Any ideas?
Anyway, Google is not blocked, and neither is the cache, so if I ever do find a site that I can't get to, I just use Google's cache to get a general idea of what is there.
Also, as far as the blocking of Playboy and other sex sites goes, any country where you can walk into a bar and have two prostitutes sitting on your lap within 5 minutes (no joke) has far more serious moral issues to deal with than a few internet sex sites. Enough said.
Re:I'm in China, it's not that bad... (Score:1)
also, it's mostly only the foreigners who have two prostitues sitting on their lap withing 5 minutes. It's because foreigners go to those places and pay for prostitutes, supply meets demand, and an ugly cycle begins. (I never met one chinese person who frequented prostitues. They either couldn't afford it or didn't need one)
What they don't tell you... (Score:2)
This site is nothing but a ploy to collect objectionable websites!
Ok, not really. I just wanted to use 'apparatchiks' in a sentence. Btw, autopr0n [autopr0n.com] isn't filtered! Come on and visit, horny chinamen! (and horny Chinese lesbians too). Coincidentally, there happen to be lots of Asian chicks featured...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Major DNS problem in China (31/8) (Score:2)
It's the Google cache (Score:2)
Infrastructure (Score:1)
I've done some googlin' but can't really find out anything about it. I think I heard once that Cisco had been involved in putting it together.
I'm just idley curious - where is it/they? What platforms are used? What are the bandwidth requirements etc. Anybody know?
xenu (Score:2)
must be those dame scientologists in beijing
No problems (Score:1)
Anyway, back to the firewall, it seems that CNN is accessable by the harvard website on this page
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/te
my experiences are that the firewall only blocks certan IPs, not just allows certan IPs. So, you can telnet to your home box, use Lynx to brows the web remotely, and have no problems!
Re:No problems (Score:2)
Or even better, use the ssh -L port forwarding command to forward a local port on your machine in china to the squid port on your machine back home and browse the web using your browser of choice
Re:No problems (Score:2)
is the way to go.
Forward X Window apps through the beauty of ssh. When people talk about the Internet routing around censorship as damage, this is what they mean.
Mail me at anything at mmdc dot net if you truly need an unrestricted connection over ssh.
I'll set you up (if you can use mozilla over X)...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
they're not that fast (Score:2)
The test site itself remains viewable by Chinese surfers, as does my web site.
I think I'll post a copy of the blocked sites list. (insert evil grin here)
My site's blocked. Speculating why. (Score:2)
Spent 2 months there this summer (Score:1)
Some sites will just time out. In some places a proxy generated page will tell you about a breach of user agreement, both in english and chinese.
It does not prevent young chinese boys to access plenty of pr0n in plain view in some cafés.
Slashdot.org was accessible when I tried it. I even posted a comment on a similar story while a was there.
Two words .... (Score:2)
Re:Two words .... (Score:1)
amerika have good rooking presidensu (Score:1)
The reason The Great Firewall sucks. (Score:1)
Me too. [harvard.edu]
Just keep making web caches of the banned documents and they will have a "whack-a-mole" problem.
Chinese control of outside access (Score:1)
darn..... why did i forget.. (Score:2)
China Blocked from my Firewall (Score:2)
I figure that just blocking off the ISP is better than notifying them that they have someone trying to tunnel through my servers. What would an ISP there do after investigating logs to see who it was?
Re:slashdot is blocked (Score:1)
--
[McP]KAAOS
Re:slashdot is blocked (Score:2)
- HeXa
Re:slashdot is blocked (Score:1)
Seems it's better to just edit the URL in the browser's URL field.
Re:Ah-soo.... (Score:1)
Re:Ah-soo.... (Score:1)
Maybe 'dare' would fit better than 'care'
With Peekabooty (Score:1)
With Peekabooty the Chinese can un-block whatever the states wanna block.
Won't be long (Score:1)
But... it is blocked now (or slashdotted, which is less probable)... maybe slashdot shouldn't have posted this story in the first place...
Re:Won't be long (Score:1)
Disable popups on chinese sites, or PORN! (Score:1)
If my government want to do censorship, it should start from the inside. At least few major US or UK sites will link to goatse.cx-alike on the front page.