Google Disappears In China 334
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.
Re:p2p (Score:5, Informative)
How long before we'll be forced to use it ourselves, i wonder?
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
sourceforge.net is also forbidden (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rumors (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Google API to the rescue? (Score:3, Informative)
I am more interested in Google search via phone, as done by Google voice search [google.com]. In theory, someone could set up a VoiceXML 2.0 service outside China's borders on a network such as Tellme Studio [tellme.com], avoiding the complexity of the Internet. Too bad the Chinese government has a monopoly on telco (which is why they block Net2Phone).
Re:Google.cn? (Score:3, Informative)
No they couldn't. CN NIC [cnnic.net.cn] gives out third-level domains only. Second-level domains (SLDs) of the cn TLD are fixed at one of com, net, org, gov, ac, bj, sh, tj, cg, he, sx, nm, as well as ln, jl, hl, and also the domains js, zj, ah, fj, jx, not to mention sd, ha, hb, hn, gd, don't forget gx, hi, sc, gz, yn, xz, sn, yet theres more gs, gh, nx, xj, tw, hk, or mo.
These regional domains where originally intended to provide censorship of finer granularity, as to match the legislation or lack thereof in specific providences of China.
Re:Cornerstone? (Score:3, Informative)
No they can't. [google.com]
Re:Propoganda (Score:1, Informative)
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!
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.
Re:Its not (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, the "subservient attitude" you speak of in Asian countries is a byproduct of the Asian stereotype broadcasted throughout your country. (assuming you live in America). That stereotype labels Asians as submissive, docile people. However, as I am of Asian descent myself, I can state that most of the Asians you will encounter today in their native homelands, for example the Chinese, are, for the most part, either aggresive, fast-paced, witty, or a combination of all three.
That's why y'all got colonized by Europe in the 19th century.
Against their will, that is. The "subservient attitude" is not entirely to blame for European colonization in Asian countries; rather, it was concepts of Social Darwinism and the "White Man's Burden" ideals popular during the time. Note that this idea was definetly not well accepted by the Filipinos (as depicted by the war between America and the Phillipines after the Spanish-American war), China's Communist and Cultural Revolution (in which almost all peoples of non-Chinese descent were banished from the country, and "foreign" buildings such as churchs were destroyed). Also, China's Boxer Rebellion is a perfect example to disprove the "submissive, docile" stereotype.
Who are you referring to by the word "y'all"? The Asiatic peoples as a whole? If so, the "y'all got colonized by the Europeans..." statement is partially incorrect. While India, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, and a throng of other Asian countries were technically colonized, China, Thailand, and especially Japan, were not.