News

After analyzing our May data, which now covers more than 30,000 URLs, we can confidently say that the month of May was uneventful. Few major websites were blocked or unblocked. Perhaps this lack of activity was related to leadership change in China (and not just at the very top - see Rumors say China's chief internet censor replaced. While the Great Firewall didn't change much, Google and Sina, in very different ways, both took important steps in trying to deal with the pervasive censorship.

Google Strikes - The Great Firewall Hits Back

"We have observed that searching for certain keywords on Google from within mainland China will often lead to a temporary service disruption." 
Google Support, May 31, 2012.

Starting on May 31, Google displayed a warning message to users from China if they enter any of the many keywords blocked by the Great Firewall. Users could choose to continue the search which would most likely result in the connection being reset for a minute or so. Or they had the possibility to edit the search query and find another, non-blocked, way of searching for the same thing.

We were excited yesterday to see Google roll out a new feature that warns users trying to search for keywords that would otherwise be blocked by the Great Firewall. It seems that the feature has now already been disabled by the GFW blocking access to the javascript file which does the magic. More on that in our soon-to-be-published monthly newsletter. Meanwhile, we couldn't resist reverse-engineering the list of blocked keywords that Google used. Neither could the team at http://www.atgfw.org who beat us to it. Anyway, better late than never, here is the full list. We will be importing all of them into our system shortly for automatic and continuous testing.

08.*宪章|宪章.*08

08县长

18大

1989.*天安門|天安門.*1989

3\.19

5月35号

5月35日

64.*真相|真相.*64

64.*镇压|镇压.*64

64.*学生运动|学生运动.*64

64memo

89.*学生动乱|学生动乱.*89

89.*学生运动|学生运动.*89

8964

89动乱

8宪章

^\s*dongtaiwang\s*$

^\s*download freegate\s*$

^\s*dynaweb\s*$

^\s*freegate download\s*$

^\s*freegate\s*$

^\s*nuctech\s*$

^\s*海峰\s*$

^\s*动网通\s*$

^\s*自由門\s*$

^\s*自由门\s*$

^\s*逍遥游\s*$

^\s*威视公司\s*$

^\s*無界浏览\s*$

^\s*無界瀏覽\s*$

^\s*自由之门\s*$

^\s*自由門下載\s*$

^\s*自由门下载\s*$

^bignews

^boxun

^cache

^creaders

^dajiyuan

^freechina

^freedom

^freenet

^hrichina

^tianwang

^triangle

^xinsheng

^ytht

blood is on the square

boobs

chinese people eating babies

east.*turkistan|turkistan.*east

epochtimes

facebook

falun

freetibet

gfw.*什么|什么.*gfw

great.*firewall|firewall.*great

heguoqiang

heywood

hotspot.*shield|shield.*hotspot

hujin

jasmine.*revolution|revolution.*jasmine

jiangzemin

jiaqinglin

jzm

lichangchun

Good news, everybody. We've worked out a simpler solution to unblock websites in China. Visit unblock.cn.com for more detail

This is a step by step guide on how to unblock your website for visitors in China without them having to do anything. The Great FireWall of China is a complicated filtering system capable of blocking websites by a variety of methods. The common methods used are IP blocking, URL and Packet filtering by connection reset, TLS (SSL) certificate filtering by connection reset and DNS hijacking.

IP blocking

Use CDN (Count Delivery Network) to hide the real IP of your site from GFW. I did a simple test myself. I created a Google site and linked it with 4 subdomains as follows.

CNAME records: (ghs.google.com is currently not blocked in China)

test1.example.com -> ghs.google.com   CDN enabled

test2.example.com -> ghs.google.com

A records: (216.239.32.21 is subject to IP blocking in China)

test3.example.com-> 216.239.32.21  CDN enabled

test4.example.com -> 216.239.32.21

April was an eventful month in China. Here's a summary of the most important Internet censorship news that we detected.

No major changes after Internet outage on April 12

There was an extraordinary Internet outage in China on April 12. Many reported that all foreign websites were unaccessible for about two hours. Our data confirms that several websites that are otherwise not blocked were not accessible, but interestingly other foreign websites were still available. For more info on what happened, check out our answer on Quora. Some people suggested that the authorities were trying out a new version of the Great Firewall, which would be more restrictive than before. Our data does not support this claim. As you can see in the first graph below, there has not been any major change in the number of major websites that are blocked in China. Furthermore, the second graph shows that foreign websites were actually faster to access in April than during previous months.

The Great Firewall of China censors hundreds of keywords. In the case of Google, this means that if you search for any of them the result is the infamous Connection Reset. However, if you use the encrypted version of Google, the firewall cannot filter the connection based on keywords. Accessing the encrypted version of Google from China takes a few tweaks, but it is not blocked. The reason that it's not straightforward to use is that Google redirects you to other URLs depending on what you start out with. Here's an overview:

Until a week ago, few Chinese had ever heard of Neil Heywood, and fewer still raised any questions when the 41-year-old British business consultant was found dead in his hotel room. Today, he is so famous — and such a sensitive topic — that China’s Internet censors have banned searches of Heywood’s Chinese name, Hai Wu De.

The above is taken from the Washington Post. Our tests do confirm that Neil Heywood is censored on the Internet in China. But just how censored? Here's an overview:

Baidu

baidu: Neil Heywood

baidu: Heywood

baidu: 海伍德 (his Chinese name)

Google

google: Neil Heywood

google: Heywood

google: 海伍德

Weibo

weibo: Neil Heywood

weibo: Heywood

weibo: 海伍德

Wikipedia

en.wikipedia: Neil Heywood

en.wikipedia: Heywood

zh.wikipedia: 海伍德

Click any of the keywords above for detailed results or test any other keyword.

China's top leadership body is the Politburo which has 25 members. Of these, nine make up the Standing Committee which is the Chinese government's most important decision-making group. Seven of the nine are expected to be replaced this year. One of the candidates to fill these vacancies, Bo Xilai, was recently ousted in a scandal. Not surprisingly, much of the reporting on this incident is censored in China. More surprising, perhaps, is that all other members of the Politburo are censored on the Chinese Internet.

The following is a summary of all Politburo members and whether they are censored on Baidu, Google and Wikipedia, searching for their names in Chinese or Pinyin, respectively. Censorship on Baidu is marked in yellow and refers to confirmed self-censorship. Censorship on Google and Wikipedia is marked in red and refers to complete blocking of those pages. You can click on either to get more info on the results, or to test again in real time.

The discrepancy in results between Chinese character searches and searches in Pinyin may shed a little light on who is deemed to be a true danger when it comes to censorship.

GreatFire.org's mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China and to that end we are continuously making our own improvements to how we monitor blocked searches and key words. This past week we launched a new version of our web site where we now provide real-time searches so concerned netizens can keep up to date with information which is being censored via the Great Firewall of China.

We are also fortunate in that we have a core of super users who are constantly and consistently testing our technology to keep abreast of censorship in China. After we launched the new version of the site, we received feedback from a user via Twitter:

Congrats on ur update. But it seems connection reset for https is not detected by ur server. e.g https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.youtube.com

After receiving this message we logged on to Facebook, checked out Google Plus and did some searches on Google, specifically for freedom and 六四. What's so special about that? These websites and searches are blocked in China but we were able to access them without using a VPN or proxy, the tools people commonly use to get around this censorship.