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While the authorities have been blocking access to most things Google since June 4th, they have kept their hands off of CERNET, China’s nationwide education and research network. However, in the lead up to the new school year, the Chinese authorities have launched a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack against Google.

一般大家以为五毛党能一眼识别，实际不然。五毛不仅在国内评论，在海外比如推特也有活动。本文只阐述了高级五毛，明显的五毛和直接刷屏的五毛不是本文重点 现在，五毛越来越隐蔽，并且使用心理学制造红色恐怖来阻止大家进行六四纪念。此篇文章曝光了一系列这种隐蔽系列的五毛。这些推特上的五毛Follow了很多民运人士，而且推文都比较隐蔽，让人一眼看上去像普通的推友。

The 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident is coming. This highlights another fierce battle in the war between China censorship authority and information flow.

Google started to encrypt search by default in China in March and currently nearly all users will be redirected to the encrypted version automatically. But prior to the anniversary of Tiananmen incident, GFW(Great Firewall of China) began to severely disrupt Google search by disrupting TCP connections to Google IPs.  The block is indiscriminate as all Google services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China. This blockage includes Google search, images, translate, Gmail and almost all other products. In addition, the block covers  Google Hong Kong (China’s version of Google), Google.com and all other country specific versions, e.g Google France.

Abstract

Independent research from Xia Chu has shown that, in addition to non-China content, Bing censors a vast amount of content that is hosted inside China and which is not censored by China-based internet companies like Baidu. After communicating our issues with Microsoft, Bing removed certain censorship rules (kudos to Bing), but much work remains to be done.

We recently called for Microsoft to release its transparency report for Bing (as have others - full disclosure, Rebecca sits on our advisory board).  Microsoft has yet to respond to this request. But Xia’s independent research of Bing’s China censorship policy could be regarded as a de facto transparency report for the search engine.

In this thorough study, the results of which we have verified, Xia examined Bing's SERP (search engine results page) for over 30,000 sensitive and nonsensitive query terms, and launched these queries from both inside and outside of China. Comparing and examining these results, plus querying with special search operators, reveals unprecedented detail on Bing's China filtering practices.

The main findings from Xia’s research include:

• Bing has a list of “forbidden” terms where no results are shown. 139 such terms have been identified.

• Bing has a blacklist of websites that it never shows to China users. 329 such websites are identified. (5 have been lifted after our communication with Microsoft.)

We can also now trace complicit Bing Chinese censorship back to 2009 as highlighted by Nicholas Kristof. It looks like Microsoft has indeed changed its censorship mechanism after our research made headlines this week. But Bing is still seriously flawed on two fronts: its algorithm favors pro-Chinese government websites by default on all search terms in simplified Chinese and their front end mistakenly delivers explicit censorship of search results on some search terms for users from all over the world.

Microsoft says: “The results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China”. This is simply not true.

Our latest research indicates that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is censoring English and Chinese language search on its home page in order to exclude certain results. We have also noticed that Bing is practicing subtle censorship with search results. In both instances, Bing is filtering out links and stories that the Chinese authorities would deem damaging.