News

News Sites Update

After Bloomberg was blocked in June, we are tracking whether other news websites will follow with great interest. Of particular interest is http://cn.nytimes.com - the Chinese version of the New York Times which was also launched in June. It has not yet been blocked. The Hong Kong edition of Yahoo! News was less lucky. http://hk.news.yahoo.com was blocked on July 3 and has stayed inaccessible in China since. Yahoo! China (http://cn.yahoo.com), which is hosted in China and operates under Chinese censorship regulations, is still working well though.

Bye-bye Slideshare

http://www.slideshare.net was blocked on July 11 and has stayed blocked since. This is the first time that Slideshare has been permantently blocked since we started monitoring access to it from China in March, 2011.

The big question for people following online censorship in China is a simple: is censorship increasing or decreasing in China? Many cite the growth of microblogs such as Sina Weibo, as well as the total number of Internet users in China, and argue that while censorship is pervasive, overall, things are opening up. However, two developments during the month of June suggest otherwise. The first was that Bloomberg was blocked, the first time in years that a major, English-language news website was blocked. The second was that out of the 15,000+ keywords on Sina Weibo, Google and Wikipedia that we are monitoring, an additional 231 were blocked while only 24 were unblocked. It would seem that the grip on censorship is tightening.

In a curious incident, Henan News published a story mentioning the Great Firewall by name both in Chinese and English. The story was quickly deleted, but thanks to Google Cache you can still view it here.

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.