News

Many in China have complained that Gmail is so slow that it is almost impossible to use (see our original story from March 2011 - Gmail now 45 times slower than QQ). We have continued to gather data on the Gmail situaiton in light of Google's continued operation in China. With more data we can now show how the situation has developed since March. The results are clear in this chart:

All foreign webmail providers are considerably slower than domestic competitors (QQ is included for comparison). Out of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, a distressed Yahoo, whose local partner in China is Alibaba, is consistently the fastest free foreign email provider. Hotmail has at times challenged Gmail to a race to the bottom. Using the same comparison as in March, Gmail is now only 9 times slower than QQ and has seen a considerable improvement in speed since September.

One way to put the speed of Gmail into perspective is to compare today's access speed with old dial-up modems, for those that remember. In the 1990s, they provided speeds up to 56 kbps, or roughly 7000 bytes per second. That is considerably faster than the average speed of either Gmail or Hotmail, when accessed from within China in 2011.

Apart from speed, the main problem with Gmail in China is instability. Rather than blocking the service outright, it seems that the authorities have chosen to impose occasional, random outages. Looking back over the year (from March onwards), we can see the following:

Browsing websites is often a slow and frustrating experience in China. Apart from blocking over 2600 websites and searches, the Great Firewall also imposes a serious bottleneck on speed. There have been rumors that the Internet is especially slow on Sundays. Analyzing more than 80,000 tests executed by our system from March to November this year, our data seems to confirm this suspicion.

The tests consist of downloading the front page of each of the world's 500 most popular websites, as defined by Alexa. Apart from aberrations in March and June, download speeds on Sundays have consistently been between 8 and 25% slower than the average of the other days of the week. Here's the full test data summary (all speeds in bytes/second):

WordPress.com, the famous blog tool, was blocked in China this week.

A quick look at different blogs hosted by WordPress (searching for wordpress in our new search above) shows the following:

Number of blogs blocked before this week: 7 our of 21 (33%).

Number of blogs blocked now: 21 out of 21 (100%).

The main wordpress.com website is also blocked. Interestingly, wordpress.org is still not blocked. So Chinese users can still access that website to download the WordPress software, but they have to host it somewhere else.

Today we've moved to a new domain: https://greatfire.org. Here are some notes on what this means:

We're not blocked in China

Though it may only be a question of time until this changes, for now our website is accessible in China without a VPN or proxy. Back in March, before we were blocked, we started getting traffic from Weibo (the biggest Chinese equivalent to Twitter) and we hope to be able to inform Chinese users on the extent of online censorship here.

We're on a secure server

Notice that our address starts with HTTPS. This means that all traffic between your browser and our server is encrypted. And the result of this encryption is that it is impossible for the Great Firewall to intercept the traffic, if you're viewing our website from China. HTTPS is a term to remember, it's the biggest reason why the authorities have semi-blocked access to GMail here.

.org as in non-profit

We are a non-profit organization which is now reflected in our name. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. We do need your help to make our operations sustainable.

Feedback is very welcome, as always.

We have been detecting which websites are blocked in China since February this year. Using our tool and contributions from our visitors, we've created the most complete database anywhere of what's blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China, including 2200+ blocked websites and 200+ blocked searches. But how accurate is our data?

When a website is tested, it's always done by comparing the results of trying to access it from A) a computer outside China and B) a computer inside China. This way, a website that is simply not working is not labelled as blocked. A website that works when accessed outside of China but fails when tested from inside China, on the other hand, will be labelled as blocked.

This makes our data more accurate, but not perfect. Another difficulty is that the Great Firewall often changes temporarily. A given website that was previously accessible may be blocked for, say, 20 minutes. The opposite is also true. Blocked websites are sometimes temporarily accessible. Examples include Facebook (March 28, April 25) and YouTube (July 31, Aug 15 etc).

To tackle this particular challenge, our scripts always re-run testing of a website once more, after it's status has changed. In most cases, temporary changes are quickly detected and the websites are labelled correctly again. In some cases, however, if the change lasts somewhat longer, it may take up to a week for our system to re-label the website correctly. So, for example, Paypal was tested to be blocked twice on Aug 22. It's now accessible again. But it will take several days before our system automatically tests it again. Meanwhile, it's labelled as blocked.

In recent days news has spread that China is cracking down on VPN use (Guardian, Global Voices). Chinese internet users, particularly those in universities, are finding it increasingly difficult to make use of VPNs to circumvent online censorship and access blocked websites. This seems to be a continuation of the increased censorship witnessed this year, including temporary blocks of GMail and LinkedIn.

While important, this development leaves an obvious question unanswered: Why do the authorities not block access to the main websites of the major VPN providers? Each serious provider offers access to a number of servers around the world and blocking actual usage of these is somewhat complicated. The main websites, however, could be blocked in an instant. After all, the Great Firewall has no problem constantly blocking other websites such as Youtube and Facebook.

There are three apparent possibilites. The first is incompetence. The authorities might simply not be aware of the VPN providers that are not blocked. This seems unlikely for two reasons. First, all it takes is a Google search of, say, "VPN China". Blocking the top 10 results would go a long way to making VPN access in China more difficult. Second, some providers, such as StrongVPN, are in fact temporarily blocked from time to time.

At the time of writing, we're monitoring 59 Google searches that are all blocked in China. This means that when in China, unless you're on a VPN or proxy and you try to search for any of these words in Google, you'll be presented with a blank page. However, there's currently a glitch in the firewall which can be used to get complete uncensored Google search in China on a standard internet connection.

It's done using Google SSL. Google SSL is hosted on an encrypted server meaning that anything that is sent or received is out of reach of the Great Firewall. This is a good reason for the Chinese authorities to block the service altogether. They have of course, but there's a loophole. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to www.google.com/ncr

If you're in China, when you Google you're redirected to www.google.com.hk by default. Typing in www.google.com/ncr makes sure that you get to the international website and not the Hong Kong version.

2. Type in google encrypted and click "I'm Feeling Lucky"

This should take you to https://encrypted.google.com. Alternatively, you can try typing in that URL manually: https://encrypted.google.com.