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With 250 million monthly connected users, Skype is one of the most popular services for making phone calls as well as chatting over the Internet. If you have friends, family or business contacts abroad, chances are you are using Skype to keep in contact. Having said that, you are probably not aware that all your phone calls and text chats can be monitored by the censorship authorities in China. And if you are aware, chances are that you do not consent to such surveillence. Microsoft, however, assumes that you do consent, as expressed in their Privacy Policy:

Skype, Skype's local partner, or the operator or company facilitating your communication may provide personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information. Skype will provide reasonable assistance and information to fulfill this request and you hereby consent to such disclosure.

From the SKYPE PRIVACY POLICY.

Known for years - yet most Skype users are unaware

The fact that Skype is collaborating with Tom Online and operating under "local laws and regulation" for the China market has been known for years. For example, Human Rights Watch got the following response from Skype in 2006, when inquiring about their partnership with Tom:

Back in October, we mentioned that weibo rolled out new semi-censorship. Apparently this is not enough. Now weibo has four different ways to censor keywords.

A. Explicit complete censorship

This translates into:

Keyword example: 六四

Note: This is the good old way of censorship since the beginning of weibo.

B. Implicit complete censorship

This translates into:

Keyword example: 江泽民

Note: This is a brand new form of censorship. Sina weibo used to admit what they censored. Now this message will also be shown to b keywords which actually have no results such as "dsfhadslfhadsljk".

C. Explicit semi-censorship

This translates into:

Note: This method is employed around October as mentioned in the blog post.

D. Implicit semi-censorship

When you search for the keywords, only some selected results are returned. With a message at the button, stating

This translates into:

The DNS poisoning that was imposed on most Google websites yesterday appears to have been lifted. The blocking was likely reversed some time this morning. Due to the nature of DNS there is a delay before this trickles down to every ISP and every computer so if you still cannot access Google in China it's likely just a question of time. You can also try to flush your DNS cache and it should work again.

Even though the blocking of Google Search may only have lasted for 12 hours or so, it was likely the single one decision by the Great Firewall authorities affecting the most users ever. So what really happened? Here are some theories:

1. Was it a mistake?

The blocking of the worlds number one (and Chinas number two) search engine took place on a Friday night. It's possible that someone simply pressed the wrong button and accidentally DNS poisoned the wrong website. Perhaps they only meant to block mail.google.com. If it was a mistake, that would explain why it was seemingly reversed this morning. In that case, at least one employee of the Golden Shield Project must have lost their job today. However, there's one reason to believe this is not the case. The authorities didn't just block access to google.com or all subdomains that belong to it (such as mail.google.com, play.google.com, maps.google.com etc). They also DNS poisoned google.com.hk and google-analytics.com. This can't be done by accidentally hitting one button - you have to launch three separate actions. So if it wasn't a mistake, what could have happened?

Today, Nov 9, 2012, http://www.google.com and http://www.google.com.hk were blocked in China. It's the first time since we started tracking online censorship in China in February last year that this has happened. Here's what we know:

1. The subdomains http://www.google.com, http://mail.google.com, http://google-analytics.com, http://docs.google.com, http://drive.google.com, http://maps.google.com, http://play.google.com and perhaps many more are all currently DNS poisoned in China. Instead of the real IP addresses, any lookups from China to any of these domains result in the following IP: 59.24.3.173. That IP address is located in Korea and doesn't serve any website at all.
2. This means that none of these websites, including Google Search, currently work in China, unless you have a VPN or other cirumvention tool.
3. Using a DNS server outside of China doesn't help. A lookup of www.google.com to 8.8.8.8 is also distorted, by the Great Firewall.
4. So far you can still access other country versions of Google such as www.google.co.uk.

You can see an overview of different Google sites here: https://en.greatfire.org/search/google-sites. You can choose any of them and test them in real time to stay updated.

We just put out a story on GMail being partially blocked in China. It turns out that Google Search is suffering the same treatment. The table shows an overview of the IP addresses that are currently returned when looking up www.google.com or www.google.com.hk from China. One out of 13 is blocked. The IP address is chosen randomly when you first access google.com. If you are unlucky, a blocked IP address is chosen and you can't access Google. One quick way around it is to go to some other Google domain such as google.co.uk or google.ca.

The IP addresses used by Google Search and GMail are similar so perhaps this is just a mistake. But it's also possible that it's intentional and that even the basic Google Search will become unreliable in China from now on.

What Is Going On?

The URL of GMail is https://mail.google.com/mail. The subdomain mail.google.com points to four separate IP addresses, listed below. According to our latest tests, only one of these is fully working in China. The other three are fully blocked, or blocked depending on where in the country you are or which ISP you use. Interestingly, only HTTPS connections to these IP addresses are blocked. For example, you can visit http://74.125.128.19. Doing so will take you to Google Search; GMail is available on HTTPS only.

Forget Twitter and Facebook – exploring the real lies behind the GlobalWebIndex and Lightspeed Research numbers

You may have noticed we made a lot of noise about a recent GlobalWebIndex study which claimed, among other things, that despite heavy online censorship, Chinese netizens are actually very active on blocked foreign social media web sites including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

In response to our protests and the protests of journalists who could see that the numbers did not add up, GlobalWebIndex published a blog post on their web site and shared some of the information from the report. They also shared their rationale as to why, despite these web sites being blocked, there was so much activity from China:

However, it only takes a little bit of desk research to discover that what is called the “Great Firewall” is actually much more porous than the Chinese government would like to admit. On closer inspection, Chinese users are using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), VCN (Virtual Cloud Networks) or connections at work that may be routed internationally. Crucially, this means that users won’t be picked up in analytics and will not register as being in a Chinese location at all!

For us this was probably the most upsetting claim. We agree that Chinese netizens have access to VPNs at home or through their places of work and that certainly there are Chinese who are active on these social media platforms. But we hardly think it goes to the extent that GlobalWebIndex and their survey partner Lightspeed Research claim.

The simple question: Is the New York Times blocked in China? 

The simple answer: No, http://www.nytimes.com is not blocked in China.

However, a lot of the content that the New York Times produces for China is in fact blocked.

In June this year the New York Times launched a Chinese-language edition at http://cn.nytimes.com. Unlike http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen and http://www.voachinese.com it wasn't blocked, or at least not fully. However, as our monitoring of individual articles in their China section shows, many of these are fully censored. Our data currently shows that 29 out of 204 articles in the China section are blocked in China.

Adding to this, at least since September 18, the entire front page of the China section of the Chinese edition is blocked. Selected articles can still be accessed from the main front page.