Domain: greatfire.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to greatfire.org.
Comments · 6
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Re:Except for Mozilla and Colts
Economic impact would be probably close to zero.
A story on the same blog posted 4 days ago shows that HSBC's corporate banking site was jsut blocked because the CDN Akamai got blocked. Apparently, "HSBC uses Akamai as part of the secure login system for clients".
What the blog doesn't say however is that many corporations in China are already paying for proxies outside of China that they access through VPNs, so as to circumvent China's great firewall. And that HSBC probably scrambled to remove the login dependency on Akamai as soon as it received customer complaints about the problem. So I can't say what the economic impact is going to be, but companies are certainly trying to mitigate the effect this has on them and route around the problem.
Also note that Akamai's CDN is also used as a big ad-delivery network, so the economic impact notwithstanding, most Chinese users are now browsing the internet without seeing ads, which for once translates into a much more positive experience for users in China. And the only problem there is that this blockage of internet ads probably won't last very long, because advertising companies will do everything in their power to fix the problem and circumvent Akamai.
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We do detect restriction
When the download speed in China is significantly lower than that of in U.S, we categorize those websites as restricted. https://en.greatfire.org/top-sites (Yellow instead of red)
About Google. Google is in fact accessible(might be slow) most of the time, at least until you search something with it. If your keywords accidentally contain restricted words, such as carrot in Chinese which contains one word of a commonly used family name, also a family name of one of the Chinese leaders, then your connection to any google page would be blocked for 90 seconds. -
We do detect restriction
When the download speed in China is significantly lower than that of in U.S, we categorize those websites as restricted. https://en.greatfire.org/top-sites (Yellow instead of red)
About Google. Google is in fact accessible(might be slow) most of the time, at least until you search something with it. If your keywords accidentally contain restricted words, such as carrot in Chinese which contains one word of a commonly used family name, also a family name of one of the Chinese leaders, then your connection to any google page would be blocked for 90 seconds. -
Re:We Know What China Censors
Hmmm... Unfortunately, looking at the list of blocked URLs does provide examples of censorship of political dissent. Mostly I see facebook, twitter, most google services blocked, netflix, porn sites, piratebay, more porn sites, wikimedia, and Chinese Wikipedia. My amateur opinion would be that these blocks are due to porn being illegal there and the government eliminating access to websites that compete with their own services and social networks that the government cannot oversee.
There's also a bunch of blogger and wordpress.com blogs. While many of these have titles making them sound related to China, I'm not understanding many of the censors, like this poetry site which is simply artsy, this blog about a teacher who loves Chinese culture and is visiting the country, and this pro-China pro-Communism site and others that have no content posted to them at all like sinologica.
There are a few that do appear to possibly be blocked for challenging the government, like X in China (link is to a post listing blocked Weibo words), SmurfWillBeFree (a free Tibet blog), a blog focused on bad economic news about China, and wikipedia articles on Chinese political issues (ie "Dalai Lama", "Tank Man", etc).
This is just my quick random sampling of a few dozen sites out of 2163, so take it with a grain of salt. At some point a plurality of anecdotes becomes data, and this post doesn't come anywhere near that threshhold, but it does provide some nuance to the NPR article I cited above.
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Re:We Know What China Censors
Hmmm... Unfortunately, looking at the list of blocked URLs does provide examples of censorship of political dissent. Mostly I see facebook, twitter, most google services blocked, netflix, porn sites, piratebay, more porn sites, wikimedia, and Chinese Wikipedia. My amateur opinion would be that these blocks are due to porn being illegal there and the government eliminating access to websites that compete with their own services and social networks that the government cannot oversee.
There's also a bunch of blogger and wordpress.com blogs. While many of these have titles making them sound related to China, I'm not understanding many of the censors, like this poetry site which is simply artsy, this blog about a teacher who loves Chinese culture and is visiting the country, and this pro-China pro-Communism site and others that have no content posted to them at all like sinologica.
There are a few that do appear to possibly be blocked for challenging the government, like X in China (link is to a post listing blocked Weibo words), SmurfWillBeFree (a free Tibet blog), a blog focused on bad economic news about China, and wikipedia articles on Chinese political issues (ie "Dalai Lama", "Tank Man", etc).
This is just my quick random sampling of a few dozen sites out of 2163, so take it with a grain of salt. At some point a plurality of anecdotes becomes data, and this post doesn't come anywhere near that threshhold, but it does provide some nuance to the NPR article I cited above.
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Re:An outbreak of common sense