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Google Disappears In China
An anonymous reader submits: "The censorship in China was finally getting better since people were 'allowed' to read the CNN news now (except for certain articles). But since this weekend it seems that a new web page has been censored in China. Since this weekend it looks like everyone in China is not 'allowed' to use google.com anymore. google.com was also gaining populairity in China as the better search engine (which also works fine in Chinese). But now I guess it got too popular and thus not allowed. Or does it have anything to do with Yahoo signing the agreement to censor?" Comments to yesterday's post "Real-Time Testing of China's Internet Filters" also noted that Google has gone missing within China.
It's called "Peek-A-Booty", created by the Cult of the Dead Cow. A fine bit of hacktivism inspired, if i'm not mistaken, by just this sort of behavior.
How long before we'll be forced to use it ourselves, i wonder?
Google access decreased steadily the whole of last week.
First it was www.google.com that went down, then the country specific versions, now the wwwN.google.com types.
IP addresses work for viewing, but a get/post doesn't work, so no searching.
From what I can see, the firewall is just dropping packets on those ports at the 80,443 addresses.
You can ping google, and see what open ports are on, but a raw GET on port 80 or 443 does nothing.
Net Scan returns this:
IP Address : 216.239.51.100
Resolved : www.google.com
Operating System : probably Unix
Time to live (TTL) : 42 (64) - 22 hop(s) away
Open Ports (2)
80 [ Http => World Wide Web, HTTP ]
H 400 Bad Request
Content-Length: 1210
Connection: Close
Server: GWS/2.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 06:45:23 GMT
443 [ HttpS => Secure HTTP ]
Looks like its back to the dark old days of proxy's again.
Lawrence
www.shanghaiguide.com
Every year or so, I get to rewrite this article, because it seems to continue to be regarded as news.
The government of the PRC, through Zhonghua Telecom, continues to filter traffic going in and out of China.
The filters do not work. This is old news. Proxy servers are everywhere.
Here's the secret which doesn't seem to have gotten out of China yet, the filters don't have to work. They're not designed for the users.
Contrary to popular belief, China is not run as an absolute dictatorship. It's run by a circle of maybe a few dozen people who's opinions really matter. Like any good-sized group, there's a lot of disagreeement about how much (or little) openness there should be to the rest of the world.
The filters exist to appease the more close-minded members of the circle and to let them know that the best efforts are being made to keep bad stuff out of the minds of users.
My best guess about Google disappearing is that one or more companies who are providing portal and search services in China have been complaining to the Ministry of the Information Industry about loss of market share to Google. The solution? If Google gets blocked, the market share for locally-produced Chinese portals goes up!
Is this good policy? No. Probably not. I've seen protectionist policy used all over the world and it's generally not the consumer or even the producers who benefit. It's a few well-placed friends of the folks in power. At least in this case, there's always another open proxy server which someone "forgot" to close up to work around this bit of government silliness.
Happy hunting all!
j.
Here is a list of sites Chinese people shouldn't see. The list includes Google, Altavista. Amnesty, geocities, various .mil sites, free speech sites, Slashdot, SourceForge, and some porn sites as well as a variety of politically oriented sites.
:)
Does the US currently have any plans for a "regime shift" over there?
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.