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China Blocks Another Search Engine
Mr Natural writes "The BBC are reporting that the great firewall of china has blocked a second seach engine, AtlaVista.com, only a week after google was blocked. Here is the article."
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is to take away Google. I, like many "EXTREME" searchers, once bowed down before Altavista (back when it was still owned by Digital), but in recent years, AltaVista has just been horrible. They've tried a few things to make it better, but it's just no competition for Google.
Ah well, next I bet China has to block Hotbot after people are forced to use that.
It's too bad that they've blocked atlavista, but those Chinese citizens need not dispair about altavista ;)
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I guess that if you can't search it doesn't exist.
Search no webpage see no webpages know no webpages
There used to be a search tool called Archie for searching FTP sites. It was an interactive tool when I first started using it but later as the number of people on the net increased a lot of Archie sites resorted to email interfaces. Now email interfaces for search engines might become useful again, though for different reasons.
It wouldn't be hard for somebody to create an email interface to google or altavista, though there would be significant bandwidth costs associated with it. A query could return an HTML email containing the 50 highest rated sites. In the event sites are blocked alternate commands could even return a cached copy of a particular site.
An email interface would be more difficult to block since its easy to generate sites that only provide a transmit/store/forward interface to the real email server.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
China seems to be black-listing just about every damn site on the net. Wouldn't it be easier to just white-list [the equivalent of] china.gov?
The more they tighten their grip, the more web sites will slip through their fingers.
GMD
watch this
How long will it take until we see a story about atsivalta, the AtlaVista mirror site?
Seen here, or just try it yourself
Slashdot Moderators mass-block posts made by Anonymous Cowards. Trolls from all around the world are concerned at this behaviour...
Pixels keep you awake!
a fully distributed content-addressible web
infrastructure is the best way to resolve this
problem once and for all. linked with a
good distributed proxy infrastructure, or better yet, a fully anonymized transport it will take herculean efforts
to do this kind of information-suppression.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Yahoo is one of the 130 major web portals that recently signed a voluntary pledge not to post information that would jeopardise state security and disrupt social stability in China.
Ahem. Bullshit. This makes Yahoo sound like a hero. It should be re-worded as: Yahoo capitulates to Chinese government in order to retain 90 million potential eye-balls.
This is why I trust Google's results over Yahoo's. Google takes the moral high-ground and refuses to censor the Internet. I don't have to worry that my search results will be skewed by somebody's agenda.
gogle.com is still accessible. If I were in charge at google, I'd just make that domain point the site rather than redirect. You know, just to piss the chinese authorities off, 'til they find it and block it. AFAIK google own a few other mis-spellings of their domain.
What I'd like to know is what sort of backlash there is in china against The Great Firewall? I very much doubt that this blocking goes un-noticed, yet I have never heard anything about any sort of resistance to it in china or any other country in the media, although it almost certainly does exist.
Naturally, a quick search on you-know-what brings up some interesting links.
I'd also like to add that I believe hacktivism to be, at least in this case, piss-all use, and that graffiti on government buldings is the way to get the message to the intellectual proles. And also the way to torture and execution.
Have a nice day.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
Glad they didn't block Altavista..
AtlaVista.com, only a week after google was blocked
Thank god it's only AtlaVista, and not Altavista.
When on earth will Slashdot editors start reading their posts ? Dont they know that every time a spelling mistake makes the front page, God kills a kitten ?!
-Dave
-- fighting the war, on drugs!
from: http://www.fofg.org/news/who_lost_china_internet.
great article.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
It seems it's not just blocking access to the sites but re-routing requests to Google to search engines of the government's choice. See Reuters article
Some relevant bits:
Some users in Beijing and Shanghai were redirected to Peking University's no-frills search site Tianwang, the little known cj888.com and the American-invested Baidu.com, among others. Users in Guangzhou were rerouted to the local portal 21cn.com.
So, perhaps the real goal here is to divert traffic to local search engines and increase their market share?
I am sure that out of the population of people in China that someone over there will come up with a way around the great firewall of China. These people go to school 6 days out of the week and are great mathmeticians and scholars (well, alot of them anyway). If the United States was to try and do something similiar wouldn't you think someone intuitive enough would figure out a way around it ? The only way to stop something is to simply take it away, and unless the chinese government goes door-to-door and confiscates everyone's system I think they will be ok in the long run. DL Delray Bch., FL
"The difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success"