The Great Firewall of China - Samples of Filtered Sites

Loligo writes "Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has released a study listing some of the sites filtered by Chinese internet connections. Sites about Taiwan are maybe understandable, but Red Lobster?" We've mentioned the ongoing Berkman study before; one of their interesting findings is that the list of blocked sites is a moving target, and some sites are blocked only intermittently. Here are summaries from The New York Times and MSNBC, by way of The Censorware Project. Update: 12/04 21:03 GMT by T : Seth Finkelstein points to his report "Searching Through the Great Firewall of China," which "describes a simple technique which can be used with some search engines to bypass censorware bans on searching for forbidden words. Particular emphasis is placed on the situation of the Great Firewall Of China."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Mnemia]

I think that was just poor wording on the part of the submitter. A better way to put it would be 'unsurprising' and I'm pretty sure that's what he meant based on the context.

Re:Huh?

[L. VeGas]

I suspect you don't know what "understandable" means. To help you out, "understandable" means you "understand" why they did it.

geez

also...

[night_flyer]

I submitted this earlier (and it was rejected), but it seems two Chinese citizens were executed for experssing their opinions on the internet, while countless others have been detained and tortured, the Chinese wont hear about it though because its on a blocked site.

here is more information on Chinas control

Since its slashdotted, Google cache

[JJAnon]

here.

Re:big deal

[Traicovn]

Mirror of sites that are blocked is up at http://ra.msstate.edu/~naw4/chinafire.html sans graphics.

Re:Other sites

[WWWWolf]

Sourceforge? ...
Why do these sites need to be blocked?

Sourceforge probably hosts software that could be used to bypass such filters. But most importantly, they host the development of Freenet, a thorn in web censor's side =)

Re:Huh?

[Planesdragon]

Finally, I imagine I'll add you to my "enemies list" (hate that term - it's just a kill file) here at slashdot.

1: it's "foes list" not "enemies." All the "dot" settings start with an F. (Friend/Fan/Foe/Freak)

2: It's not a killfile. It's a non-anonymous automatic user-indictaed moderation setting with notification of jounrals of those you add to the "friend" list. You can set whatever value you want for it in your settings.

Summary of Censorware Drama

[Sanity]

Michael Sims, Slashdot editor, and Seth Finkelstein both worked on the Censorware project. One day Sims got into some kind of bitch-fight with Finkelstein, the subject of that fight isn't even relevant any more. Sims hijacked the Censorware website - for which he happened to own the domain name. He shut it down, and actively tried to prevent anyone from mirroring the information on it.

Even if you ignore what happened before, the current situation is that the Censorware project had to start up a new site at censorware.net, and Sims is using the original URL - censorware.org, as a rant page against Finkelstein.

Sims admits at the top of this page that many people visiting it will be hoping to find information pertaining to censorship. However, rather than do what most people who claim to be concerned about censorship would do (allow the visitor to get the information they are looking for), he just rants on about Finkelstein.

Seemingly, for Sims - ego and flaming Finkelstein gets a higher priority than educating people about censorship. Don't take my word for it, visit censorware.org and see for yourself.

Oh, also - be warned. Sims is known to use his Slashdot editor status to remove these discussion threads, claiming they are off-topic (he can't really use that excuse here).