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The Great Firewall of China - Samples of Filtered Sites

Posted by timothy on from the populism dept.

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."

4 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Speaking of censorware... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is what happened to the Censorware Project (censorware.org), for anyone wondering why the domain name has changed.

  2. Historical rationale for blocking the website... by Sheetrock · · Score: 5, Interesting
    According to ancient Chinese tradition, a crayfish (their word for lobster) symbolises a time of rebirth and enlightenment. A period piece from the 6th century AD, or their Han dynasty, demonstrate a crayfish circling the earth, holding the Moon ('pearl' in their language) and Sun ('golden pea') in the sky, with a philosopher riding its back. It's relatively like our Easter Bunny, except without the religious connotations.

    From this perspective, I hope you can understand why they might find the idea of plunging a 'red' lobster into a tank of boiling water to be as offensive as any pornography our country has to offer.

    --

    Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
    -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.




  3. Red Mountain Ski/RedHorse Records also blocked by burgburgburg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quick perusal of the list showed that www.ski-red.com is also blocked, as is www.redhorserecords.com. Perhaps they are blocking sites that have red as a URL component.

  4. Is this meaningful? by A+non+moose+cow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (the following is a slightly modified email that I sent to the people who did the study. I did get a response, but I will not post it since I didn't ask for permission.)

    ******
    It occured to me that this is only interesting because of the very large number of potentially affected people. If the same study was done about filtering in the country of, say, Morocco, I probably would not have bothered to read it. As such, I feel that the analysis sort of begs the question. How many people in China actually have Internet access, and what parts of the society are they in?

    If only 1% of the country uses the Web on a regular basis, and 90% of those are "well to do", then the filtering has much less significance because the potential impact of Internet access is already minimalized.

    (I have made the assumption that "well to do" citizens are less likely to want to modify the status quo, meaning that Web content would have minimal impact on their actions, filtered or not.)

    Does an increase in filtering correalate in any way to an increase in Chinese Internet users? ...Or perhaps to an increase of users in a particular layer of Chinese society?
    ******

    (The gist of the response was that the study was not concerned with any implications of the filtering, just the filtering itself.)