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DuckDuckGo Now Blocked In China
wabrandsma sends this news from Tech In Asia:
Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo is now blocked in China. On Sunday DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg confirmed to Tech in Asia that the team has noticed the blockage in China on Twitter. DuckDuckGo had been working fine in mainland China since its inception, aside from the occasional 'connection reset' experienced when accessing many overseas websites from within the country. But now the search engine is totally blocked in China. ... [T]he GreatFire index of blocked sites suggest that DuckDuckGo got whacked on September 4. DuckDuckGo joins Google in being censored and blocked in the nation. Google, after years of being throttled by China's Great Firewall since the web giant turned off its mainland China servers in 2010, was finally blocked totally in June this year.
duckduckgo is my favorite search engine. theirs is the only site that has a clearly written privacy policy. also, with ios8, ddg is now a default option in safari which I appreciate.
People searching from China without Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, etc should be banned from reaching their 'approved' results in the U.S.
Censoring the internet is becoming so crucial for the political control of massive states that virtually all countries on the planet practice it in some manner.
As a Chinese (well, Hong Konger, but frequently visiting the mainland) Bing is not blocked in China. But it redirect to bing.cn, which is filtered by the government.
I thought the Chinese loved duck.
....and a dash of irony and a twist of silly symbolic gesturing. Its a pictogram like a Chinese character delivered from the government of Chinese characters. Its a quaint gesture of authority that is a very effective at getting our attention, but ultimately completely ineffective of meaningful results. They may delay, but they will not be successful at censoring reality from the appropriate or prescribed Chinese social conscious. I always liked the Peking Duck....sorry to see it duck duck Go.
When countries like China (and North Korea, Middle Eastern countries, etc) start blocking something, it is a clear indication the authors have been doing a very good job. Better than a hundred reviews. I will switch to duckduckgo today.
The firewall uses DNS Poisoning for starters. Domains like www.google.com and mail.google.com resolve to incorrect IPs.
Then known Google IPs are blocked.
And yes, Google Fonts is therefore blocked so custom fonts don't show up on websites.
Google's CDN is blocked so if websites load jQuery through www.googleapis.com, it won't load.
Sysadmins for big companies have access to VPNs. The Chinese government is okay with breaching the firewall for the sake of making money. Corporations usually have access to rather expensive and approved VPN connections (such as the place I work for). They allow you to access e.g. Facebook and the IP also shows up as China based. My personal VPN at home is illegal, much much cheaper and usually shows a US based IP.
Most Sysadmins don't speak much English though, but there are many Chinese IT books available. They're MUCH cheaper than books in the US, although some are just direct translations from the English Help file to Chinese.
Last time I was in mainland China (about 2 years ago) I was able to use google.hk -- it wasn't blocked outright. However, it did appear to be throttled in some way. So searches took ages and it was a pain in the ass. One my Chinese friends said the she always used google.hk, even though it was slow, because she preferred the search results. So at least at the time, it was usable in practice. Also, I heard that the more tech savvy people in China know how to bypass the firewall. I don't know the details so can't verify, but apparently it's quite common knowledge.
soylentnews.org
The philosophy is quite different.
They don't care if you a few people circumvent the GFW. They care if people start spreading the truth, or what the CCP calls "rumors". I.e. if you try to get other Chinese to act against the government's interests. As long as you shut up, you're safe.
With this in mind, the Chinese firewall was never designed to stop everyone. It just makes it difficult enough for the average Chinese to not bother circumventing it and getting "stupid" ideas. And even then, if you don't act on those ideas, no problem!