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New Compilation of Banned Chinese Search-Terms Reveals Curiosities
An anonymous reader writes Canada's Citizen Lab has compiled data from various research projects around the world in an attempt to create a manageable Github repository of government-banned Chinese keywords in internet search terms and which may appear in Chinese websites. Until now the study of such terms has proved problematic due to disparate research methods and publishing formats. A publicly available online spreadsheet which CCL have provided to demonstrate the project gives an interesting insight into the reactive and eccentric nature of the Great Blacklist of China, as far as outside research can deduce. Aside from the inevitable column listings of dissidents and references to government officials and the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, search terms as basic as "system" and "human body" appear to be blocked.
There's a secret blacklist in the UK called Cleanfeed - it's supposed to be for child porn, but the contents of the list is a closely guarded secret, and it's already known from an incident where Wikipedia was briefly blocked by mistake that many ISPs will spoof a 404 message rather than reveal the reason for the block, so it's impossible to say how many non-child-porn pages are blocked.
TFA is the worst website design I've seen in several months. Here is the link to the original source, which is a bit easier to read.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."