I'll be damned. I didn't think their censorship tech was that subtle; everything I've seen here in the past has just been blocking at the domain level. Shutting down all of Blogspot instead of just the odd Blogspot blog that they don't agree with, for example.
I was wrong, though. I can personally confirm that searching for zh.wikipedia.org on English-language Google will break Google for at least a couple of minutes.
That is... unfortunate.
When you access a blocked page in China, it just looks like the web site doesn't exist. 404 error.
What's more, we really do have outages that shut off access to large swaths of the foreign internet for a couple of minutes/hours/days.
Sometimes I have to fire up TOR to tell the difference between censorship and a plain old DNS problem or server failure.
No question that the government stooge in question was either a liar or a fool, but it is at least plausible to me that he just didn't know any better. He wouldn't be the only Chinese citizen blissfully unaware that his internet was censored. I've personally enlightened more than a few.
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I'll be damned. I didn't think their censorship tech was that subtle; everything I've seen here in the past has just been blocking at the domain level. Shutting down all of Blogspot instead of just the odd Blogspot blog that they don't agree with, for example. I was wrong, though. I can personally confirm that searching for zh.wikipedia.org on English-language Google will break Google for at least a couple of minutes. That is... unfortunate.
When you access a blocked page in China, it just looks like the web site doesn't exist. 404 error.
What's more, we really do have outages that shut off access to large swaths of the foreign internet for a couple of minutes/hours/days.
Sometimes I have to fire up TOR to tell the difference between censorship and a plain old DNS problem or server failure.
No question that the government stooge in question was either a liar or a fool, but it is at least plausible to me that he just didn't know any better. He wouldn't be the only Chinese citizen blissfully unaware that his internet was censored. I've personally enlightened more than a few.