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Help Test the Great Firewall of China
Posted by Ernest Miller on Thursday, August 29 @ 11:11:11 EDT Free Expression
Politechbot has posted the following letter from Ben Edelman [Ben, why didn't you send a copy of the letter to us? - Ed.] of Harvard's Berkman Center (Probing the Great Firewall of China, courtesy of the Berkman Ctr).

UPDATE: 1130ET
The New York Times (reg. req.) has a good article on Edelman's study of Saudi Arabia's firewall (Saudi Censorship of Web Ranges Far Beyond Tenets of Islam, Study Finds). Sites blocked include the "Women in American History" section of Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I are studying Internet filtering in countries worldwide, including restrictions on Web access in China. As in our prior testing of Saudi Arabia [1], there has been no publicly available master list of blocked sites. To assemble something approaching such a list, we have found ways to remotely test "twenty questions" style, asking about thousands of individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.
To help us broaden the number and types of pages tested and to provide the general public a means of finding out whether particular pages of interest are filtered, we have created a web page at which users can see whether a given site is likely accessible from China, and in doing so suggest that we test that site going forwards. We'll track all requests and retest them over time, reporting the results in our forthcoming report about Internet filtering in China. We're eager to see whether such "open source research" will end up finding a substantial number of blocked sites that, despite our best efforts, we neglected to think of asking about ourselves.
Those who are interested can test sites via
[Real-Time Testing of Internet Filtering in China]
[1] Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia
Be sure to check out the page that shows which sites have been found to be inaccessible (Inaccessible Sites Tested by Users of the Real-Time Testing System). The extensive list includes:
 
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Update: Google blocked & replaced - screenshots (Score: 1)
by BenEdelman on Tuesday, September 10 @ 18:57:39 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman.html
Since August 29, this system has reported that Google has been blocked. But beginning this past Sunday (and as Reuters and others now report), a request for www.google.com in China now produces not an ordinary block error message (which in China is "host not found" or your browser's equivalent) but instead the web page of another search engine.

Puzzled? Can't imagine what it's like? I threw together some quick screenshots of the situation.


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