The Dark Visitor

This is starting to get boring…

Lawyers for Cybersitter, the company that claims its intellectual property was ripped off by PRC companies that developed the green dam youth escort in home censorware are now claiming that they have been targeted in spear phishing style attacks.  Maybe the PRC companies didn’t get all of the code the first time.

Article here – linked from Danwei (one of my favorite China sites).

Now for a break from the Adobe zero day stream…

The censors in the PRC are now apparently blocking searches and taking down articles related to a recent bribery scandal over a multi-million dollar contract in Namibia.  The censors at baidu.cn got a little ambitious and briefly blocked any searches that contain the word Namibia so any search was filtered rather than just results that contained information about the scandal.  As of this post, it appears that baidu.cn searches for “纳米比亚” work just fine without any error message – news about the scandal still does not appear however.  Maybe next they will reach into Chinese Kindles to delete anything related to Namibia.

baidu.cn briefly blocked searches for 纳米比亚 (namibia)

Source: Open Net Initiative:  http://opennet.net/blog/2009/07/no-more-namibia-china-blocks-search-results-entire-country

On May 1, a zip file was posted to wikileaks.org that contained several internal files that appear to be from Baidu.cn, the most popular search engine in the PRC.  There is an html file within the zip that contains several sections with a list of key phrases that will cause the search engine to filter the results.  Here is an automated translation of each category (after the jump):

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The State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) and Central Propaganda Department, along with various local areas, are in the process of reviewing online mapping and geographical information websites to determine if they present a threat to national security.

According to the report, Chinese citizen’s territorial consciousness needed to be strengthened, the mapping marketplace required order and online “problematic maps” needed to be decreased.

The SBSM used technical methods to carry out an internet search and discovered there were 15,648 mapping sites.  Among these, 14,760 published maps and 888 provided geographical information services.  According to incomplete statistics, there were actually over 41,000 such sites, of which 8% posed a problem.

An SMSM spokesman said that despite the illegal actions of online mapping and geographical survey services, the “management” work had obtained tangible results but that problems and deficiencies still remained.  Online mapping presented a serious political problem and there was a high-degree of danger in revealing secrets.

Blah, blah, blah…the state would continue to carry out this work and develop a state approved map, available to all.

When China announced a crackdown on porn sites, you would have thought the internet exploded.  Daily updates on the number of porn sites shut down.  Now they come for maps…crickets.

The Chinese national soccer team is in Tehran to play a friendly game against the local boys.  However, all is not well.

During their downtime, the Chinese team likes to get online to see what is happening back home.  The hotel has wireless broadband in the rooms but it costs USD $5 per hour to surf.  The business center in the lobby also has access but that costs USD $4 per hour.

The team members decide to pay the price and use their laptops in the room only to discover that they can’t access Chinese websites such as Sina, Sohu and Netease.  They inquire and find out sure enough, Iranian authorities have them blocked.

James Fallows was interviewed in a Network World article today about his articles on the Great Firewall of China.  We blogged about the GFW previously.  From the article:

When it comes to the Internet, this haziness about just what is and is not permissible has two implications. At a purely technical level, it makes it harder to reverse-engineer the firewall’s filters. One day, you can reach all pages at the BBC. The next day they’re blocked. If you’re trying to game out the system, you’re stymied. And at a social level, it makes it hard for people to be sure that they’re ever operating in a truly safe zone, since the rules of enforcement might shift tomorrow.

FYI:  www.thedarkvisitor.com has been GFW’d since January of this year.  We still get occasional hits from the mainland though.  Mostly from English language browsers – probably in hotels.

I first became interested in Internet censorship after hearing Roger Dingledine talk about TOR and Kenneth Geers’  talk “Greetz from Room 101 (PDF)” at DEFCON XV.

Today I noticed that we haven’t had any visitors from China since January 17th.  I assumed the worst – that the blog is blocked by the infamous great firewall.  I checked out http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html and thedarkvisitor.com does indeed appear to be blocked by URL filters.  The DNS name resolves correctly but the web request is never answered.  Censorship in the PRC is decentralized but our site appears to be blocked in all of the cities that this test is available for.  I will be conducting some more testing using TOR later this evening.  I’m not sure I understand why the site would have been blocked since it is not the least bit critical of the CCP or the PRC government and we don’t have any posts about taboo subjects.  There are a couple of posts that make light of Taiwan independence but I wouldn’t guess that would be enough to cause someone to recommend the site be blocked at a national level.  I would be very interested in hearing any readers’ thoughts on this issue of censorship in China.   UPDATE - I used a number of open proxies in China and all returned a 404 when thedarkvisitor.com was requested while other US websites loaded fine.