Jul
22
2009
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
May
12
2008
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.
