Jan 21 2008
BLOCKED
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.
