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Tell HN: Guess what Baidu and Yahoo China have already censored?
45 points by profquail on Jan 13, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments
Step #1: Visit www.baidu.com or cn.yahoo.com.

Step #2: Search for Google or blogspot.com. Note that both work.

Step #3: Now search for google.blogspot.com.

Step #4: Enjoy your Baidu lockout. You should be able to search again in 5-10 minutes, I haven't timed the duration exactly.

Source: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1508260&cid=30746302




Had never been to Baidu.com before. Wonder where they got their inspiration for that UI...


When I was working at Google in 2007 the DNS in China would redirect Google to Baidu every now and then. Can't point fingers at who was making the changes... but it usually coincided with the U.S. doing something China didn't like. Talk about irritating.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me if China blocked Google all together, made a clone of Google's UI, and powered searches on Google through Baidu.


Well, since we control the root servers maybe we can fight fire with fire and have some fun with China. We could randomly allow innocent (to the Chinese govt) sites to be redirected to free speech and human rights activist sites.


Making the DNS even more unreliable isn't good for anyone. Also, you're talking about returning an IP that is probably blocked by GFW anyways. So instead of getting the web page for the "innocent (to the Chinese govt)" website, the end user just gets a TCP RST.


I was joking (mostly), but if we did it I imagine we'd go all the way and host the censored content, changing IPs faster than they could block. They would have to wall us off completely to their people, which is exactly what we'd want.


Umm, Hi yahoo

http://web.archive.org/web/20020331055621/http://www.baidu.c...


Note that you'll also get blocked out if you type in:

   http://poorlytyped.blogspot.com/2010/01/haskell-ray-tracing-parallel.html
from which one can conclude that the Chinese are being kept in the dark from Haskell's enlightenment.

All blogspot websites have been blocked for at least the 6 months that I've been here, and I doubt that Baidu has anything to do with it. There's nothing new here. There's also a ton of workarounds. I just use vtunnel.com.


I am astounded. The server actually dropped my connection when I tried searching for it!


I believe this is one of the main techniques of the Great Firewall -- once it detects a connection is disfavored, inject a few spoofed packets to break the connection. It's cheaper than being a full participant in the stream.


google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre.

So the government may block access to google.cn if it hasn't already.


Actually, if you search for "Tiananmen" you do still get filtered results.

Searching "Tianamen" (note the missing "n") is not filtered, though. I wonder if this was a purposeful loophole in Google's filtering, or an engineering mistake.

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&sa=1... http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&sa=1...


I noticed that too yesterday when trying to see if google.cn was in fact uncensored and mistyped it "tienanmen".


google.cn has already unfiltered results concerning the Tiananmen massacre

Are you claiming google.cn has already changed their filtering though? Just fwiw, from what I understand you would need to use a Chinese IP address if you wanted to properly verify that.


Actually, google.cn filtered results for everyone before - so yes, it's possible they've only disabled filtering for foreign IPs, but I fail to see why they would.


I am located in China. I can confirm you that i see the uncensored results when searching for images with "Tienamen"

http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&newwind...

Screenshot : http://hotelcostantiga.com/specials/censor.jpg


Be careful. You may be next.


Further proof : http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&um=1&newwind...

Screenshot : http://hotelcostantiga.com/specials/censor2.jpg


That is misspelt though; is that new or has that always been uncensored.

The correct spelling IS censored.

I know when I tried in the past (when it first was censored) miss-spellings were still not filtered.


I am located in Shenzhen, Popular Republic of China, I am on a 3G China Mobile connection. This connection does not even let you use a VPN, for getting rid of the censorship. I have noticed though that my adsl works with a VPN in USA, so that way i am able to access blogspot, but still not able to watch youtube or use twitter/facebook.


Wait seriously? They're giving that big a finger to China?


Examples:

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=fal...

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=tiananmen+square+...


No, it's the just the mass illusion from westerners for spelling "TianAnMen" wrong.


I tried it and got locked out. But if you remove "www" completely or replace it with "www1", you're back in.


It doesn't matter, because you cannot access blogspot from china. Even the google official blogs, you can't access. Even state.gov. And you know what ? during the days Obama was here in China, the NyTimes was censored, and they did not unblock it until recently. And it is the Great Firewall blocking everything. Google is beyond this. They can do nothing. The PRC Committee controls this. What a shame




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