Rebecca MacKinnon would be one to ask about Internet censorship in China - she 
studied it at the University of Hong Kong a few years ago, and is on the board 
of Global Voices Online. She's now a fellow at the New America Foundation. 

Bio/contact info: http://newamerica.net/user/303

On Aug 15, 2012, at 2:46 AM, "Eric S Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote:

> As far as I can tell, China doesn't "keyword-filter" in the sense most people 
> think of that phrase. That is, the Great Firewall isn't inspecting all the 
> text which flows through it, failing to deliver any web pages which have 
> offending words. The filtering is of two main types:
> 1)      any of thousands of domains or specific URLs are on a static 
> blacklist, and
> 2)      there is a small list of words which, if present in a URL, will 
> dynamically result in blocking.
> The blocking is generally manifested as a “connection reset” page which looks 
> to most users like “page not found.” China also poisons the DNS for some of 
> the domains it blocks, but this is (as far as I can tell) redundant because 
> of “1” above. (I guess it trips up some users whose VPN fails to tunnel DNS 
> requests.)
>                Sometimes (inconsistently), an attempt to see blocked content 
> results not only in the content not being delivered, but also a “punishment” 
> meted out to the offending user: all attempts to access servers outside China 
> fail for a period of between 5 and 10 minutes.
>                It’s “2” above which can be used to censor searches, since 
> unencrypted access to Google from inside China (or to Baidu from outside 
> China) puts the search terms into the URL. This censorship can easily be 
> neutralised by accessing Google via HTTPS.
>                There are persistent reports that China’s cybercensorship can 
> sometimes vary (a little) by ISP, but I’ve never seen this (I’ve only been to 
> ~13 of the 34 PRC-defined provinces), and Alkasir hasn’t ever detected any 
> such variations. (The internet in 3 of those provinces isn’t filtered: Hong 
> Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. Of course, even if the PRC thinks Taiwan’s a 
> province, Taiwan doesn’t think that.)
>  
> Best,
> Eric
>  
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [email protected] [mailto:liberationtech-
> > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Philipp Winter
> > Sent: Monday, 13 August 2012 16:15
> > To: Stanford tech list
> > Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Images of Blocking in Different Countries?
> >
> > On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 09:14:48PM -0700, Adam Fisk wrote:
> > > My understanding is that China just shows a blank page. Is that correct?
> >
> > That depends on the type of filtering. The keyword filtering infrastructure
> > forcefully terminates connections and depending on the browser you will get 
> > an
> > error message saying something like "The connection was reset".
> >
> > You can actually test it yourself by going to baidu.com and searching for
> > "falun".
> >
> > Philipp
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