I have never heard that the Tor website http://tor.eff.org/ has been blocked in China, nor any URLs under that website. It is currently not blocked by my ISP in Beijing, nor was it blocked by my ISP in Shandong province when I lived there.
I was, however, referring to the Tor service itself, not the website, though I did not make that clear. The psiphon website, on the other hand, http://psiphon.civisec.org/ has been blocked, at least by my ISP in Beijing, but the psiphon service has not been and most likely could not be effectively blocked without blocking all encrypted tunnels since the IP addresses of psiphon servers do not have to be publicly known. Tor on the other hand could be blocked without blocking encrypted tunnels by simply blocking the IP addresses of Tor servers, since the IP addresses of Tor servers are and essentially must be publicly known, and furthermore this is exactly how websites are currently being blocked in China, ie., the IP address of the server they are hosted on is blocked. So from the point of view of the Chinese firewall, there really would be no difference between blocking an IP address serving up a website and blocking an IP address routing Tor requests. I think it is very interesting in and of itself that the main Tor website http://tor.eff.org/ has not been blocked. Perhaps it's the Great Firewall's way of saying, "We are knowingly allowing this backdoor." Kevin S. On 1/15/07, John Kimble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 1/14/07, Kevin Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Why hasn't Tor been blocked in China already? > It depends on what you're referring to - the Tor website, or the Tor service itself. As far as I know, URLs under http://tor.eff.org/ are blocked, just like http://psiphon.civisec.org/ and http://www.torrify.com/ . There may be inter-province or even inter-ISP differences though. If you're referring to the services themselves, neither (Tor or Psiphon) are blocked. If you can get Tor (or Torpark for that matter) to initialise in the first place, or if you already have someone on the outside offering you a Psiphon link, they will just keep running. I guess that's because China is, for now, focusing solely on blocking websites (i.e. readable material served over HTTP). They haven't started worrying about encrypted tunnels yet. - John
