Moonlight Blog » censorship

Google Maps in Moonlight BBS Censored by CCTV

William Long — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:10:11 +0000

　　GlobalVoices: China: Be aware! Google Earth leaks national secret

　　On May 6, famous blogger, William Long, was summoned by the Shenzhen Urban Planning and Land Supervision Division that a Google Earth picture indicating military facilities at www.moon-bbs.com is in suspect of leaking national secret. During the conversation, someone recorded the whole process with video.

　　Ogle Earth: China cracks down on user-generated maps

　　Having lived in China for just over a year, I’ve seen the progressive blocking of Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, YouTube and now most recently DropBox, so today should not have come as a surprise: User-generated maps and annotations are up next.

　　danwei: Dodgy CCTV journalism and map clampdown

　　The CCTV program ‘Topics in Focus’, ever happy to attack Internet companies, especially Google, participated in the purge by airing a program last night showing how a Chinese blogger was “revealing state secrets” by writing annotations on Google Earth.

　　South China Morning Post: Censored: the map website accused of leaking site of PLA HK barracks

　　”Everyone can freely mark information about buildings, even the houses of some top leaders and other so-called secrets, and share them at Google Earth; that’s why they want to control such behaviour,” he said.

Top Ten Most-Blocked Websites

William Long — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:06:20 +0000

OpenDNS offers quicker and more reliable Web browsing, but when you sign up for a free OpenDNS account, you can also get other features such as content/domain blocking and access to your DNS usage statistics. With then OpenDNS Domain Tagging tools, OpenDNS issued the following lists of the most-often blocked domains by parents, schools, and small businesses.

1. MySpace.com
2. Facebook.com
3. YouTube.com
4. Playboy.com
5. Ebay.com
6. Meebo.com
7. Friendster.com
8. Orkut.com
9. AdultFriendFinder.com
10. Espn.com

These are currently the ten most-blocked Web sites on home, school, and small business networks. Most of the blocked or blacklisted sites are about social networks, shopping, sex, religion and pop culture. This is not the same as China. In China, websites that talk about Porn, Tibet or Democracy are blocked.

Google Earth Layer Blocked in China

William Long — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:55:24 +0000

China appears to have blocked access to the popular internet maps service – Google Earth. Google Earth is a virtual globe program that displays satellite images of varying resolution of the Earth’s surface, allowing users to visually see things like cities and houses from a bird’s eye view.

Google’s map and satellite-photo service offered Chinese Internet users something they rarely could see: a bird’s-eye view of the secret compound of Zhongnanhai(located west of the Forbidden City), where the country’s top leaders live and work.

But in recent weeks, some layer of Google Earth(such as Google Earth Community) could not load and work in China. The Google Earth Community is an online forum which is dedicated to producing placemarks of interesting or educational perspectives. It may be found on the Google Earth webpage or under the Help section on the program itself. After downloading a placemark, it will automatically run Google Earth (if not opened), and fly to the area specified by the person who placed it. Once there, you can add it to your “My Places” by right clicking on the icon and selecting “Save to My Places”. Additionally, anyone can post a placemark for others to download; as long as you have an account.

When I run a proxy program, and open Google Earth again, the Google Earth Community layer is right there, everything is ok.

Then I close the proxy program and click the layer again, it’s tell me “Fetch of NetworkLink failed(http://mw1.google.com/): Connect Failed.”

That mean the Weather,Gallery and Global Awareness layer is blocked in China. Google Earth Community is in the Gallery layer, so it cannot be open again.

If the Chinese government is blocking its own citizens from seeing where their leaders live, whereas the rest of the world can see just fine, we’re talking some major institutional paranoia.

GoDaddy and SourceForge Blocked in China Again

William Long — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:41:21 +0000

GoDaddy, the world’s largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar, and SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China again after Beijing 2008 Olympic Games closed.

A screen copy of the command tracert shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

Update: SourceForge unblocked on Nov 2 2008, GoDaddy unblocked on Nov 10 2008.

China Internet Censorship After Olympic Games

William Long — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:35:58 +0000

As Beijing 2008 Olympic Games closed, the Internet censorship in China further tightened. Undeniably, this deterioration has affected and frustrated an increasing number of netizens in China.

lot’s of foreign websites have been blocked again after the Beijing Olympics drew to an end. Meanwhile, although other foreign websites remain approachable in China, some of their touchy contents are actually not accessible.

Want China Milk, Mr. Mandelson?

William Long — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:48:18 +0000

British politician Peter Mandelson, who was feted in China for drinking a glass of yoghurt on television in Beijing last week, has been rushed to hospital suffering from a kidney stone.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson drinks a Beijing-branded yogurt at a press conference in the Chinese capital on Friday September 26, 2008. Mandelson said he was confident of Chinese dairy products despite the recent tainted milk scandal. On October 6, Peter Mandelson is to have a kidney stone removed after attending the first meeting of Gordon Brown’s economic war council.

Thousands of babies across China have suffered kidney stones after drinking formula milk mixed with the industrial plastic melamine.

Also, if you want to get an idea of how the Chinese government is handling the post-scandal media since the milk powder contamination was revealed, here are instructions reportedly from the propaganda bureau on how to report the incident:

Recently, the Sanlu mild powder contamination story attracted a lot of attention on the Internet. Now we are issuing some requirements for managing online news publishing: 1. Strictly standardize news sources, only use dispatches from Xinhua, People’s Daily and other central media outlets. 2. Do not make any headlines or features on this topic. Emphasize the government’s handling of the crisis and progress, and the care given to the babies by hospitals and other care providers. 3. Forums and blogs should not recommend this topic, not put it on the top of their pages, and the atmosphere and number of threads in the forums should be monitored and controlled. 4. Firmly block and delete information and posts that criticize the Party, the government, instigate petitioning and spread rumors. 5. Mobilize online commentators to guide the opinions. The general guidance should be based on information released by the Ministry of Health, and lead online users to support the Party and the government, convey the effectiveness of the efforts by concerned agencies.

Boycott China Product If You Really Love China

William Long — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:18:41 +0000

My blog entry today on a certain dairy poisoning case was deleted by request of a certain company… I feel that this very company’s PR tactics are really, really neat. Isn’t this supposed to be the case with best PR practises in China? That is — bind the interests of the company and the government, use the government to control your PR, and remove all posts that do not reflect well upon you. What kind of a “rhetoric advantage” this is! This way, they’ll keep on drinking what you make, and suddenly vanish into graves — just like that, out of the blue.

The greatest problem in China is that we have too many people who have knowledge and independent thought, if all these people are dead, we don’t have anymore problem.

There is hearsay there the enterprise spent 3 million yuans in Baidu search engine, it seems that we have underestimated its power, they only need to spend half the amount to push the government’s PR machine.

Remember: if you really love China, never buy anything made in China.

GoDaddy Unblocked in China

William Long — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:31:42 +0000

After a week hiatus, GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name host, is back online in China.

According to my early report, GoDaddy.com was blocked during the Olympics to prevent Chinese nationals from registering domain names after the names of Chinese athletes who won (Gold, Silver or Bronze) in the Olympics. The Chinese government has a policy of protecting famous names from being registered and allows only the owner the right to register it as his/her domain name.

Since GoDaddy has suspend lots of Chinese human rights sites without warning last year, Isaac Mao think GoDaddy “It deserved! No tears” — The hidden rules in China will change all the time. Just like Godaddy’s case, any cases can become your nightmare whether it’s an event, a people’s name, or a domain name. And the worst thing you can never recover is that you lost the support from users. There’s only one government one business can please today or tomorrow, but there are millions of users one can’t be fooled.

GoDaddy Blocked in China

William Long — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:15:00 +0000

GoDaddy, the largest ICANN-accredited domain registrar in the world, appears to blocked in Mainland China by the evil Net Nanny before the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games came to a close. A screen copy of the command “tracert www.godaddy.com” shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China’s sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country’s Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China’s Olympic team prior to the Games opening on Aug. 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names any more, they were forced to give it to the medalist “as a gift”.

The person that already had domain name hold up to now abandons a domain name of player of Olympic Games of China. If they donot want to abandon the domain, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) will force to retrieve the domain. But if the domain name is register outside China, such as in GoDaddy.com, the CNNIC can not retrieve that domain.

Now the currently largest Internet domain registrar in the world is blocking in China, the most likely explanation is, CNNIC do not want any Chinese hold a domain name of country’s Olympic gold medal-winning athletes by blocking GoDaddy registrar. When the people in China can not visit GoDaddy and register domain outside China, so CNNIC can protect the domain names more easy.

GoDaddy has come under heavy criticism for suspending Chinese human rights sites without warning on August 17, 2007.

Websites Unblocked in China

William Long — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:44:06 +0000

It seems that the Chinese Wikipedia is unblocked in China now. The unblocking of the Chinese Wikipedia in China has probably been extended to cover the whole of China. Chinese users have direct access Chinese Wikipedia from very different corners of the country.

Not only with Chinese Wikipedia, this unblocking also looks like this was part of a broader opening up – mainlanders now have access to a lot of sites. Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked.

Moonlight Blog » censorship

Google Maps in Moonlight BBS Censored by CCTV

Related posts

Top Ten Most-Blocked Websites

Related posts

Google Earth Layer Blocked in China

Related posts

GoDaddy and SourceForge Blocked in China Again

Related posts

China Internet Censorship After Olympic Games

Related posts

Want China Milk, Mr. Mandelson?

Related posts

Boycott China Product If You Really Love China

Related posts

GoDaddy Unblocked in China

Related posts

GoDaddy Blocked in China

Related posts

Websites Unblocked in China

Western media

Hong Kong media

Taiwan media

NGOs

Related posts