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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.

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.

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.

Western media

Hong Kong media

Taiwan media

NGOs

SourceForge Unblocked in China

William Long — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:44:34 +0000

After a month hiatus, SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, is again accessible from China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Chinese authorities has never admitted to blocking access to SourceForge, the only way for people in China to reach the site was by using a proxy server based outside of the country. There has been also no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked, but China unblocked it anyway. The Chinese authorities had promised to give foreign journalists more freedom in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic Games.

China censors internet content that it finds objectionable, usually political material and occasionally pornography. The SourceForge blocking may be related to the author of SourceForge’s anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games. China programmers needs SourceForge, and SourceForge is a professional technology website without political material. Now, SourceForge has been unblocked in China, Chinese programmers should enjoy SourceForge while it’s available because we may never know when it will disappear.

SourceForge Blocked In China

William Long — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:49:46 +0000

SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. A screen copy of the command “tracert www.sourceforge.net” shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.

The current blocking may be related to the recent anti-China protests of Beijing Olympic Games, which began on 8 August in Beijing. Some days before, the author of a very popular free source code editor in SourceForge named Notepad++ start to boycott Beijing 2008, he said that the action is not against Chinese people, but against Chinese government’s repression in 2008 Tibetan unrest. The boycotting is surely a politic issue, but refers to human rights problems in China.

Is that the reason of this blocking? Chinese authorities regularly blocks access to websites that it finds objectionable, including those dealing with politically sensitive subjects. That’s what we have been. Blocked.

Internet Censorship In Chinese Cyberspace

William Long — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:33:41 +0000

China’s Internet filtering regime (the Great FireWall) is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world. The internet censorship in Chinese cyberspace is pervasive, sophisticated, andeffective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control.

The Great FireWall is unparalleled anywhere in the world and is an insult to the spirit of online freedom, the Chinese authorities use it blocking thousands of websites and censoring online news.

Because of Chinese government have deployed colossal human and financial resources to obstruct online free expression. Chinese news websites and blogs have been brought under the editorial control of the propaganda apparatus at both the national and local levels.

The use of the Internet keeps growing in China. The country now has more than 160 million Internet users and at least 1.3 million websites. But the Internet’s promise of free expression and information has been nipped in the bud by the Chinese government’s online censorship and surveillance system. The Govermment is afraid of reign, they want to control all of the society.

In my early report, the Chinese authorities blocks more than thousand of dedicated server in HeNan and GuangDong without any explanation, Also they use the Greate FireWall to blocks some great website like FeedBurner,Blogspot,Youtube and Flickr, prevent people to meet the unwanted material.

The Chinese authorities have a longstanding set of policies restricting the information to which citizens are exposed, and that which they may themselves publicly say. The Internet poses a new challenge to such censorship, both because of the sheer breadth of content typically available, and because sources of content are so often remote from Chinese jurisdiction, and thus much more difficult to penalize for breaching restrictions on permissible materials. There is some evidence that the government has attempted to prevent the spread of unwanted material by preventing the spread of the Internet itself, but a concomitant desire to capture the economic benefits of networked computing has led to a variety of strategies to split the difference.

For example, the government might encourage Internet access through cybercafes rather than in private spaces so that customers’ surfing can be physically monitored by others in the cafe. As a technical matter, anecdotal reports have described a shifting set of barriers to surfing the web from Chinese points of access — sites that are reported unavailable or domain names that are unknown to the system or that lead to unexpected destinations, individual pages that are blocked, and the use of search keywords that results in temporary limits to further searches.

The Great FireWall was bought from Cisco Inc. , the technologies that Cisco sold to China for backbone routing purposes have packet filtering capability, allowing the routers to filter bi-directionally at thepacket level and to implement up to 750,000 different filtering rules. These systems are designed to combat various Internet attacks, including Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and the spread of worms andviruses. These same techniques can beapplied to block political content. The particular technique described in Cisco Systems to be Key Supplier for Building China’s Nation-Wide IP Backbone. Also, China regularly blocks access to Web sites that it finds objectionable, including those dealing with politically sensitive subjects.

Activists and human rights organizations have for years charged Cisco and other Westerncorporations with actively assisting China in developing censorship and surveillance systems. Companies such as Microsoft and Cisco respond to these charges by suggesting that they simplysell the technology to China; thus, they cannot and should not control how their customers use what theyhave bought.

Google Blogspot And Google Pages Unblocked In China

William Long — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:27:21 +0000

The free blog hosting services Google Blogspot and the free homepage hosting Google Pages are accessible in China today.

Some days before, Google BlogSpot is blocked again after the the 17th Party Congress finished in BeiJing , but after YouTube unblocked, the Google Blogspot and Google Pages both unblocked now, that surprise me, those blocking are extremely arbitrary.

Hope that is not temporary unblocked.

Update: Google Blogger(Blogspot) was blocked in China again a week ago.

How To Visit Google BlogSpot In China

William Long — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 14:38:17 +0000

Most efforts(using proxy or editing hosts file, for example) to bypass The Wall can work, . I’m going to write 2 methods dedicated for blogspot.

The easier way is to use pkblogs, who provides accesss to blogs “blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China”. But I think pkblogs itself may be blocked soon.

The more technical way (by Dance In The Dark) is to assign “*.blogspot.com” to an alternative IP address which is not banned yet, by configuring proxy settings of Firefox with following steps:

Create a new text file and write the following codes

function FindProxyForURL(url,host){
if(dnsDomainIs(host, ".blogspot.com")){
  return "PROXY 72.14.219.190:80";
}
}

Save it as C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\local\proxy.pac
In Firefox, open Tools(menu)->Options(menu)->Advanced(tab)->Network(tab)->Connect, Settings(button)->Automatically Proxy Configuration URL(box), enter:

file:///C:/Program%20Files/Mozilla%20Firefox/local/proxy.pac
Say OK to close all dialogs. Now you can try someone.blogspot.com

Problems:

The IP we used here 72.14.219.190 may be banned in the future, you will need to google for new solutions at that time.
IE is also known to support auto proxy configuration, but I can’t get it work. (via)

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