Posted 2:14 AM by Jian Shuo

The Great Firewall of China

There is a lot of discussion about what the Internet filter looks like in China.

First, there are a handful of websites that cannot be accessed. If you type in "BBC.com" in your browser, it will return "DNS Error." It seems that "bbc.com" does not exist at all. The list of banned websites is long and includes some famous sites like Wenxuecity.com (a Chinese website by overseas Chinese). Previously, the Google ban raised a lot of attention about China's Internet situation. Now the ban has been lifted, but the cache function still does not work---it simply returns "DNS Error."

Second, the word filter works perfectly. If you search for sensitive terms like "Jiang Ze Min" in Google, you are disconnected immediately from the network. You are still connected to the network, or the dialup still remains active, but the browser returns "DNS error" for any site you try to visit. The network will resume after about 5 minutes automatically. This is a great technology I would say---but it is used in the wrong place. All ISPs are required to follow this policy, but different ISPs vary in how they do it. For example, for some dialup connections, it only bans the site for which you enter sensitive queries. I was posting about the (Communist) Party at Tiger Cafe before, but I was also disconnected from the network. I tried for some time until I directly used a U.S. connection. I don't like this.