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Yesterday afternoon, Shanghaiist noticed on its Twitter stream that some China-based users were having problems accessing the newly redesigned (wonderful in fact) Danwei site. Blocked blogger, The Weifeng Radish, noted it can only be accessed by an anonymising proxy. Prolific Shanghai blogger and journalist Fons Tuinstra over at The China Herald popped out a post musing about their situation.
What I think is happening that the filter systems has been partly automated and triggers off an IP-block when it notices a "banned" word. At the current frontpage I see for example both the T-word and the c-word in their recently introduced news aggregator. Wonder whether it will be over again tomorrow.
Last night, Shanghaiist approached Jeremy from Danwei for a comment, and we got a straight-bat response...
We do not know what has happened but are working to resolve the situation.
At the time of writing this morning, Danwei's site is still down.
So what has happened to Danwei's site? When Shanghaiist uses an anonymous proxy to access Danwei, there's nothing obvious like F*G or T*ianamen being talked about. Is it really like Fons suggests, and the wrong word triggered the clamp down? We're not sure. The recent off-again, on-again fiasco with Blogspot is a good example on how temperamental China's Net Nanny can be. The askew, cynical conspiracy theorist that lurks somewhere in the back of Shanghaiist's psyche is bleating that Danwei shouldn't have kept raising the hands-off treatment that the Australian press have taken on when it comes to Wendi Deng. I'm sure her husband Rupert has some friends somewhere on the internet that can press suspend buttons. According to Slate Magazine, there's a few reasons why Rupert can't be trusted.
UPDATE: May 12th
This morning, Danwei is now accessible from Shanghai without using a proxy.
add to stumble upon
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post to facebook
i reckon there's two kinds of filtering going on in these parts...
one is that which Fons describes - this was investigated by the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (published about a year ago), and involves on-the-fly content scanning, before TCP RST (reset) packets are sent to bring down the connection. in this case, the inaccessible site becomes available again after a time-out period. of course, if the offending keywords are still present on subsequent page requests, the cycle repeats.
but i think there's also a scarier type of 'blanket' banning (though i've not made any effort to prove this). this isn't transient and isn't based on content of pages requested. this method also makes use of RST packets. i think this is what Jeremy and co. might currently be experiencing. not nice. the IP address of their server is not even returning ICMP (ping) packets sent from my computer (Shanghai) but it will return them when sent from Hong Kong.
We're migrating to a new server right now, so things should be back to normal in a few hours, or tomorrow morning at the latest.
Don't tell Wendi.
--Joel
There is a mention of me li tare e weakly, perhaps mentioning such topics triggers new blocks.
Should be cleared up now. Thanks for your concern.
nanhe: the military weekly link was added after the block.
As of this morning, Danwei can be accessed from Shanghai without using an anonymising proxy.
-Tim
i use TOR on firefox to get thru the 'great firew*ll', but it's very frustrating to keep turning the TOR function on and off because i can never tell when/if a website is blocked.
i blogged about ti*n*nmen squ*re every year. apparently, many people in china got to my 2006 entry (in chinese) if they googled 1989.6.4 (without using a proxy) when blogspot wasn't blocked.