Shanghaiist: Danwei blocked?

mmonk

Sun, 13 May 2007 23:20:48 +0800

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.

tim

Sat, 12 May 2007 11:03:59 +0800

As of this morning, Danwei can be accessed from Shanghai without using an anonymising proxy. -Tim

zhwj

Sat, 12 May 2007 01:54:13 +0800

Should be cleared up now. Thanks for your concern. nanhe: the military weekly link was added after the block.

nanheyangrouchuan

Fri, 11 May 2007 23:32:11 +0800

There is a mention of me li tare e weakly, perhaps mentioning such topics triggers new blocks.

zhwj

Fri, 11 May 2007 17:13:41 +0800

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

ghatzhat

Fri, 11 May 2007 11:23:06 +0800

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.