Baidu hijacks China BitTorrent sites
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Chinese sites containing, ” pornography, violence and terror,” and supposedly, “endangering national security” are being shut down by the country’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), with the Internet Audio Video Program Service Management Regulations as the tool.
Now, however, it’s gone a significant stage further.
Historically, BitTorrent sites have escaped the attention of China’s censors. But that’s changed. Popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay have been hijacked by Chinese rogue search engine Baidu, says TorrentFreak.
“The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu,” it says, going on:
” Other sites, including China’s largest eDonkey indexing site, VeryCD, received warnings. A few days later, however, VeryCD users found that their favorite eDonkey site was redirected to the Chinese search engine – Baidu.com.”
The hijacks were lifted yesterday and, “According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems,” says the story, adding:
“This doesn’t seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe. Also, DNS issues can’t explain why all the P2P sites were suddenly redirected to another website.”
Indeed.
Baidu, itself accused of violating copyrights, was implicated in the continuing tainted milk scandal, accused of censoring news in exchange for payment from dairy companies.
Stay tuned.
endangering national security – China shuts down video sites, October 31, 2008
rogue search engine -Baidu ploy: divide and conquer, July 14, 2008
TorrentFreak – China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites, November 8, 2008
violating copyrights – Big Music goes after China’s Baidu, February 29, 2008
tainted milk scandal – Baidu’s role in tainted milk scandal, September 23, 2008
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November 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
DNS error? Ha!
I manually put piratebay in my /etc/hosts to prevent “accidental DNS fuckups”.
November 9th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
That is pretty smart… I’ll have to figure out how to do that