p2pnet - rss feed: Google China censors news
p2pnet.net News:- Google China is censoring news stories, p2pnet has learned.
Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) ceo Bill Xia told p2pnet that on September 15, a volunteer working with DIT’s DynaWeb noticed Google’s Chinese news returned different results depending whether the search was conducted in China or in the US.
DIT was founded in 2001 to provide low cost, reliable solutions for customized Net service needs for people living in repressive regimes such as China’s.
DynaWeb is a constantly updated, free proxy network designed to circumvent internet blocking in China. Supporters are from media and human rights organizations such as the VOA (Voice of American), and Radio Free Asia.
“We were able to confirm this report through proxies in China,” says Xia.
“Search results inside China do not contain news from blocked sites such as www.epochtimes.com.au.”
Xia says the search started with http://news.google.com/news?hl=zh-CN&ned=cn, going on:
“We recorded the result for the search string “???”, which happens to be the name of a Chinese poet who lives in the U.S. After clicking “????” (search news), this was the url returned. We found three entries when we searched from the US:
- http://www.epochtimes.com.au/gb/4/9/16/n663372.htm
- http://www7.chinesenewsnet.com/gb/MainNews/EntDigest/Showbuz/2004_8_23_9_20_38_553.html
- http://www.epochtimes.com.au/gb/4/8/24/n638236.htm
“When we used a proxy in China to simulate the search from inside China, zero results were returned.”
Search data were taken around 5:50pm, September 16,US Eastern time
And other keywords were tested, Xia told us.
Entries from http://www.epochtimes.com.au or http://www7.chinesenewsnet.com aren’t shown on the first page when searching with a proxy inside China.
If you’re planning to emulate the DynaWeb search, don’t use high profile keywords such as Falun Gong or ‘religious freedom’ because they’ll trigger the national firewall in China and disconnect you from Google or from the proxy you’re using, depending on where you are and how you’re doing the search, says Xia.
“Use dissidents’ or writers’ name who publish articles or are reported on oversea websites,” he suggests, adding:
“If you triggered the keyword blocking, you can try to find another proxy and change your IP by restarting your computer or logging off and logging back in. For technical details of this kind of keyword blocking of China’s national firewall, please refer to this report.”
p2pnet has contacted Google US by email and phone and is waiting for a response.
For further information, contact DIT.
Download Freegate
In the meanwhile, if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, p2pnet is now carrrying Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
We’ll be posting it on the bottom of every story we run on China.
Symantec recently incorrectly described Freegate as a trojan but has now withdrawn that label.
Feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
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See:-
repressive regimes - Dynamic Internet Technology, site.
incorrectly - Symantec’s ‘trojan’ mistake, p2pnet, September 16, 2004
September 17th, 2004 at 6:17 pm
It’s funny how China gets called ‘repressive’. China does not have the draconian copyright enforcement policies under which P2P users suffer here in the USA.
Since the USA is providing free proxy servers so that Chinese internet users can skirt Chinese law, maybe China could in turn provide free proxies so US P2P users can skirt US law. That would be a fair trade.
September 17th, 2004 at 6:38 pm
China has the highest rate of software piracy as well, they almost encourage it through lack of enforcement….kinda being subversive to the Western Imperialists
- or so it has been theorized
so that’s no real big surprise.
TT