How exactly do countries censor the net?

Just filter everything at the import/export level with a firewall, it's pretty straightforward and I'm sure it has legal precedent in most countries under import/export laws.
 
dmpoole said:
After reading the above story I was wondering how it was done?

Well I'm in one of the countries mentioned in that report and I can tell you that numerous websites are blocked where I am. I just tried to access the Bangkok Post (newspaper in Thailand) and get this:-


I have to connect to a proxy server with a specific port (9090). That connects to a "gateway" (in my TCP/IP settings) whatever that is, before it reaches the outside world. Here's a couple of edited pictures:-



I know that any email I send or someone sends to me that has an attachment to it is opened and read by the censor. It can take up to three weeks to receive an email with an attachment, but it normally takes just a day or two.

You can't play games, use things like Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger etc or ICQ. All online webmail sites are blocked as well as they want all emails to go through them. For some reason Skype and Google Talk work, but I've heard they're trying to block them as they're losing too much revenue on their international calls (£3 a min to call UK from here).

None of them are foolproof though. ;)
 
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China has been blocking Google until recently. Google made the decision to censor it's results rather than being censored itself, although this goes against Google's own aim.
 
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Myanmar, he left the TLDs in his email headers. :)

At least you're informed when a site is being blocked. There are many sites blocked by UK ISPs (admittedly they're horrible illegal sites, im sure you can work out the type) but you're not actually told that the site has been blocked, you're just told it doesn't exist. With no option for it to get removed from said block.

I know of incidents of innocent companies having found themselves on the recieving end of this ISP blocking by accident. And it being merry hell to get it sorted out.
 
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Moredhel said:
At least you're informed when a site is being blocked. There are many sites blocked by UK ISPs (admittedly they're horrible illegal sites, im sure you can work out the type) but you're not actually told that the site has been blocked, you're just told it doesn't exist. With no option for it to get removed from said block.
Oh, we get that too :( :-



One is for an online proxy server that people used to use to get around the censors, the other is for Ebay. I can't check the proxy server one to see if the site is still there (or works), but even though I can't check it, I'm quite sure Ebay still exists.... ;)

Added on edit:-
Yep, as I suspected, Ebay works fine (in the real world):-

The other site does actually appear to be down.
 
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if i was in china i would prefer a google which censor content to no google at all. As there is no way of it not being censored
 
axe said:
if i was in china i would prefer a google which censor content to no google at all. As there is no way of it not being censored
My trip to China a couple of months ago left me in no doubt that they are very lucky, 99% of the websites I went to were fine. Here it's a different story.
 
Speaking of which, is it against the rules for someone to point me to a proxy server site? Tried searching and only got hits for sites selling software......
 
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