Tell Me About: Chinese Filtering System

Soldato
Joined
14 Dec 2005
Posts
12,488
Location
Bath
As the title says, tell me about it! Other than that it's censorship and shouldn't happen, I know nothing!


Going through the stats of one of the websites I manage I notice it's getting about 30GB a month of traffic from China. This is good.

However someone pointed out to me that the more traffic increases from China, the more likely it is to get noticed and then censored.

The website is 100% written in English, and is aimed at people here in GB. The Chinese traffic is a bonus - but now they're finding the site of use I'd like to ensure it doesn't get filtered.


Is there anything I can do to make sure the site doesn't get filtered? Or when it does get filtered is there a way round it?


For the record, the site is 100% legal under UK law, and is hosted in the UK.


TIA. All comments/knowledge welcome....
 
Not sure if I can help you, but I can tell you the sorts of sites that get blocked.

I no longer have access to Facebook or YouTube, they have both been blocked.
I can access Wikipedia, but the images don't load.
I can access photobucket and flickr, but not imageshack.

The government doesn't like international social networks, pornographic sites, or anything that slates the party. They want to protect the citizens from pornograpy, strong religious views, etc. which might cause the citizens to start thinking like western countries.

There are also some seamingly random sites that get blocked, for no reason. For example, just today, I can no longer get access to formula1.com.

There are, of course, ways around this, by way of proxy. However, all the popular free proxies have already been blocked by the government.

I can't explain how these proxies work very well, but basically they piggyback off servers in the west (whether knowingly or not, I'm not sure).

If your site isn't politically sensitive or contain porn, then it won't get noticed.

Edit: forgot to mention, that if the website address has the word 'blog' in it, then 99% of the time it will be blocked.
 
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Thread resurrection

Just looked up Octobers stats..... over 80GB of bandwidth to China :eek:.

Whilst of-course that's a good thing :), it's also increasing the chance of it getting noticed & censored! :(


Would Domain Aliases work for getting round the filtering system? My thinking is if I stick up a few aliases now I can hopefully balance the bandwidth between them, thus each domain will be getting fewer hits and less likely to be noticed.
Also if/when the domain(s) are filtered I could then stick up a few more aliases, specifically with names that you wouldn't assume relate to the site... (but there's the issue of how do I tell the visitors who can't get to the old domain about the new domain?).

Or do they filter by IP address, and thus domain aliases are a complete waste of time?
 
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