Don’t Cup Block Me!
So I figured out the fastest way to get your site blocked in China: quote Chinese newspapers. Yesterday, Cup of Cha went down for a while after I quoted two articles, one like this in China Daily and the other was this in 人民日报. They were both on the event that isn’t happening in a place that is inherently part of China. Fortunately I was able to get the “offending” material off through creative means, and the site was up and running immediately again.
What this means is that I wasn’t really “blocked” per se. Rather there appears to be a filter in place that stops you from accessing material that includes words that some people might be anxious about appearing on websites. That may explain why smaller newspapers like the LA Times and Washington Times were blocked yesterday, while the NY Times and Washington Post were not. The latter two sites would have caused outrage, so they manually opened them, while there were too many other smaller newspapers to handle on a case-by-case basis. Instead, they (i.e., the man) let an automated device check most sites for “inappropriate” content.
I supposed technical types already figured this stuff out, but for me it was pretty interesting to see it in action. It literally took about 30 seconds after putting up the block quotes before the site became inaccessible.
It appears that even the Chinese want to block the propaganda that they publish.
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Jakob Montrasio responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 9:56 am →
FYI, your blog works here in Shanghai.
theotherrichard responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 10:31 am →
For those who are interested, a - slightly technical - explanation of how this funkybusiness is all brought about. I will include some further links, as they seem to go down - surprisingly…
China Law Blog responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 11:51 am →
I just never use the word for that particular region and I block it out in my comments as well, replacing it with ________.
Pappi responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 12:20 pm →
It looked like the euphemism here is “western China,” but I propose the “current unpleasantness” and a certain gentleman we can just keep on the “DL.”
Larry responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 11:25 pm →
I doubt anyone would notice that Peoples Daily and China Daily articles are blocked. But since there is something to hide in these articles, may be they are worth reading.
Stuart responds:
Posted: March 18th, 2008 at 11:51 pm →
Too late for yours truly. I used the ‘T’ word with abandon because other sites (Granite Studio, for example) were having no problems. Now I’m screwed even when the offending items are removed. I’ve also been quoting some of the CD rhetoric, because it’s good for a laugh.
Yuefei responds:
Posted: March 19th, 2008 at 9:21 pm →
Perhaps with the high-level of activity of China’s “search & block” technology, now would be an opportune time to determine its weaknesses and methods.
Web indexing and search on this scale and sophistication would indicate that a private sector partner such as Google.cn or Baidu.com is being use. Google has some 450,000 servers.
I wonder if a simple meta tag “china robots=no follow, no index” would work to prevent your site being indexed?
Jeremiah responds:
Posted: March 20th, 2008 at 12:52 pm →
Generally speaking though, I replace the T in that word with the Greek symbol ‘tau’ or replace another letter with some odd but similar character. It doesn’t show obviously in the post but seems to avoid the censors. For now. On the other hand, I think I’m too small and obscure for them to worry about.
Jeremiah from The Granite Studio