This site is a production of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Please email if you have questions, contributions, or ideas about improving this site.
posted by filter_editor
on Thursday August 29, @11:05AM
from the research-without-walls dept.
edelman writes "Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I are studying Internet filtering in countries worldwide, including restrictions on Web access in China. As in our prior testing of Saudi Arabia, there has been no publicly available master list of blocked sites. To assemble something approaching such a list, we have found ways to remotely test "twenty questions" style, asking about thousands of individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.
To help us broaden the number and types of pages tested and to provide the general public a means of finding out whether particular pages of interest are filtered, we have created a web page at which users can see whether a given site is likely accessible from China, and in doing so suggest that we test that site going forwards.
We'll track all requests and retest them over time, reporting the results in our forthcoming report about Internet filtering in China. We're eager to see whether such "open source research" will end up finding a substantial number of blocked sites that, despite our best efforts, we neglected to think of asking about ourselves.
It seems
Websense [websense.com]
is a major player in China censorware.
Every once in a while, I'd thought of doing
an
anticensorware investigation [sethf.com] of China, but
never had the access to such a server. It'll
be interesting to see the results here.
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
GrepLaw
