Googling Behind China's Firewall
From Slashdot:

xcham writes "The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge, have released a bulletin regarding the type of filtering applied to Google by the Chinese government. Most notably, certain keywords are filtered, as well as Google's 'cache' function. More information on how the keyword filtering is implemented is available in a previous bulletin."

InsideGoogle reads it for you:
In 2002, China blocked Google, but later stopped blocking it. Google, rightfully so, refused to negotiate and create a filtered Google for China, unlike other search engines, which are glad to get the Chinese revenues even while supporting that government's oppresive policies. China, however, filters the internet itself, and as a result, Google is filtered, but it is Google-independent. Users are blocked from certain keywords, and from the cache of those keywords (since that is a typical runaround). The cache block can be runaround by simply adding an ampersand, as in changing 'search?q=cache' to 'search?&q=cache' (try out those searches, you'll see what Chinese users see). The cache block is Google specific, meaning that Yahoo's cache is still available.
The list of banned keywords was discovered by Chinese hackers when it was included as a DLL with the QQ instant messaging client. 15% are sex-related, almost all the rest are political, and 20% of the words are Falun Gong related. of the more than 1000 words, 71 are in English, including:

• Freedom


• Freechina


• Naive


• Paper


• Playboy


• Safeweb


• Simple


• Sex

The filtering works not by banning websites, but keywords, meaning a smart searcher may be able to sometimes break the Great Firewall, or at least access these sites in the cache. Often, connections are no just blocked, but dropped. OpenNet has a Circumvention Lab, which mostly just points to Psiphon, a proxy designed to circumvent filters.
Analysis: Kudos to Google for taking the high road, shame on the other search engines for playing along, and more shame on the Chinese Government for doing this in the first place. Good work by OpenNet, but being a product of major universities like Harvard, they aren't willing to take the risk of providing true hacker solutions. There are reports that
elgooG, the mirror of Google that displays Google backwards, can get around the filter.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 9/01/2004 11:29:00 PM