Beijing Blocking Blogs

by _interFACE_

Sat, Jan 11, 2003 5:03PM

Journals hosted at Blogspot.com and other blog providers have joined a growing list of sites blocked by China's Web Police.

Peking Duck: The bad news is that the blogspot ban, now well into its third day, continues, so I can only hope this stuff is actually appearing after I click the Post & Publish button. (A couple of my friends have assured me it's appearing, but you know how possessive and loving we are about our blogs.)

leylop: I'll keep blogging as long as Blogger works, it has become one part of my life, I think.

markkraft has a simple, practical solution that is going to be very hard to stop.

via http://go.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/11/0359210&mode=thread

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§thousands of blogs affectected in China

by Musty

Sun, Jan 12, 2003 6:20PM

Thousands of Blogs registered in a China weblogs diretory became dumb due to the censorship of blogspot.com, as well livejourrnal.com, by China government since Jan.8th, 2003. Reported by CNBlog.org's blog on blog(In Chinese).

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§DynaWeb

by dweb (contact [at] dit-inc.us)

Sun, Jan 12, 2003 8:30PM

As first publically reported by Greg Walton, China blocked blogspot.com on Jan. 9, 2003. We believe that China blocked it because Chinese are retrieving DynaWeb IPs to gain access to forbidden sites. (DynaWeb is a proxy network that supports encrypted proxy and CGI proxy. )

Time line:
12/23/02: DynaWeb first publicized dweb.blogspot.com to its subscribers.
12/25/02: DynaWeb publicized dweb.blogspot.com into Chinese news media (outside China of course).
1/8/03: Between 5:30am-5:40am, dweb.blogspot.com experience dramatic traffic drop.
1/9/03 2am EST: DynaWeb received the first report that dweb.blogspot.com can't be accessed from China. It was then verified that the IP of blogspot.com was blocked. Therefore, all bloggers hosting their blog on this site will no longer be accessible from China as well.

Besides IP blocking, China also hijacked the domain name "dweb.blogspot.com". (see http://www.dit-inc.us/hj-09-02.html for more details of the DNS hijacking.) However, other subdomains are not hijacked. This can be verified from outside China. Here is a screen output you can reproduce:
C:\>nslookup dweb.blogspot.com ns4.bta.net.cn
Server: ns4.bta.net.cn
Address: 202.106.0.20

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: dweb.blogspot.com
Address: 64.33.88.161

C:\>nslookup bill.blogspot.com ns4.bta.net.cn
Server: ns4.bta.net.cn
Address: 202.106.0.20

Name: bill.blogspot.com
Address: 64.41.146.221

C:\>nslookup blogspot.com ns4.bta.net.cn
Server: ns4.bta.net.cn
Address: 202.106.0.20

Name: blogspot.com
Address: 64.41.146.221

Here you can see that dweb.blogspot.com is the one Communist party pick up to be the most subversive among all bloggers to be on the DNS hijacking list.

So when this blocking happen? Log of dweb.blogspot.com must be a good source of info to see this,
1. It is one of the most popular Chinese page.
2. Most readers are from IPs in China. One will visit this blog only if they are blocked in China. (Not now, while you are reading this. :) )

We process some statistic on 1/8 (sorry, they use California time, which is GMT -8, EST is GMT -5, I can convert all those time later on after I find new ways for Chinese to get Dynaweb IP.)

Those data are saying that it is blocked between 2:30am-2:40am on 1/8.

Here is the data on 1/8:
2:00am-2:10am 29
2:10am-2:20am 38
2:20am-2:30am 51
2:30am-2:40am 15
2:40am-2:50am 3
2:50am-3am 1
3am-4am 0
4am 1
5am 1
6am 1
7am 1
8am 7
9am 4
10am 0
11am 0
12pm 1
1pm 6

You may contact me at contact [at] dit-inc.us .

For more information: http://dweb.blogspot.com/

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