FC: Probing the Great Firewall of China, courtesy of the Berkman Ctr

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

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From: "Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>
To: <declan@well.com>
Subject: Help Test Internet Filtering in China
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 16:36:32 -0400

Declan,

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 [1], 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.


Those who are interested can test sites via
    <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test>.


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/>




[1]
Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/saudiarabia>




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