Read a Pacific Northwest, liberal perspective on world, national, and local politics. From majestic Redmond, Washington - the Northwest Progressive Institute Official Blog.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Many sites blocked by China

Over at HA, Goldy reports that his blog has been banned in China, presumably due to his outstanding work on the melamine/food safety issue.

That got me curious about such things, and I found a site called Great Firewall of China, which offers what it calls real-time testing to detect censoring of web sites by China. The group describes itself as a non-profit collection of "creatives" who wish to further the discussion about censorship.

There is a disclaimer that says, in effect, that sites could be wrongly labeled "blocked" due to ordinary technical glitches, so please note that and perhaps take the results with a grain of salt.

For fun, I tested a few sites, including the NPI blog (this page,) Slog, The Seattle Times main page and HA. Those came back as blocked.

Curiously, the P-I and Daily Kos came back as "available."

Lastly, I checked Postman on Politics, mainly out of curiousity, as logically it would be blocked, being part of the Times web site. And sure enough, the result indicate it's blocked.

Naturally, at this point we have no way of knowing how or when these sites might have been blocked, or for what reason, but I certainly wouldn't put it past the government of China. But it's certainly very fascinating, and kind of odd to think that a foreign government might have decided you are a threat to them.

If you wish, head on over to Great Firewall of China and see which of your favorite sites might be censored.

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