[huridocs-tech] China blocks blog again

DIGITAL FREEDOM NETWORK: Human rights and cyber-rights news

China blocks blog again
by Bobson Wong, Digital Freedom Network

URL: www.dfn.org/news/china/blogblock.htm

(January 30, 2003) A U.S.-based company announced yesterday that a Web site 
containing information on how to circumvent Chinese government Internet 
filters was reportedly being blocked again, several days after access to 
the site in China had been restored.

The blocked "blog" (http://dweb.blogspot.com) is run by Dynamic Internet 
Technology (DIT Inc.), a U.S.-based company that according to its Web site 
provides low-cost solutions for customized Internet service needs in 
"challenging environments. (A blog is a Web site that serves as a publicly 
accessible personal journal for an individual.)

DIT runs DynaWeb, a proxy service that enables Internet users in China to 
gain access to restricted Web sites from within the country. According to a 
spokesman for DynaWeb, 95 percent of their users are from China, and about 
10,000 people in China use their services daily.

The DynaWeb blog contains Internet Protocol (I.P.) addresses of proxy 
servers that people in China can use to circumvent government Internet 
filters. (An I.P. address is a series of numbers, such as 169.132.18.1, 
that uniquely identify all computers on the Internet.)

DynaWeb repeatedly blocked

Soon after the DynaWeb blog was first announced in late December 2002, 
China's firewall, which filters Internet content entering the country and 
blocks content that the government deems objectionable, began blocking the 
site.

On January 8, Greg Walton, a researcher who focuses on the impact of 
technology and globalization on human rights and democracy, reported that 
the China's firewall was preventing Chinese users from accessing all blogs 
hosted by BlogSpot, including the DynaWeb blog. Chinese users who went to 
dweb.blogspot.com were automatically redirected to http://falundafa.ca. 
Falundafa.ca is the site of a Canadian-registered organization that 
promotes Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that the Chinese government has 
labeled a threat to national security. Since the Canadian Falun Gong site 
is blocked in China, DynaWeb speculated that the redirecting was being done 
to discredit Falun Gong by making unsuspecting users think that Falun Gong 
had hijacked the sites being redirected.

Hours after the redirecting was reported by Reuters and other newswire 
services on January 15, Chinese users reported that they could access blogs 
on BlogSpot.com's site but that the DynaWeb blog was still blocked. By 
January 18, the DynaWeb blog was moved to a different location on the 
Internet, where it remained accessible in China until January 27 or 28.

The DynaWeb blog is not the only site that has been redirected by the 
firewall. Last October, DynaWeb reported that users in China who tried to 
access several Web sites, including the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, 
and the dissident e-mail magazine Dacankao (VIP Reference), were being 
automatically redirected to falundafa.ca. DynaWeb detailed its findings in 
a report available on its Web site at http://www.dit-inc.us/nj-09-02.html.

A DynaWeb spokesman told the Digital Freedom Network that DynaWeb has taken 
several steps to ensure that people in China can use their services. Users 
can obtain the Internet addresses of their proxy servers by e-mail, which 
is not affected by the block of DynaWeb's blog. DynaWeb is also working on 
switching their blog's I.P. address again, although Xia noted that the 
process increases the cost of maintaining the system.

Struggle over content

China is one of the world's biggest censors of online content. Firewalls 
monitor Internet traffic entering the country for material the government 
deems pornographic, subversive, or otherwise harmful to the state. While 
these laws directly affect dissidents and other controversial individuals 
in China, they also affect the majority of users, who are only getting 
online to chat with their friends, send e-mail, or read news. The DynaWeb 
blog appears to be the latest target in the government's continuing effort 
to regulate the Internet.


Copyright (c) 2003 Digital Freedom Network (http://dfn.org). All rights 
reserved. This article may be reproduced or redistributed for online 
not-for-profit use without prior written consent as long as DFN is 
recognized with this credit. For information about DFN's permissions 
policy, see <http://dfn.org/about/permissions.htm>.




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