I was recently invited to speak at Dalian Technical University, in Liaoning Province in Northern China, and took the opportunity afterwards to spend three weeks travelling around China with my family. (Finally putting several years of studying Mandarin into practice, with a reasonable level of success, and having a fantastic time.)
Being in China, I couldn’t help but poke a little at the limitations imposed on my connection. Travelling with 14-month old twins is a full-time job, albeit one that I can highly recommend, which did not leave me a great deal of time to analyse connections. I will therefore only report on my personal experiences and impressions, although the data that I did gather will hopefully be useful for a future paper based on work that I presented at FOCI’11. As such, anyone who knows a little about Chinese state-level internet censorship is unlikely to find anything new here.
In my time in China, I ran simple filtering tests on all the Internet connections to which I had access, covering locations in Beijing, Dalian, Shanghai and Hangzhou. I also took the chance to run code to test local nameservers for DNS manipulation when requesting known blocked sites.
The most notable observations from my own experiences were:
Twitter and Facebook are some of the more well-known blocked sites in China.… Read full post
