pennypacker.net: China's political policy and internet censorship.

China's political policy and internet censorship.

Recently, I installed Shaun Inman's Shortstat software to track hits to this website. It's a lightweight fairly non-geeky means to track who visits your site and where they came from. The package is just in beta at the moment, but it seems to work pretty well, and the results are certainly easy to read at a glance, which is its big selling point.

I've noticed, in the past few days that it has been running, that this server gets in the neighborhood of one thousand hits from China every day. China is known for sending bulk e-mail, and there have been worms and other malicious traffic that originate there. So I got a crazy notion to simply block all traffic from China to my website.

That's right. Block off the entire country. It's overkill, I know it. It can also be well argued that it's a bad practice. It is. But given that I get 1000 hits per day that aren't visiting my actual pages (they're poking around the server looking for who knows what, I presume exploits), it seems that 1000 bad apples have the spoiled the bunch.

So that brings me to my dilemma. How does one block an entire country from viewing one's site? On a shared server, such as this one, I don't have the liberty to simply block off a nation. The server is managed by someone else, and it hosts several other sites, and I doubt they'd all agree to block all of China. But then someone cracked a joke, and while it was tongue-in-cheek, it's truly brilliant. He said that I don't have to block China, all I have to do is publish information that China doesn't like, and they will block me!

China blocks internet traffic from within its borders to sites about Taiwanese independence, Falun Dafa, and even the BBC! It's often referred to as The Great Firewall of China, and while there is a lot of information on the web to circumvent the block, there is little information on ensuring that your site is blocked.

I asked the person who thought of this crazy idea for sites that China might block, as he's quite knowledgeable on China and its politics, and he provided me with a great list of links that include http://www.falundafa.org/, http://www.taiwandc.org/index.html, and http://www.freetibet.org/.

I quickly went on to construct a page discussing China's political policy and kept it as simple as possible: just text and enough mark-up to get it to show up on search engines. The goal is that the Chinese government will become aware of that page and then block my site from all of its citizens. Hopefully, that will curb some or much of the traffic that I presume is malicious.

I don't know if it'll work. But it's something that I figured is worth a shot, even if just for the purpose of researching the effectiveness of the technique. My personal opinions on China aren't necessarily represented with this information, there are a lot of issues covered, and I think it'd be foolish to form and state an opinion without better knowing more about it, so please don't label me as a China-hater, and no, I don't have any ill will or prejudice in regards to the Chinese. I would post a link to the person who provided the idea and the info, but we fear that doing so may cause China to block his site, or sites he visits, so anonymity will have to take precedence.

I tried to submit that page to Chinese search engines, but I was unable to find submit links for any search engine save google.cn. There is something of a language barrier, I'm afraid. So I'll just have to wait for search engines to do their thing and hope that they pick up on my China page.

As of right now, there have been 4,718 hits to this site from China (since May 14th, 2005). I'll post updates and results as they occur.

under:

Life in General

Web Development

Posted on

2005-05-19