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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

There's something I don't get - why is the Great Firewall of China only blocking these terms in GET requests?

If it's only GET, then a user can use POST to search and bypass all this entirely - Google just has to change the request type, which IMHO is much easier than what they just did.

If it's both GET and POST, then I don't see how typing in the infringing character which is then POST'd via AJAX is any less prone to connection termination than a GET search request.

It doesn't add up.

EDIT: downvotes? Seriously?

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The great firewall is much more advanced than that.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peop...

Methods

* IP Blocking

* DNS Filtering

* URL Filtering

* Packet Filtering ( TCP, FTP, POP, SMTP, ETC)

* Connection resets of up to 30 minutes

Try this: http://search.china.alibaba.com -> Search for "Falun Dafa", you'll be cutoff for about 5 minutes or so completely. That includes not just GET, POST, BUT ALL TCP/UDP connections will be rest.

It's possible google stores the finite list of bad queries in JS and has the user's browser do the comparison client-side.

Yep - the web page is a client-side app, proactively warning the user about problems in the network

Let's get that list!

I wonder if they load the whole list of "bad" terms on the client-side. Wouldn't that trigger the firewall? Unless they encrypt it, or use a bloom filter (which would save some bandwidth)...

not sure if a bloom filter with false positives would be a good idea in this case.

I didn't think of that - that certainly would be a viable solution.

You're assuming that the GET request is the one being blocked, but it looks more reasonable that it's actually the response (the html results page) that's causing the problems. Probably the "Great Firewall" detects a page that includes frequent use of some "bad" term and blocks the connection.

Maybe they are blocking POST requests too with those terms? It's not that they cannot access them on POST requests.

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