Test if any website is blocked in China | Hacker News Reader

Test if any website is blocked in China

blockedinchina.net

36 pointshowaboutit37 comments

A page like this might be really useful, but it's very difficult for it to tell the whole story, and the story is always changing.

In my experience, China's government uses many methods to sabotage the Internet, and the methods used against specific services change very often. I believe change so often because it's more disruptive.

Some services seem "just plain" blocked, as in the connections are being sniped by RST or something. Others (e.g., Google services like Maps) are in what I believe to be a "degrade" mode, where perhaps half the page is allowed to load, but not enough to be functional, in order to make the service look broken and to be more annoying to the user. I met many people in China who hated Google services because they were so slow and/or defective--due entirely to the sabotage.

They also seem to mess up a lot of stuff via DNS. They also seem to disrupt VPN. They also inject ads into page content, e.g., ads in the lower right corner of espn.com or whitehouse.gov.

Also, each Chinese ISP is quite different in what is blocked: even if their are some popular givens (facebook, youtube, twitter), there is some flexibility with respect to imugr, wikimedia, and Google PLUS.

> I met many people in China who hated Google services because they were so slow and/or defective--due entirely to the sabotage.

If you call up your ISP and tell them you can't get to Facebook, they'll tell you it must be Facebook's fault. The government won't admit to blocking or interfering with these websites...the GFW technically doesn't exist.

Countdown timer: http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=blockedinchina.net

As someone who travels to China fairly frequently I can say I've found this site to be inconsistent.

That said, different locations within China have inconsistently differing levels of blockage (for instance, you can access many more places from within the greater Shanghai area than from within nearby Hangzhou and can find differences in what is available between Hangzhou and Beijing) so I think it is difficult to definitely state that this or that site is completely unavailable from anywhere within China.

This is because of the different service providers and the decentralization that is applied from within the government.

It leads to inconsistency but it stops some of the mistakes that result from an overly centralized government.

Lots of it is applied at province level, as I understand it. There is not 'one firewall'. That's probably why this site gives you a result for five different provinces.

http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html seems to be a much better resource. The latency for successful requests is usually pretty high, and blockedinchina.net returns too quickly for me to think it's accurate.

you are right, this is because the website you mentioned makes use of more than one server based on different region in china.

One question: Is Tor now totally blocked in China? Tor does not work here for me, even with bridges. Any words of wisdom?

Otherwise: A lot of useful comments here already. - what is blocked today, maybe blocked or not blocked tomorrow. E.g. I could not make my CC payment yesterday. After some hours, the site worked. I doubt it was the banks fault.

- Different providers seem to block different sites

- Many VPN are blocked, https often does not work (e.g. with wikipedia)

The blockedinchina.net seems a little bit like snake oil with very little reliability.

I typed in https://news.ycombinator.com/ and it removed the https:// from my query. http and https are not the same URL, and in particular may have different "blocked" statuses!

Also FYI: it gave an error when I entered this HN submission, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666214

It seems to give an error if the URL contains a path.

Yeah, I think the paths are blocked. One more reason to use the above options given. I tested a path out and it worked on http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html

I tried github several times and every time it fails to load at least for a couple of the places but it does load intermittently from all of the servers. I wonder what that means - is it being throttled so that it loads slowly? The same doesn't happen with other websites - for example, my website consistently shows ok from all servers.

Lots of incorrect sites, and no way to differentiate http and https.

Lists that weibo is blocked! http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=weibo.com

I typed www.facebook.com.

Amazingly, it was the response page itself that got blocked(, TCP reset to be precise). Perhaps the Great Fire Wall read 'www.facebook.com' as a substring in url, and subsequently killed it.

Right on time since I'm going there for Christmas holidays. I used to use HotspotShield as a VPN when I was in Beijing but that was 5 years ago, anyone knows a good VPN right now?

Living in China - Astrill, they have a variety of different protocols and endpoints, some working better than others on any given day.

GoldenFrog's Vypr served me well abroad

If I were you, I would just set up an ec2 instance on Amazon and then tunnel my traffic through ssh. Why rely on some VPN??

Smartphones.

We'll have to see how this goes! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435993

It says google.com isn't blocked:

http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.com

Google.cn is blocked though, oddly enough. http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.cn

Google.cn isn't blocked but it's only a page that basically redirects to Google.com.hk.

Actually, google is blocked sometimes, including .com, .cn, .hk. If you search some sensitive words, google will be blocked for a period of time.

actually what blockedinchina.net does it, it takes the website URl from form and query it from a system whose internet is tunneled to a China based server. So the qurey reply is based on internet on that particular server(internet on a particular computer or ISP in China), hence this might not be reliable.

Completely off topic - It drives me crazy when the enter key doesn't submit forms. Especially one liners.

It says one of my sites isn't blocked when other tools I have tried says it is.

I actually want it to be blocked in China.

I find it hard to believe that sites like whitehouse.gov and barackobama.com aren't blocked.

wikipedia.org was unreachable in Shanghai one week ago whether blocked or not. Wikipedia is incredibly useful, I can understand blocking individual articles (as they do in Saudi Arabia, for example) but not the site as a whole.

They are only blocking the HTTPS version in Shenzhen (not sure if that's the case for other regions).

Yes, it is. (Beijing)

No, you should use Alibench or 17ce. They have many servers to test accessibility.

How was this created?

taiwan.gov.tw just causes an error message. Not sure if that means it's blocked, or the site doesn't like the address

this is very unreliable, I tested it with 10 sites, 8 are incorrect.

We're not blocked, according to this. Score one for the Chinese.

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