Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. Though Hacker News appears to not be blocked, it has been flagged as "Contradictory" on certain days. Is the Chinese government blocking certain news items?

Take a look here: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com

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If you click on the day in the calendar to look at the details, the "Contradictory" status is when some of their test servers work and others don't. For this site in particular, there are several servers showing a timeout and no data received. So it's possible that HN is being partially blocked.

Censorship in China isn't just an all or nothing thing. There are content filters at the city, providence, and country wide level. Separate filters for traffic leaving the country vs internal. etc.

It looks specifically like cURL's exit value and the downloaded page size varied on some requests. It would be interesting to know what the contradictory download size was, and what the curl exit value was.

All that is there when you click on the date, if you scroll rightwards. The exit values in the blocked sites are timeouts (CURLE_OPERATION_TIMEDOUT), and the broken download sizes are 0 bytes.

> Is the Chinese government blocking certain news items?

That would certainly be my guess.

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