GFW is the short term for The Great Firewall of China, which is part of Gold Shield Engineering launched by Chinese government. The purpose of GFW is to filter information which the government considers not proper to spread in China, including pornography, violent, and political sensitive information, in other words, it is built to “purify” the cyber world in China.
Inside GFW, people complains that many excellent and usefully websites are blocked. These sites might be blocked simply because they are hosted on shared servers and one of the other sites on this server contains sensitive information.
Google, Youtube and many other sites were also blocked because they contain “ill” information.
The national anti-porn campaign in China is intensifying. Following the shut down of 55 websites during Spring Festival, CIIRC (China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre) announced on February 2nd that another 68 porn Web sites have been closed, bringing the total number of blocked sites to 1,575. On the same day, 148 blogs containing pornography and “lewd” contents were also closed.
A principal of the Special Operation Office for the Crackdown on Online Porn and Lewd Content said that more than half of the closed websites were from southeast Chinese provinces including Jiangsu, Fujian, Zhejiang and Guangdong. The telcom operators in these provinces provided internet access services for these illegal websites.
He also stated that the porn Web sites gained profits mainly through charging fixed telephone or cell-phone users to log onto the site. Low threshold of website running business and lack of supervision are two of the reasons that make the porn websites grow.
He emphasizes, anti-porn is still very arduous task. Further measures will be made to crack down the online porn and lewd contents, leaving no space for them on the Internet. No enterprises should provide channels for the porn websites to get income. And those who provide internet access or income collection channel will be Held accountable in accordance with the law or relevant regulation.
The principal also emphasizes, any forms of distribution of pornography on line are prohibited, and distributing pornography by bloging is also illegal.
Google, between 1430 and 1525 GMT, sites turned up in search results were marked as harmful and users received the message: “Warning! This site may harm your computer.”
Why? Here is the answer
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“What happened? Very simply, human error,” Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company’s official blog.
Google receives regular updates to a list of malicious websites from StopBadware.org, which investigates consumer complaints.
“We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning,” Mayer explained.
“Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.”
Users who tried to access the site were blocked by Google, which directed them to StopBadware.org. The firm works with Google to determine which sites are dangerous.
“This led to a denial of service of our website as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information,” StopBadware.org said in a statement.
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A simply mistake but cause outage of internet, because google controls 70% of internet search market. Big news, happy news for Baidu ( which take 70% of chinese internet search market ) .
Okay, that’s a small mistake, but so many people found it.
Internet Usage Rises in China
BEIJING — The number of Internet users in China has reached 298 million, nearly equal to the population of the United States, according to official figures. Although only 23 percent of Chinese use the Web — compared with 73 percent in the United States and 22 percent worldwide — about 88 million people went online in China for the first time last year, a 42 percent increase over 2007, the official China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.
China surpassed the United States as the biggest user of the Internet last June.
In 2008, there was also a spike in mobile Web surfing, with 117.6 million users, a 113 percent increase over the previous year.
Internet use is restricted in China and the government regularly blocks Web sites and blog postings that it views as a threat to state security. Last week, officials announced a crackdown on 91 Web sites that it said featured lewd content. It also shut down Bullog, a popular blog aggregator.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/world/asia/15beijing.html?ref=world
Published: January 14, 2009