China’s latest porn crackdown hits 244 vulgar websites

Written on 22nd January 2009                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The lonely Chinese man who wants to satisfy his sexual needs online, faces a challenge that just got a little bigger. The Chinese government has blocked 244 new porn sites over the last week, reports Chinese news agency Xinhua. In its battle against “vulgar” content, China already made 700 online victims. These targets were unregistered and broke laws about the distribution of nasty content (meaning sexual movies, photos and whatnot).

The campaign will last for a month and isn’t limited to websites. Mobile phone games, online novels and radio programs can be blocked as well. Major Internet companies like Google and Baidu also got a public warning because they didn’t react fast enough when forbidden content showed up in their search results.

The Communist Party’s efforts aren’t limited to sexual content. Due to the 20th anniversary of the government’s bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, forbidden political content is also subject to blocking.

When I participated in the China 2.0 tour, Shel Israel and I experimented with Google and forbidden topics like Tianamen Square. On his personal blog, Israel wrote the following:

At dinner one night, Ernst Jan Pfauth typed into Google “Tienanmen Square Massacre” and got the 19-year-old story of troops killing about 400 students. A minute later he typed in “Falun Gong,” the banned religious group and got blocked. The block lated about 10 minutes then he was free to surf again.

According to Xinhua’s reports, it’s gonna be a whole lot harder to find similar results right now.

baidu, china, Chinese government, Falun Gong, google, Government of the People's Republic of China, Shel Israel, Tiananmen Square, Xinhua News Agency

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Massive Surveillance on Skype’s China platform

Written on 2nd October 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A group of Canadian activists have discovered a massive surveillance system on the Chinese Skype platform. In just two months, the researchers from Citizen Lab – an internet research division from the University of Toronto – noticed that the Ebay-owned servers archived more than 166,000 censored messages from 44,000 users. The Canadians were able to download copies of the censored data because they found a security hole in the Chinese computers.

I received an email from Ronald Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab, containing the major findings of the study:

• The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have
  communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and
  if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
• These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are
  stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to
  decrypt the data.
• The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such
  as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party
  of China.
• Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the
  captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting
  that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.

After Yahoo! and Google, also Ebay can be added to the list of large web companies who participate in Chinese censorship practices. Deibert and his colleague Rafal Rohozinski wrote in the foreword of the report: “This is a wake up call to everyone who has ever put their (blind) faith in the assurances offered up by network intermediaries like Skype. Declarations and privacy policies are no substitute for the type of due diligence that the research put forth here represents.”

Download the report here.

censorship, Citizen Lab, Falun Gong, google, Ronald Deibert, skype, yahoo

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