How Big is the Great Firewall of China or China's DNS Censorship Assessment

[DronVR]

How Big is the Great Firewall of China or China's DNS Censorship Assessment​

The Golden Shield content filtering system, or the so-called Great Firewall of China, used by the Chinese government for censoring purposes, is far from ideal. In short, the system blocks what is unnecessary and does not block what is needed. This conclusion was reached by a group of specialists from Stony Brook University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of California and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto based on the results research “How big is the Great Firewall of China? An Assessment of DNS Censorship in China ”.

The team used their large-scale GFWatch platform, which tests hundreds of millions of domains every day, allowing them to continuously monitor how DNS traffic is being filtered in China. Within nine months, using GFWatch, researchers tested 534 million domains and found that only 311,000 of them were censored by the Golden Shield.

"To our knowledge, this is the largest number of tested and censored domains ever described in the literature," the researchers noted.

Experts also found out that due to incorrect filtering rules "for the company" with censored domains, 41 thousand allowed domains are mistakenly blocked. As a reminder, users in Russia also faced with a similar code in March of this year, by slowing down Twitter, Roskomnadzor slowed down all sites with "t.co" in the domain, including Microsoft.com, podcast sites Beardycast and Zavtracast, subdomains Github and Steam.

Among other things, as it turned out, the "Golden Shield" blocks 77 thousand domains outside of China. The reason is that during the blocking process, the equipment does not drop the connection and does not display the notification "Access is restricted by the request of the court", but simply gives users different addresses in response. Very often, non-Chinese public DNS servers, including those of Google, Yandex and Cloudflare, “remember” these addresses and distribute them to international users.

A source

 

[Частный детектив Донецк]

Content filtering system operation in China far from its own minimum)

 

[Олег Юрьевич]

Almost off-topic, but in the same direction: the eternal dispute about the need / usefulness / harm / danger of censorship carries a very strange component - we don't bother too much about it for the time being, until we ourselves are faced with the need to gain access to something- either or denying access to anything ...
Then the analyzes begin, the search for ways, the creation of detours, or vice versa - the organization of protection and strengthening schemes ...
It turns out that the ban (censoring) is also one of the ways to stimulate progress)): cool:

 

[Kiril Harchevnikov]

I read the opinion of experts, they say: "not very")

 

[David Mamedov]

Let them continue to improve their firewall!

 

[Частный детектив. Москва.]

Thanks for the post!

 

[частный детектив. Узбекистан. Ташкент.]

Now I realized how "big" he is

 

[Детективное агентство Израиль.]

Thanks for the interesting article!

 

[seventeam]

Thank you for rating! It was interesting to read

 

[Детективное агентство. Грузия.]

Content filtering system operation in China far from its own minimum)

I agree