Despite acceding to Beijing’s censorship requirements, which yielded Google access to the Chinese market, users of Google.cn in China found the site blocked at the government backbone server.
Poor Google. Their stock has been hammered downward after missing market expectations on earnings, and they have received no end of grief from all quarters over their long-delayed entry into the Chinese market. Now even that has been problematic.
Instead of the higher quality service Google expected to provide by having servers handle traffic for the censored Google.cn site, Internet users in the populous cities of Beijing and Shanghai found nothing but 404 – Page Not Found for that address, Forbes reported.
Traceroutes conducted from Shanghai confirmed that packets were being lost once they hit the Internet backbone connection in China, the article said. That generally means the government has blocked a site. Shanghai could still reach Google.com in the US, though.
Tom’s Hardware Guide observed that a basic flaw in the filtering could be the reason for the Google.cn blockage, presumably once Chinese censors discovered it:
“… recent demonstrations revealed that retrieved items are only filtered when the items being searched for are spelled correctly – that is, using Roman letters.
That seems to be the case. A test of one keyphrase at Google.cn that should be on the censored list returned a list of results that were very obviously pro-government in nature. After changing a single letter in the keyphrase and trying it again, the results were very different, and certainly ones that would have the information officers spraying green tea out of their noses.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
