Who's Blocking Who?

[roddy]

Interesting set of topics on Webmasterworld.com. Start

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/8030.htm

and there are other links to follow.

It gets technical at points. Basically, some Chinese websites / ISPs copy entire websites. To stop this, the websites in question try to ban the people doing this, and as in many cases they have no Chinese customers, they just ban all of China.

I suspect this may be responsible for some allegedly 'blocked' sites - I"ve heard of people complaining of local US newspapers or high school sites being blocked from within China - it's possible the block is on the foreign side of the internet, not the Chinese one.

Roddy

[zhwj]

Interesting. The site those forums are complaining about doesn't really make sense - the about page of 1bu.com doesn't provide any information on why anyone would want to filter a page in this way. It does allow for turning it off for a given site, however, so there's no particular need for US webmasters to blanket-ban all of Asia over this, other than the fact that wading through cancellation terms in Chinese and poor English translation is not on the job description of most web-masters.

And news.bbc.co.uk.1bu.com doesn't work, unfortunately.

[gato]

http://www.whitehouse.gov.1bu.com/ works!

Yes, it's pretty strange. Is it to speed delivery for people browsing from China? I heard access to foreign sites is pretty slow there because of the great firewall.

[sui.generis]

During the campaign, a lot of Republican sites blocked all non-US access because of cordinated attacks coming from international anti-war hackers.

[zhwj]

Just found out what this is: it's a way for people in China to get around limited-service ISP plans - there are some services that only allow access to domestic sites (university libraries are usually set up this way), but using things like 1bu.com as a suffix converts international IPs into domestic ones, and allows general internet access at the reduced price of domestic access.

Clever.