THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA
by Dan Calloway
14 November 2012
The Chinese government has blocked access to Google.com, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google Drive, and many other Google services as the Communist Party of China holds the 18th Party Congress, which started Thursday morning. Google has confirmed the block with The Next Web, and a Google spokesperson offered the following statement: “We’ve checked and there’s nothing wrong on our end.”
China is only the latest government to block access to specific Internet sites so that its people can't reach them. Apparently, China has DNS-poisoned the Google domains and sub-domains in response to its long-standing battle with Google.
The blocking by China of Google sites was first reported by the Chinese Web monitoring site, GreatFire. So, today when the people who reside within the borders of China attempt to search through Google.com, reach their mail via Gmail, find information on Google maps or Google Analytics, or create documents on Google Docs, or store or retrieve information already stored on Google Drive, they are redirected to the IP address of 59.24.3.173. This IP resolves to a dead-end Website originating in Korea.
Google+, the popular Google Social Networking Website is also included in the block sites. If you're like me, I had individuals in China that were among those whom I followed for some time now. They are no longer able to reach out to those outside of their Country who they may have been following as well.
If you go to GreatFirewallofChina.org, the monitoring Website I referred to earlier, you can type in the Google sites I've referred to here and you will see that they appear to be blocked. Network admins at GreatFirewallofChina.org and others have confirmed the blocking. I am running a service on my domains being hosted through Arvixe called Cloudflare, which allows me to monitor incoming threats of various types to all of them. Over the last several weeks I have encountered many threats originating from China which has caused me to block the entire Country of China from reaching those domains. This Web monitoring service allows me to block incoming requests to my domains either by IP address, IP address range, or by country of origin based on IP addresses assigned to those countries by ICANN.
Earlier this year, Iran created its own internal Internet and shut off contact for its citizens to any outside Internet sites only allowing access to their own internal network. China now is approaching this by blocking Google and its subdomain Websites. The next step will most likely be similar to the path that Iran took.
