
Test if any website is blocked in China - howaboutit
http://www.blockedinchina.net/?hn
======
b6
A page like this might be really useful, but it's very difficult for it to
tell the whole story, and the story is always changing.

In my experience, China's government uses many methods to sabotage the
Internet, and the methods used against specific services change very often. I
believe change so often because it's more disruptive.

Some services seem "just plain" blocked, as in the connections are being
sniped by RST or something. Others (e.g., Google services like Maps) are in
what I believe to be a "degrade" mode, where perhaps half the page is allowed
to load, but not enough to be functional, in order to make the service look
broken and to be more annoying to the user. I met many people in China who
hated Google services because they were so slow and/or defective--due entirely
to the sabotage.

They also seem to mess up a lot of stuff via DNS. They also seem to disrupt
VPN. They also inject ads into page content, e.g., ads in the lower right
corner of espn.com or whitehouse.gov.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Also, each Chinese ISP is quite different in what is blocked: even if their
are some popular givens (facebook, youtube, twitter), there is some
flexibility with respect to imugr, wikimedia, and Google PLUS.

> I met many people in China who hated Google services because they were so
> slow and/or defective--due entirely to the sabotage.

If you call up your ISP and tell them you can't get to Facebook, they'll tell
you it must be Facebook's fault. The government won't admit to blocking or
interfering with these websites...the GFW technically doesn't exist.

------
ParadisoShlee
Countdown timer:
[http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=blockedinchina.net](http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=blockedinchina.net)

------
gaoshan
As someone who travels to China fairly frequently I can say I've found this
site to be inconsistent.

That said, different locations within China have inconsistently differing
levels of blockage (for instance, you can access many more places from within
the greater Shanghai area than from within nearby Hangzhou and can find
differences in what is available between Hangzhou and Beijing) so I think it
is difficult to definitely state that this or that site is completely
unavailable from anywhere within China.

~~~
tnuc
This is because of the different service providers and the decentralization
that is applied from within the government.

It leads to inconsistency but it stops some of the mistakes that result from
an overly centralized government.

------
andymcsherry
[http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-
test.html](http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html) seems
to be a much better resource. The latency for successful requests is usually
pretty high, and blockedinchina.net returns too quickly for me to think it's
accurate.

~~~
scottydelta
you are right, this is because the website you mentioned makes use of more
than one server based on different region in china.

------
tiatia
One question: Is Tor now totally blocked in China? Tor does not work here for
me, even with bridges. Any words of wisdom?

Otherwise: A lot of useful comments here already. \- what is blocked today,
maybe blocked or not blocked tomorrow. E.g. I could not make my CC payment
yesterday. After some hours, the site worked. I doubt it was the banks fault.

\- Different providers seem to block different sites

\- Many VPN are blocked, https often does not work (e.g. with wikipedia)

The blockedinchina.net seems a little bit like snake oil with very little
reliability.

------
idupree
I typed in [https://news.ycombinator.com/](https://news.ycombinator.com/) and
it removed the [https://](https://) from my query. http and https are not the
same URL, and in particular may have different "blocked" statuses!

Also FYI: it gave an error when I entered this HN submission,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666214](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6666214)

~~~
johncole
Yeah, I think the paths are blocked. One more reason to use the above options
given. I tested a path out and it worked on
[http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-
test.html](http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html)

------
primelens
I tried github several times and every time it fails to load at least for a
couple of the places but it does load intermittently from all of the servers.
I wonder what that means - is it being throttled so that it loads slowly? The
same doesn't happen with other websites - for example, my website consistently
shows ok from all servers.

------
nikisweeting
Lots of incorrect sites, and no way to differentiate http and https.

Lists that weibo is blocked!
[http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=weibo.com](http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=weibo.com)

------
ttflee
I typed www.facebook.com.

Amazingly, it was the response page itself that got blocked(, TCP reset to be
precise). Perhaps the Great Fire Wall read 'www.facebook.com' as a substring
in url, and subsequently killed it.

------
baby
Right on time since I'm going there for Christmas holidays. I used to use
HotspotShield as a VPN when I was in Beijing but that was 5 years ago, anyone
knows a good VPN right now?

~~~
skeletonjelly
GoldenFrog's Vypr served me well abroad

~~~
scottydelta
If I were you, I would just set up an ec2 instance on Amazon and then tunnel
my traffic through ssh. Why rely on some VPN??

~~~
kalleboo
Smartphones.

------
PakG1
We'll have to see how this goes!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435993)

------
jfoster
It says google.com isn't blocked:

[http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.com](http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.com)

~~~
andrewfong
Google.cn is blocked though, oddly enough.
[http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.cn](http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=google.cn)

~~~
olalonde
Google.cn isn't blocked but it's only a page that basically redirects to
Google.com.hk.

------
scottydelta
actually what blockedinchina.net does it, it takes the website URl from form
and query it from a system whose internet is tunneled to a China based server.
So the qurey reply is based on internet on that particular server(internet on
a particular computer or ISP in China), hence this might not be reliable.

------
FajitaNachos
Completely off topic - It drives me crazy when the enter key doesn't submit
forms. Especially one liners.

------
johnpowell
It says one of my sites isn't blocked when other tools I have tried says it
is.

I actually want it to be blocked in China.

------
xw
I find it hard to believe that sites like whitehouse.gov and barackobama.com
aren't blocked.

------
pseingatl
wikipedia.org was unreachable in Shanghai one week ago whether blocked or not.
Wikipedia is incredibly useful, I can understand blocking individual articles
(as they do in Saudi Arabia, for example) but not the site as a whole.

~~~
olalonde
They are only blocking the HTTPS version in Shenzhen (not sure if that's the
case for other regions).

~~~
tiatia
Yes, it is. (Beijing)

------
be5invis
No, you should use Alibench or 17ce. They have many servers to test
accessibility.

------
ero5004
How was this created?

------
forktheif
taiwan.gov.tw just causes an error message. Not sure if that means it's
blocked, or the site doesn't like the address

------
ausjke
this is very unreliable, I tested it with 10 sites, 8 are incorrect.

------
amerika_blog
We're not blocked, according to this. Score one for the Chinese.

