I am quite surprised by this part of your comment though: “This is because you are connecting to Baidu without passing through the filtering system (gfw). If you connected to Baidu from outside China I can trigger the RC.”

1- Basically what you are saying is that the GFW works in BOTH directions?? So it not only blocks incoming content, but also content going from China to the outside. If this is true, RC blocks on content that is hosted in a server within China can only be seen from outside China, and viceversa. I find this surprising, because it defeats the purpose of Chinese censorship: they want to block content from showing inside China, while giving an image of (relative) openness to the outside. Are you sure of this bidirectionality of GFW??

2- Also, one related question, are you sure GFW is ONLY applied to content crossing the border of mainland China, so it is only a “border control”, as opposed to also blocking content ciculating within China. I suspect this is true, as is exlplained for example in the famous
Fallows article. But I don’t have any proof.

3- Thanks for the info on the crawlers too. My approach however is different. I look at Censorship from the side of the final user, and my question is: What is google/baidu showing the users when they perform a search? Whether it is for crawlers/servers or other technical reasons -which Google has certainly the know-how to understand and solve- the essential is to find out: Search Engines are consiously giving the final user manipulated information, yes or not.

In this sense, I found very useful the points in your paper about transparency, thanks again for the link.

Check also the other more comprehensive post on censorship I wrote (link below).

“Baidu has a different system from Google: it has no Reset Connections. ”

This is because you are connecting to Baidu without passing through the filtering system (gfw). If you connected to Baidu from outside China I can trigger the RC. This is also why you get RC when connecting to Google.

The RC’s you get are due to the filtering (gfw), not Google(.com). Google.cn has servers inside China, but you can also connect to google.cn server outside China. i find it best to manually specify the IP, that way you know what/where you are connecting to.

Also, there are differences in search engine results for a variety of reason, one of which is the location of the crawlers — if they are indexing from inside China then sites blocked (gfw) are not indexed and don’t need to be censored by the search engines.

Yes, I know that Fallows article and it is brilliant, I have linked to it recently in another post.

My comment was not a critic, what you’ve done is interesting. I just wanted to expand a bit on the subject for the fun of it…

Back to your comment: there are many ways that the authorities censor content, and as you say, they can sometimes only censor one post within a blog (this was the case today when I found out one of the threads at FM had the RC block): it is here.

But there is a reason why I haven’t considered these things in my post. The above little “study” is only focused on “Search Engine censorship” and the extent to which these search engines collaborate with the censors. The examples we are giving here like Youtube and FM are a different aspect, and cannot be controlled by the owners of these sites or by the Search Engines.