The e-mail of death itself!

Here it is!


Dear IT personnel,

As you may already know, the Chinese government practices censorship on a
rather wide scale. They are very concerned about the ability to control
information and hence one of the conditions that were to be met before the
Chinese public were able to access the Internet was the establishment of
what many of us call "The Great Firewall of China".

The "Great Firewall", as it's rather jokingly called by some, is not
actually a firewall in the strictest sense of the word. It is basically a
list of IP addresses that are inaccessible from inside China. They can
accomplish and implement this because China controls all the major routers
inside the country and also control all backbones leading outside. Every
major router has a copy of this list and it is constantly updated and
changed.

Whenever a request to site is made, the routers check if it is part of the
list of banned servers. If a request to a "blacklisted" site is made, the
router simply discards the packet before it gets outside of the country.
According to the target server, such a request was not made in the first
place.

One thing to note is that the list is constantly updated, and sites do not
always stay on it all the time. While some sites are generally permanently
banned (such as sites known to contain, for example, Falun Gong
propoganda), other sites may only receive temporary placements on that
list. For example, if a news site were to place an unfavourable article on
their site, it may be temporarily blocked until such content is removed.
(In fact, this is one of the most common cases.)

One type of ban that is of note is that they also ban DNS servers of
certain things. One prominent example is of dynamic DNS services such as
dyndns.org or no-ip.com - effectively stopping them from being used in
China.

I have tried to access your site from both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and
have experienced no problems currently. Thus, your site is currently not
on the aforementioned "blacklist". This, however, does not guaruntee that
it may not be placed on this "list" in the future.

Hong Kong's connection to the Internet was established before the 1997
handover to the Chinese government, and hence their backbones are separate
from China's. (Most of Hong Kong's Internet traffic, as a sidenote, is
routed through to the Chinese University of Hong Kong.) Hong Kong does not
suffer from the same problem, and as such the entire Internet should be
properly accessible from Hong Kong as long as the target site is not
plagued by bandwidth or latency problems.

However, there are other problems plaguing website availability in China.
Because China owns all connections outside the country and nobody else has
any, the link outside is rather badly saturated. Some sites are not
accessible simply because the latency to the DNS servers governing a
domain (or the site itself) is so large that the timeout value has been
exceeded by the time a reply comes back, leading the client into thinking
that it was a failed request.

Even if your site does not contain any unfavourable content, it is still
possible for the server it is hosted on to be placed on the blacklist.
This is because your site is currently placed on shared hosting, where
multiple sites are hosted on the same physical server. Thus, if one of the
websites hosted on the server that your site is located on is placed on
the blacklist, your site will be affected as well.

For this reason, many free web hosting servers are currently on this list,
as people with free accounts are more likely to place provocative or
"illegal" content on their sites. Websites on services such as angelfire
and geocities, as well as several servers on 1and1 Internet's network, are
now no longer accessible from China.

If your site finds its way onto this "blacklist", there are several
courses of action you can take. The first one is to simply wait it out -
for many smaller sites, the ban is only temporary and may only last from
24 to 48 hours. If the downtime continues to persist, you may contact your
hosting provider to see if you can arrange to be moved to a neighbouring
server - usually the blacklist bans single servers and not entire
networks. Finally, you can switch to a different hosting company
altogether. This may be your only course of action if your hosting
provider's entire network has been deemed permanently unsuitable.

I hope this thorough explanation helps you understand the various factors
that affect a site's availability in Hong Kong and China.


From: Renoyd@aol.com
Date sent: Sat, 15 May 2004 11:55:36 EDT
Subject: To anybody at Guyline - we would appreciate your help To:
guyasia@pacific.net.hk

> Hello,
>
> I understand that our Pope website may not be able to be opened in
> Mainland China, and I am not sure about Hong Kong. Could sombody
> there please check on this for us. Also, if you could give us
> examples of USA websites that ARE able to be opened it would be
> helpful.
>
> Thanks very much in advance.
>
> Thanks & regards,
>
> Dean Segal
> VP Sales & Marketing
> Pope Scientific, Inc. USA
> p. +1 262 268 9300 x120
> f. +1 262 268 9400
> e. sales@popeinc.com
> w. www.popeinc.com


So, did I get any of those facts wrong? Anybody? :)