I went to China for vacation November 2008. It was crazy watching the U.S. election from the Yengtze river.
Being the dork that I am I spent a good chunk of time playing around with the Great Firewall of China. One thing that baffled me was the ease of which I could find "censored" material. For example the wikipedia page for the Tiananmen Square protests was accessible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989).
Searching Google images for "Tiananmen Square" came back with hundreds of tanks, bloody civilians and the like - no different than in the U.S.
Yet some things were banned. I found that all the free http proxies that I tried were banned. I couldn't get to wikileaks.org. And I couldn't get to the Tor website to download the installer.
This presents an interesting chicken and egg problem with circumvention software. How do you get the software in the first place if it's source of the software package is censored? I ended up asking a buddy of mine in the U.S. to send me the Tor program via gmail, but not everyone has that option.
I was only on a very slow 8k/sec connection so at times it was difficult to tell if a site was banned or if it just was really slow. I could only really tell by running a trace route. It would always time out at the same router, presumably the router that bridged between inside and outside China.
In case anyone is interested here is a tracert going to a banned site.
C:\>tracert wikileak.org
Tracing route to wikileak.org [72.1.201.156]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 490 ms 298 ms 298 ms 220.192.136.4
2 298 ms 299 ms 299 ms 220.192.136.251
3 298 ms 280 ms * 61.242.160.182
4 280 ms 342 ms 296 ms 211.94.54.205
5 432 ms 439 ms 439 ms 211.94.56.105
6 438 ms 459 ms 459 ms 211.94.55.5
7 358 ms * 1107 ms 211.94.39.98
8 499 ms 480 ms 479 ms 211.94.55.250
9 * 1108 ms 479 ms sl-gw22-ana-1-0.sprintlink.net [144.228.79.177]
10 498 ms 500 ms 518 ms sl-crs2-ana-0-1-2-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.12
2]
11 518 ms 519 ms 539 ms sl-crs2-fw-0-13-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.1
97]
12 536 ms 538 ms 558 ms sl-crs2-kc-0-0-0-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.14
1]
13 537 ms 558 ms 538 ms sl-crs2-chi-0-8-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.2
14]
14 528 ms 539 ms 539 ms sl-st21-chi-11-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.21
]
15 537 ms 539 ms 540 ms sl-bigpi4-209998-0.sprintlink.net [144.223.6.30]
16 536 ms 559 ms 539 ms rc2ch-pos10-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.41]
17 537 ms 719 ms 539 ms rc1ch-ge1-0-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.1]
18 556 ms 560 ms 559 ms rc2sh-pos13-0.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.77.13]
19 558 ms 557 ms 559 ms ra2sh-tge10-1.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.66.78]
20 597 ms 578 ms 580 ms rx0sh-hydro-one-telecom.mt.bigpipeinc.com [66.24
4.255.38]
21 578 ms 559 ms 559 ms 142.46.128.14
22 779 ms 779 ms * tol-gsr.telecomottawa.net [142.46.130.10]
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * ^C
C:\>
