[joolze]

Same with Yahoo in the past week. I think about new years eve the search results suddenly shifted to what they should look like using a Chinese only training set.

Results were all Xinhua and such, wikipedia, imdb, etc are no longer results numbers 1, 2, 3 anymore instead seeing a lot of qq, baidu, xiami etc results for song lyrics, movies, etc.

But it seems to be closer to normal today.

The normal internet speed has been maybe halved or thirded since about the week before Christmas, VPNs are all sketchy, there seems to be a regular interval when all connection is cut for a short time. You see pings oscillate between 40 and 400 ms quite regularly.

Chinese domains are always rock solid though. Can stream music off qq or xiami or stream youku without issue for extended periods of time when ycombinator, bbc news, etc are down. Yahoo and Bing stay up when most western sites are down.

However haven't been seeing as much total blockage as usual when they kick up the security. Lots of social sites that usually go black for a week or two are up just fine.

[ethbro]

Gee, it sure would be helpful if the Chinese government had a switch they could flip at will to slant the internet to a pro-Chinese position. Why, that would be almost the definition of "secure and controllable" when faced with periods of civil unrest...

[ihsw]

Disinformation is a natural progression after total information awareness.

[ethbro]

Well, I see it as the typical (and smart) Chinese straddling of control and efficiency.

The government would like the capability to render the internet more favorable to their interests.

The government also recognizes that a modern economy cannot run at competitive efficiencies with incomplete/mis- information.

Ergo, it'd be perfect if you had a propaganda switch you could throw to influence the chokepoints (search engines) only when you needed to. Economy keeps humming along with mostly full internet during status quo: when dissent breaks out, you restrict information and take the hit to economy efficiency in favor of order and security.

Pretty evil genius, actually...

[paulddraper]

Makes sense, considering Bing powers Yahoo!