I worked on the censorship and government reporting (sending all logs) infrastructure for Akamai China CDN. I'm glad to see it get shut down. Happy to answer questions.
Thanks for the disclosure. Don’t feel too bad, those stuff you helped built may not cause much damage as you feared.
CDN used to be at the front line of blocking content and surveillance citizens, nowadays that happens mostly thru social networks.
Unlike other countries, Chinese citizens are ultra online, and mostly concentrated on two platforms Webo and Wechat. Most other online services all require authentication via either of these two, plus cellphone number. So for govt it’s very simple to block anything or see any identity, CDN hardly play any major role anymore.
1. How was working with China requests and logging, differing from working with other nation states?
2. Was there full services brought up only for China specific needs? What would they take care or?
3. How would any blocks work? allowlist or denylist? Was takedown immediate, or was it working with the customer/client and getting them to take it down within SLA?
1. At the time it was the only nation state that had specialty infrastructure except for maybe the US.
2. There were specific infrastructure changes made for blocking and sending logs inside mainland china.
3. The CDN node would deny access to specific urls uploaded by the Chinese partner company. I don't remember the SLA. The SLA for reporting visited URLs was 15m IIRC
CDN used to be at the front line of blocking content and surveillance citizens, nowadays that happens mostly thru social networks.
Unlike other countries, Chinese citizens are ultra online, and mostly concentrated on two platforms Webo and Wechat. Most other online services all require authentication via either of these two, plus cellphone number. So for govt it’s very simple to block anything or see any identity, CDN hardly play any major role anymore.