[b6]

A page like this might be really useful, but it's very difficult for it to tell the whole story, and the story is always changing.

In my experience, China's government uses many methods to sabotage the Internet, and the methods used against specific services change very often. I believe change so often because it's more disruptive.

Some services seem "just plain" blocked, as in the connections are being sniped by RST or something. Others (e.g., Google services like Maps) are in what I believe to be a "degrade" mode, where perhaps half the page is allowed to load, but not enough to be functional, in order to make the service look broken and to be more annoying to the user. I met many people in China who hated Google services because they were so slow and/or defective--due entirely to the sabotage.

They also seem to mess up a lot of stuff via DNS. They also seem to disrupt VPN. They also inject ads into page content, e.g., ads in the lower right corner of espn.com or whitehouse.gov.

[seanmcdirmid]

Also, each Chinese ISP is quite different in what is blocked: even if their are some popular givens (facebook, youtube, twitter), there is some flexibility with respect to imugr, wikimedia, and Google PLUS.

> I met many people in China who hated Google services because they were so slow and/or defective--due entirely to the sabotage.

If you call up your ISP and tell them you can't get to Facebook, they'll tell you it must be Facebook's fault. The government won't admit to blocking or interfering with these websites...the GFW technically doesn't exist.