The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money. The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.

Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available for everyone.

Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.

Related posts

• The HD war is not over yet (6)
• Zune does not allow to share all songs (3)
• Need Another Reason why DRM is bad ? Here it is ! (1)
• HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray Next Round (5)
• DRM Free Songs come to iTunes (0)

Skype messages were in the focus of privacy groups since first news about text filtering messages in China became known to the public. Back then Skype released an official statement that the text filter applied by the Chinese Skype partner Tom Online would not affect security and encryption mechanisms of Skype, that people’s privacy would not be compromised and calls, chats and other forms of communication on Skype would continue to be encrypted and secure.

Researchers and privacy activists of the University of Toronto discovered files on unprotected Chinese computers that contained filtered Skype messages that were recorded in China.

The filtering system uses a blacklist that contains words that will not be shown in Skype conversations. If a blacklisted word is send over Skype the word will be filtered and the conversation recorded including personal information about the users taking part in the chat.

Some of the words that cause the filtering and recording are Tibet, Taiwan Independence and Voice of America. There is no way of telling if and how Skype is working with authorities in other countries but who would want to risk that?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has Skype replacements on their priority list with links to multiple voip clients that can be downloaded freely.

The complete report from the researchers can be downloaded at the Infowar Monitor website. The major findings list:

• The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have
  communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and
  if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
• These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are
  stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to
  decrypt the data.
• The captured messages contain specifc keywords relating to sensitive political topics such
  as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party
  of China.
• Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the
  captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting
  that there may be criteria, such as specifc usernames, that determine whether messages are
  captured by the system.

Related posts

• Skype Backdoor Speculations (1)
• VoxOx Unified Messaging (3)
• Skype VOIP Recorder (10)
• Skype Voice Changer (13)
• Skype Log View (0)

The Opennet website offers a form where users can enter a url and check if it is banned in a country. Not every filtered url is know and not every country of the world can be selected, I guess it would be an impossible task to keep up with every countries filtering efforts. Just take a look at Turkey and Youtube if you know what I mean, feels like they ban and unban the video portal every other day.

The main emphasize lies on countries that are known to filter the Internet heavily which amounts to a list of roughly 20 countries currently. The website offers a global Internet filtering map that displays the level of political, social, conflict / security and Internet Tools filtering for each country in the world.

The website offers additional research which is more valuable than the two tools that I described before. Extensive country profiles are available for selected countries which give a in depths analysis of the current filtering situation in that country with lots of sources at the end of each report. It is furthermore possible to read regional overviews, articles about the subject, book recommendations and general news.

Related posts

• Internet Censorship 101 – DNS Server Filtering (4)
• AT&T considering spying on its users (19)
• YubNub a social internet command line (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)
• Wireless Network Scanner inSSIDer (3)

After discovering this they decided to ban URLs starting with ‘feeds’, ‘blog’, ‘rss’ and probably a handful of other related words. Several of my readers from China mentioned to me that my feed was blocked in China as well but the website was not. So, they started visiting my website again.

If you want to check if your website or feed is blocked as well in China you can use the website test behind the Great Firewall of China to do so. Just enter the url of your website, blog or feed, choose a location (Hong Kong, Beijing or Shanghai), enter the validation code and wait for a response from the script.

An alternative to RSS feeds is to get those feeds by mail or using a service on the web that displays them. Newsgator is supposed to work fine at the moment. It would be nice to receive information about Netvibes and Google Reader.

Read More:

Test if you website is blocked in China
Newsgator
Email Digests of RSS Feeds

Related posts

• Zonealarm Pro Firewall 2010 Promotion (5)
• Windows Vista Firewall Control (4)
• Who is connected to your pc right now ? (5)
• Wallwatcher firewall and router analyzer (1)
• Use this iptables script for Web/Mail server security (2)