While the original initiative for a real-time URL censorship check in China was originally realized as a project by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman couple of years ago, it's great to see someone continued what they've started and came up with the GreatFirewallofChina.org :"Aim of this website is to be a watchdog and keep track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored. Help to keep the censorship transparent. Each blocked website will automatically be added to the great firewall on the homepage."
What you should keep in mind is that despite of the capability for URL checking, from a technical perspective the censorship in China is much more sophisticated. Realizing that URLs themselves can be obfuscated, proxies and many other alternatives such as TOR for instance used, dynamic page content scanning for subversive keywords and the same technique used for sms messages is what I have in mind. For instance, according to the GreatFirewallofChina, blogspot.com is not blocked in the country, which doesn't mean a Taiwan independence related blog's content wouldn't get filtered. Moreover, it's perhaps even more disturbing to see various search results from a Chinese user's perspective, than figuring out whether an URL is blocked or not only. Here are two great screenshots confirming the twisted reality, and a recent summary of situation in China.
It would be great to see how this project evolves and starts taking presenting the results by confirming whether or not an URL is blocked in all of the countries on the world's censorship map, or ever better, start feeding local search engines with possibly censored keywords, summarize the results and emphasize on the big picture.
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