Sina and Sohu blocked

Two of the most popular web portals in the world, the search engines Sina and Sohu, of have been blocked in a sign of intensified internet censorship, millions of users expected are affected. The Sina and Sohu search engines have been out of service since Monday noon, with the search pages carrying a message that the sites were undergoing upgrades. Other services of the two portals were unaffected. Acording to Alexa.com Sina.com is the sitxth largest website in the world and Sohu is the tenth largest site.
Western internet firms including Microsoft and Yahoo have long been criticised for putting the quest for profits ahead of ethics and agreeing to censor websites and content. According to an industry source, illegal keywords, which are regularly updated by the authorities, cover content deemed ’subversive’, such as references to Tibet, Taiwanese independence, the Falun Gong and the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, writes Asia Media. But a recently updated list of illegal keywords shows that references to former president Jiang Zemin , the Cultural Revolution, the Bingdian Weekly, which was once suspended for controversial articles, and rights activists Gao Zhisheng and Guo Feixiong have also been banned.

Update!

Red Herring and Austrailian IT now runs the story

Update

China unblocks search engines of popular portals
On Monday authorities blocked the search engines of Sina.com and Sohu.com to try to upgrade their censorship capabilities, website staff said. ‘Concerned government departments have been inspecting web portals including Sina and Sohu and others,’ a customer service employee at Sina told AFP. She refused to specify what aspects of the search engine had been inspected. But on Tuesday Sina staff said the government was seeking to enhance the censorship capabilities to better preempt ‘unhealthy’ content. A customer service representative at Sohu also said the company’s search engine had been upgraded and resumed functioning on Wednesday morning. Mainland China has for years been battling to censor the internet of pornographic and violent content, as well as political and religious material that it believes could spark social unrest. (South China Morning Post via Asia Media, June 22, 2006)

2 Comments »

1. Hans, you might want to try the keywords I used.

   Here are some of the search result I found about Tiananmen on another Chinese search engine Baidu.com. I used the keywords “??? 89″ [”Tiananmen 89″]:

   Here’s a blog complete with photos and frank discussion:

   http://www.starfox.cn/wowo/article.asp?id=37

   Here are few more I found on Baidu.com:

   http://mpm.3c3e.com/modules/planet/view.article.php/36234/b30

   Two netters argued weither hundreds of thousands of university students were killed during TAM. They called it “89 Student Movement Massacare”:

   http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/5659664.html

   Netters are trading VCD of some artist’s concert performance during TAM protest:

   http://www.fmusic.cn/bbs/printpage.asp?BoardID=5&ID=122

   Comment by bobby fletcher — June 22, 2006 @ 2:16 am

2. Hans, you might want to try the keywords I used.

   Here are some of the search result I found about Tiananmen on another Chinese search engine Baidu.com. I used the keywords “??? 89″ [”Tiananmen 89″]:

   Here’s a blog complete with photos and frank discussion:

   http://www.starfox.cn/wowo/article.asp?id=37

   Here are few more I found on Baidu.com:

   http://mpm.3c3e.com/modules/planet/view.article.php/36234/b30

   Two netters argued weither hundreds of thousands of university students were killed during TAM. They called it “89 Student Movement Massacare”:

   http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/5659664.html

   Netters are trading VCD of some artist’s concert performance during TAM protest:

   http://www.fmusic.cn/bbs/printpage.asp?BoardID=5&ID=122

   Comment by bobby fletcher — June 22, 2006 @ 2:18 am

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