China Censors Web Traffic On the Fly

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Last week, China was furious that President Bush met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. In fact, they were so furious and so fearful that the Chinese citizenry would find out about it, that the Chinese Government poisoned the Chinese DNS entries for popular search engines and news sites. As the story faded from the world headlines, the Chinese government allowed the poisoned DNS entries to expire.

From the AFP here:

US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that the move was in retaliation for Washington’s award to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.

The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the Internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the 72-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader.

This was not about revenge, but suppression of the news. China is capable of delivering a total internet news blackout, and they could sustain it if they wanted to. Should an uprising ever happen somewhere in China, you can be sure that the people in China will be the last to know about it.

And you can see the Dalai Lama’s homepage here. Baidu.Com is the Chinese search engine. I did a search for BelchSpeak, my blog name and it came up almost blank. I guess the commie bastards don’t like what I have to say about their government and culture.

Google in China also eliminates my site because of my criticism. Check out the search results.