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Carrefour is censored on Google.cn and Baidu  (View post)

www [PersonRank 1]

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
16 years ago11,551 views

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=%E5%AE%B6%E4%B9%90%E7%A6%8F&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=

www [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%BC%D2%C0%D6%B8%A3

www [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11090574&CFID=3584960&CFTOKEN=51434953

Above 3 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

WOW, and I thought Google can't surprise my with anything regarding their conduct in China. That isn't "just" a classic censorship anymore. Looks like Google is taking an active part in the Carrefour boycott (as Philipp said it doesn't look like a normal censored website), supporting propaganda (a.k.a. political marketing) campaign of a authoritarian regime. Just WOW.

There is alway a slight chance Chinese Government did that without consulting Google via some automatic or semi-automatic system they established. That would get some blame off Google, but again, those are all just consequences of Google's previous decision to censor results.

I never thought I would say that, but after I read about this one I stopped dreaming about working in Google. I would feel so ashamed being there right now...

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_China_joins_Carrefour_boycott_blocks_all_results

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I added an update to the post, thanks Ludwik!

Den Kosten [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Oh! Great job!
Very interesting and useful post.
I add your interesting blog in my iGoogle page!

Ari A [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

It definitely is possible for the government to re-route the requests by changing the DNS server.

I believe this IS the truth, as the copyright on the page says 2006, while real Google pages say 2008, as it is supposed to be.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> It definitely is possible for the government to re-route the
> requests by changing the DNS server.

I guess it's technically possible. But if they're doing that, they'd be re-routing EVERY request to that domain and they're also spoofing the "Server" HTTP header, etc.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I don't really think that's possible. China can only modify traffic they control. Google (as a policy) doesn't have servers in China and I'm not in China, so traffic between me and Google server isn't going throw china, yet I still see this message.

Of course Chinese Government control .cn domain system, but to modify the website they would have to change the DNS record and this would be visible to anyone. I just checked and the DNS record points to a genuine Google server.

Anyway, you can check for yourself by trying a version in the .com domain system:

http://cn.l.google.com/search?hl=zh-CN&ie=GB2312&q=%BC%D2%C0%D6%B8%A3&btnG=Google+%CB%D1%CB%F7&meta=&aq=f

Google Government doesn't have any technical control over this one, and it still shows the message.

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted) [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Hijacking a connection in this way is a very unlikely move from Chinese, especially since Google is operating legally in that country and they have the deal to censor results.

Most likely there is some automated system, which the Chinese goverment can use to publish new versions of blacklisted keywords to ISPs/ICPs. Providers are obliged to refresh that list regularly and I doubt anyone would like to check it manually each time and verify why a particular word is banned (and then dispute goverment's decision).

We can blame Google for the initial decision to move into China and apply their censorship system, but saying that they willingly colaborate with the government against Carrefour is going too far.

Andy Wong [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It is common that the communism party hacked Google to enhance censorship and boost its competitors like Baidu, though Google.cn had managed to conform the "local law" made by the communism party, however, the backbone of the internet is still strictly controlled by the communism party.

Just as usual, the largest population of the internet can access the smallest set of the internet.

www [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

You are wrong!
Google did not joins the Carrefour boycott.

THe government tries to stop the boycotte,it orders all search engine not to show results about carrefour boycott,because Nationalists post "do not go to carrefour " everywhere,and it makes the government worried.

Chaz [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Do a view source on the web page. You'll see this line:
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2769" name=GENERATOR>

I guarantee that Google is not serving any pages generated via MSHTML.

Also what is up with the year 2006 copyright notice?

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted) [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I was quite skeptical about the connection hijacking hypothesis, but the points listed by Chaz really raised my eyebrow. Also notice how the Google logo is included from google.com, while on normal result pages it's from google.cn.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Marcin – those are compelling reasons, but I still don't see how it would be technically possible, unless Google moved their servers to China (they didn't, did they? They said they wouldn't...).

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I could be wrong, but I thought the Google China servers *were* in China because that was the only way Google could avoid being blocked by the Great Firewall. That includes http://cn.l.google.com too.

For example, http://www.google.cn is a CNAME for http://cn.l.google.com which resolves to the IP address 64.233.179.160:

http://www.robtex.com/ip/64.233.179.160.html

And that seems to be a China-specific IP address, kind of implying it's only used by China and, therefore, probably based in China...?

www [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Google has servers in china

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<< I guarantee that Google is not serving any pages generated via MSHTML. >>

I don't think anyone can guarantee that. I'm sure I've seen pages hosted by Google that have been generated by all sorted of editors, including FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Oh, ok. thought Google had a policy about not having servers in China to guarantee a control over them.

Guiwald [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

After the American "Liberty fries", introducing the Chinese "NO-carrefour".
Poor France… censured everywhere.

Luka [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Well, this censorship is to protect France... China do not want protests or boycott organized from internet of French interests in China...

gdupont [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

As far as I know google has servers in China

Moreover if you look deeper and search on google relation with the chinese government you will find the page I read and learn that the page displayed in this article is a generic page that google display when it cmos out on censored searches.

This is a part of google policy in order to be able to deliver its services in China and you blame it or the Chinese government for the censure.

But, in that particular case, there is no boycott at all and as far as I understand the recent problem between France and China, Chinese people are angry against France about the Olympic event things in Paris (don't want to reduce the problem but don't have words to describe it). Thus, censoring the results on Carrefour mean protecting the brand from diffusing the whole bunch of angry blogger that call for strikes against Carrefour (you did not misundertood, people are calling for strike in China, there is a lot of them, Chinese people are likely to go on strike and there is strikes everyday in China).

Well that's all what I can say on that. BTW, I'm French and my wife is Chinese. That does not mean that I has all the knowledge on that problem, but I'm quite interested and

Ari A [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

If it was a Google error, it would have been generated will a full template, and links, as well as a generated copyright date, as I said before. This is a copy+pasted Google page. Why would google do that, as I assume they have 1-line codes to generate error messages. The only solution is government intervention.

HOWEVER, WHOIS records (http://whois.domaintools.com/google.cn) indicate that the server is located in Google HQ :S

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Everyone's comments here are of great help already in shedding more light on this, I hope we get some more info. If you also want to help out by sending an email, press[put at-character here]google.com is meant to answer requests by bloggers and journalists and perhaps other interested parties.

I have not yet heard back anything official from Google, and other parties at Google tell me it's outside their responsibility or that they can't comment. However, I have one good source which I will keep anonymous telling me that this is indeed Google's page being served. But it's of course possible, if this is a deceptive act of intervention by another party, that this source also has been deceived; I cannot know for sure, and wish Google will answer soon.

However, I do not think anything on that page absolutely means it's not by Google. Google has been spotted with all kinds of pages before and even those with outdated copyright. If the page had been around for a while but is rarely used, it might just not have been updated so far. Or differently put I think that there's as little reason for the Chinese government to use an outdated "odd" HTML page as there is for Google, so it seems the error is about equally likely to have happened on either candidates' side.

Also of interest might be that Baidu and Yahoo have the same query censored as well, all with their own unique pages. And that as far as I know, neither Google or Yahoo issued a release so far indicating that someone intercepts their pages and abuses their trademarks, though again this also does not prove anything.

I don't find many news reports dealing with this issue yet. Garett covered it on Googling Google now (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1024) and there's also this bit from Bloomberg:
<<The government is also instructing Web sites to filter content related to the boycott campaign, according to Xiao of the China Internet Project. A search for the Chinese name of Carrefour on Google's China Web site brings a message that the engine cannot access that information, while the same search on Google on a Hong Kong server, outside China's Internet control system, gets 6 million hits.>>
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aw1fsXdRYEvU&refer=asia

> thought Google had a policy about not having servers
> in China to guarantee a control over them.

As far as I understand, their stated policy was not to offer services handling stuff like emails in China, and perhaps tools like Google Docs which could contain private lengthy documents. Under current conditions anyway. (Then again, it would not be the first time they changed a policy, so who knows what the future brings.)

Veky [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think we are all trying to think too much in binary, "either it is officially from Google Inc., USA, or it is counterfeit by the Chinese government". It seems to me that the truth is somewhere in between. Google China is not really Google (nor it is really China:), it is some limbic entity that tries to compromise where compromise is not really possible. Google may not have _servers_ in China, but it surely has _people_ in China, and those people are trying to keep Google in China alive (probably in no little part because their pay is depending on it:).

So what do they do when they receive "instruction" from Chinese Ministry of Truth? They comply. But they can't access Google's templated pages, so they grab the first they have, and slap the code into it. Of course, they are not very motivated to make it look nice, so it looks ugly. (Maybe it's even on purpose, like what happened on Google.be when the court ordered them to post the whole decision on their home page. I really laughed at how they handled that.:)

[CHN]VeryCD_lr [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

英语不好,只能看懂一部分,
my english is poor,I just understand a little.but I support the boycott of Carrefour,
France is too bad,
我赞成抵制家乐福,法国人太坏了,
做人不能太CNN!

dd [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Censorship is bad... always bad

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Ludwik Trammer

1.Google have two Data Centers in Beijing and Hongkong.
2.Google use black keyword list, it is simple. This forum also have similar censorship system to prevent spam.
3.Google can know your IP, then according to your IP, can know your location, if you are in China, then active black.list.cn. Same way for Germany, USA ect. Only black list different.

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Boycott Carrefour and boycott china both stupid.

The truth behind the boycott is Western people think China Made make them lost work, make western poor.

Did China Made make western poor?

China Made, and Western sell, is good for western. China Made, just can give enough work for Chinese, with low profit or even not profit. But Western sell, western almost keep all profits and, get almost all real goods.

But western free China now. They close the door for China Made. They forgot China itself is a huge market. And Russia, middle Asia.

Who are the richer? Who got real good, who are.

Western did a wrong selection. Make RMB rise, low USD, make the price fly...Topic so far.

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