UNM CS Professor Tests Chinese Internet Censorship

September 11, 2007

New CS professor Jed Crandall and a research team at UC Davis have been studying the Chinese firewall, and getting noticed in places like Slashdot and on the BBC web site for their surprising findings. They found that contrary to expectations, the firewall did not always stop censored traffic at the border of the network. Using ConceptDoppler, a kind of automated weather report tool for censorship, they tested various censored keywords from the Chinese wikipedia and discovered that on 28% of the tested network paths, the data made it through. They also noted that that filtering in general was most erratic when traffic was busy, and uncovered 122 blacklisted keywords.