AfterDawn: News

China hijacks popular BitTorrent sites

Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for "regulations violations" and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.

The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a "DNS error", yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn't explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.



Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.

Written by: James Delahunty @ 10 Nov 2008 1:34

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• 5 comments

• domie

  seeing as it was China, no doubt some of the top ranking government officials had noticed that the titles available through indexing or downloading on these sites were identical to the titles that they were giving the rest of their family to sell on the local black market or on the street corners and were fearful that free piracy such as BT and ed2k downloads would eat into their own profits from the sale of pirate dvds etc on the street.

  10.11.2008 06:09 #1

• onya

  These guy's are unreal. Do they really think that we don't know, that we really do know? It's more like the Abbot and Costello routine "who's on first..what's on second and....". you've gotta laugh at such a ridiculous front.
  
  EDIT: New I forgot. Hey Dom, how about some punctuation in your post eh?

  10.11.2008 06:45 #2

• domie

  Originally posted by onya:
  EDIT: New I forgot. Hey Dom, how about some punctuation in your post eh?Certainly, i'm all for learning.:) Please advise me on what punctuation I need to add considering the comment is one sentence with no change of subject or theme.

  11.11.2008 05:46 #3

• techoter

  That's kind of ironic. Will be very interesting to see what happens when China wakes up to the internet fully -- and discovers how controlling their government is. That said, I have a Chinese friend who is quite loyal to the government despite being western educated. Patriotism is highly valued in their society, though in a somewhat different way than it is here.

  12.11.2008 11:51 #4

• Mez

  onya, I am sure they do not care what you think and why should they?
  
  They seem to be doing OK while thumbing their noses at the rest of the world.

  18.11.2008 07:33 #5