Ask HN: How much of the Chinese internet is visible to outsiders?

11 points by lowdose 5y ago ↗ HN

Recently I stumbled on several hyperlinks in academic literature to a chinese domains which chrome concluded are unreachable with error code ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE. Is the great firewall two-sided by design?

4 comments

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Lammy 5y ago ↗

Regardless of its intent I can only see the Great Firewall as a bidirectional barrier to humanity’s next stage of evolution. If anybody could talk to anybody else then it wouldn’t be so effective for our respective leaders to feed us things to hate about the other group.

8bitsrule 5y ago ↗

Perhaps they're concerned that the next stage of evolution includes a perception of what real leadership means.

markus_zhang 5y ago ↗

Most of it is accessible AFAIK. Which ones did you try to connect to? Links in academic literature could be outdated. I also believe the firewall is bi-directional but it limits the going-out ones much more often.

yorwba 5y ago ↗

There was a push a few years ago (2017 IIRC) to secure academic networks against espionage. A lot of research websites hosted on public IPs owned by universities (some of them didn't even bother to register a domain name) were suddenly only reachable on the intranet. Some of them were later made public again (probably after going through an approval process) but old sites with few users or where the only users are on the university network were never updated.

Then there's general link rot. Once I wanted to check the source of some economic statistics cited in a paper, only to discover that the domain was now being used for porn.