By Bloomberg News Jun 12, 2014 7:44 AM ET
China’s Internet users can access censored content, including references to the Tiananmen Square crackdown, after online activists created a website duplicating Google Inc. (GOOGL)’s restricted portal.
Greatfire.org, a group opposed to Internet censorship in China, said it created the mirror website to enable searches for sensitive content, and the number of visitors today exceeded 100,000. Users in Beijing and Shanghai were able to see text and image results for “Tank Man,” the iconic protester at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and FreeTibet.org that usually are prohibited in China.
Google features including search, Gmail and Translate were blocked in China a week before the 25th anniversary of the crackdown earlier this month, and many users are still unable to access services, according to Greatfire. The mirror website Sinaapp.co is hosted by Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud services.
“An unbelievable number of people are using it right now,” Charlie Smith, who uses a pseudonym for fear of reprisals by Chinese authorities, said in a message. “The culmination of general frustration from Chinese netizens who rely on Google services has helped the spike in our traffic.”
Greatfire isn’t working with Google, Smith said. Taj Meadows, a spokesman for Google, declined to comment.
Google Censorship
Google has long wrestled with the best approach to China’s Internet controls. In 2010, the Mountain View, California-based company said it wouldn’t self-censor content for Chinese services, shut its local search page and directed users to its Hong Kong website.
“There’s definitely frustration among Chinese Web users when they can’t use Gmail and they can’t get on Google,” said Doug Young, Shanghai-based author of the book “The Party Line: How the Media Dictates Public Opinion in Modern China.”
The company’s Android software is used on smartphones made by Chinese manufacturers including Lenovo Group Ltd., Xiaomi Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co.
Greatfire’s mirror website encourages people to repost links to the site on Weibo Corp. (WB), China’s most popular microblogging site, and Tencent Holdings Ltd. (2988)’s WeChat, an instant-messaging application with nearly 400 million active users. Weibo subsequently blocked search terms for the Web address.
A slogan appearing under Google’s logo on the mirror search page says, “There is no freedom without struggle.”
Hidden Identities
Greatfire.org gives people a way around censors by creating duplicates of banned websites. The three individuals behind Greatfire have kept their identities hidden from users, their advisory board of three open-Internet advocates, and even each other.
Greatfire was created to help fight China’s so-called Great Firewall, a digital barrier censoring what citizens in the most populous nation can see on the Internet. In October 2012, Greatfire created Freeweibo.com, a website that tracks posts censored on Sina Weibo, China’s largest microblog site.
China’s Internet users may exceed 850 million by next year, according to government data. That’s greater than the population of any other country except India.
The group’s content is cloaked from censors because it enters the country as part of the encrypted data on cloud servers of Amazon Web Services, an arm of the Seattle-based e-commerce giant. Amazon’s servers also are used by many corporations based in China.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at [email protected]; Edmond Lococo in Beijing at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at [email protected] Robert Fenner
From:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-12/-tank-man-googled-in-china-as-hackers-bypass-censors.html