Chinese censorship affects small part of foreign internet users

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A small part of the international internet traffic will unintentionally, create with the Chinese overheidscensuur. The Chinese root servers to ensure that certain sites on the ipv6 be disabled or work poorly. It is unknown how big the problem is.

The unintended side effect of the Chinese firewall was discovered by the Dutchman Bert Hubert, the open-source dns software PowerDNS has developed. China, like other countries, dns root servers, the dns servers that are the highest in the dns chain.

Normally fits China domestic dns requests censorship and foreign dns requests did not pass the Chinese firewall led. “For ipv4 is that good, but it seems that they have their firewall for ipv6 requests have set”, says Hubert opposite Tweakers. “But there is now no exception is made for foreign requests.”

By the way the internet is, internet users can in other parts of the world on a dns request to a rootserver yet to get a response from a rootserver in China. It is difficult to say how often that happens. “In Luxembourg and Germany, this is a problem, and in Belgium, it on university networks,” says Hubert.

Who have to deal with the Chinese dns servers, notes that Facebook is blocked. In addition, some of the other sites bad. “The Chinese firewall blocks traffic often is not 100 percent, but sites go suddenly, worse work,” says Hubert. “Often understand Chinese the hint. An exception is Facebook: that’s closed.” Also YouTube, Dropbox, several Google services and Twitter are blocked in China.

That dns requests in China, is by the border gateway protocol. This is the fastest route for a internetpakket found; that is not always the server that is geographically the closest. Also allows bgp sometimes problems: it is a decentralized system that is based on trust, and last year showed that trust asset is misused for the interception of internet traffic.

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