[liberationtech] All Google products are now blocked in China

[Matthew Finkel]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 06:07:02AM +0800, Percy Alpha wrote:
> *Google disrupted prior to Tiananmen Anniversary; Mirror sites enable
> uncensored access to information <https://en.greatfire.org/node/1030705>*
> 
> Google started to encrypt search by default in China in March and currently
> nearly all users will be redirected to the encrypted version automatically.
> But prior to the anniversary of Tiananmen incident, GFW(Great Firewall of
> China) began to severely disrupt Google search
> <https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.google.com.hk> by disrupting TCP
> connections to Google IPs.  The block is indiscriminate as all Google
> services in all countries, encrypted or not, are now blocked in China. This
> blockage includes Google search, images, translate, Gmail and almost all
> other products. In addition, the block covers  Google Hong Kong
> <https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.google.com.hk> (China???s version of
> Google), Google.com <https://en.greatfire.org/www.google.com> and all other
> country specific versions.

Hi Percy,

Thanks for the update! Can you say how the block is implemented? It's
mentioned that TCP connections to Google IP addresses are disrupted,
which sounds like IP address blacklisting or DPI, but the blog post
also mentions:

"
    They can access Google directly using https://203.208.41.144 or
    add the following content to hosts file.

        203.208.41.144 www.google.com.hk

        203.208.41.145 www.google.com.hk
"

and that makes the block sound like DNS cache poisoning. Can you
describe what you see when you make a request?

Thanks again,
Matt