A Detailed List of What Sites Were Blocked at the Olympics Main Press Center

The MPC was watched by much more than just heavy armor (Photo courtesy of EPA)

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has released a detailed report about what sites Chinese censors, in blatant defiance to the IOC, blocked at the Main Press Center (MPC), the base of operations of thousands of visiting journalists.

The report points out improvements in access after international pressure forced the Chinese organizers to loosen their very tight grip on Internet access. However:

Foreign-hosted Chinese-language news sites have been the main beneficiaries of China’s Olympic guarantees, while the majority of advocacy sites and politically ‘sensitive’ organizations remain blocked. This filtering sweeps across a broad swath of issues, from the Dui Hua Foundation to the Three Gorges Probe, as well as nearly all Tibetan advocacy organizations.

For example, while Chinese Wikipedia is accessible, the filtered status of Boxun.com, a dissident news website that Chinese government officials reportedly look to as a source of internal news, remains unchanged.

Furthermore, the accessibility of any website does not guarantee that content on that site will be available, as China’s practice of filtering keywords through a tcp reset appears as robust as ever. In just one of many examples, a video of a protest led by a founder of Students for a Free Tibet near Tiananmen Square triggered a tcp reset.

Moreover, many of the websites that were unblocked, according to a separate Reporters Without Borders report, remained unavailable in the province of Tibet.

The sites of the human rights organisations Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International were inaccessible on 20 August in Tibet although they were unblocked in the rest of China on 1 August. The sites of Radio Free Asia (except its English-language version: http://www.rfa.org/english) and Voice of America (http://www.voanews.com/english/portal.cfm) were also blocked, although they are accessible in Beijing and in Shanghai. The newspaper of the Tibetan community in exile, Potala Post (http://www.pressoftibet.com), was however accessible in Tibet.

Here is the ONI list of blocked websites at the MPC as of July 25:

IP blocking:

Uyghur rights http://www.uyghuramerican.org/

Tibet-related content:

http://tibetanyouthuk.blogspot.com/ http://tibetonline.tv/ http://woeser.middle-way.net/ http://www.actfortibet.org/ http://www.radiotibettoronto.com/ http://www.savetibet.org/ http://www.rsf.org/ http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org/ http://www.tcv.org.in/ http://www.thetibetconnection.org/ http://www.thetibetmuseum.org/ http://www.tibetanjournalists.org/ http://www.tibetanyouthcongress.org/ http://www.tibetbroadcast.com/ http://www.tibetsites.com/ http://www.tibhomes.org/ http://www.worldtibetday.org/ http://www.xizang-zhiye.org/ http://www.vot.org/

Watchdogs and advocacy organizations:

http://crd-net.org/ http://www.boycottmadeinchina.org/ http://www.civilhrfront.org/ http://www.cpj.org/ http://www.duihua.org/ Http://www.hrichina.org/ http://www.hrw.org/chinese/ http://www.ned.org/ http://www.olympicwatch.org/ http://www.smhric.org/ http://www.threegorgesprobe.org/ Independent media and blogs http://1bao.org/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/ http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/ http://memedia.cn http://rconversation.blogs.com/ http://www.atnext.com/ http://www.boxun.com/ http://www.cchere.net http://www.inmediahk.net/ http://www.newtaiwan.com.tw/ http://www.ntdtv.com/ http://www.orientaldaily.com.my http://www.rfa.org/ http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/ http://www.rfa.org/tibetan/ http://www.rfa.org/uyghur/ http://www.rfanews.org/ http://www.wenxuecity.com/ http://www.youmaker.com http://www.zengjinyan.org/ http://www5.chinesenewsnet.com/ DNS tampering only: http://www.rsf-chinese.org/ Blocked by IP address and DNS tampering: http://www.freetibet.org/ http://english.ntdtv.com/ http://www.secretchina.com http://web.amnesty.org/ http://www.dajiyuan.com/
The website for the New Tang Dynasty television station (http://www.ntdtv.com/), which is affiliated with the Falungong, was blocked by IP address at the MPC and by both DNS tampering and IP blocking at a Beijing residential connection.

Blocked using a tcp reset:

http://www.mitbbs.com http://guoweidong.blogspot.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvF822Oh75c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BukWSNBBKdM http://zengjinyan.spaces.live.com/ http://usolympictibetinfo.blogspot.com/ http://www.fillthesquare.org/ http://farm1.static.flickr.com http://farm2.static.flickr.com/ http://www.tibet.ca/ http://www.libertytimes.com.tw http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tibet/ http://zh.wikipedia.org/ http://www.voanews.com/chinese/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/default.stm

As of August 1, the status of most of the above websites was unchanged, while a handful of others had been unblocked: RFA and its sister non-English language websites
Apple Daily (http://www.atnext.com/)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/default.stm http://usolympictibetinfo.blogspot.com/ http://www.libertytimes.com.tw http://zh.wikipedia.org/ http://web.amnesty.org/