Web site tracks world online censorship reports

Technology Review ^ | 08-04-09 | Staffwriter

[TennesseeGirl]

BOSTON (AP) -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message...

...Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship...

...Zittrain started Herdict in February -- a month before China's block began -- to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked online censorship since the early 2000s, he wanted to put Web accessibility at the fingertips of those who use it most, rather than a handful of experts...

..."I don't think that a specific monitoring tool will specifically have censorship go away, but we'll just know about it better," said Robert Guerra, project director for the Internet Freedom Program at the Washington-based Freedom House. "It's far more pervasive than people think."

[TennesseeGirl]

Cool site. Click on "United States" to see which sites are inaccessible. (http://www.herdict.org/web/) On the bottom left hand side of the page you can click on countries trending such China, Iran, United States, etc. If you click on United States, you get a site report of specific inaccessible websites.

[darkwing104]

I wonder if we could add the Obama Administration to that list.

[rightey1]

holy cow...who knew?

[Richard Kimball]

I’m going to wait about 24 hours, then see if I can find a youtube of Chinese police beating Isaac Mao.

[TennesseeGirl]

Some freepers use a site called scribd.com. I noticed yesterday it was reported on HerdictWeb as being inaccessible. (I believe I've seen that name in connection with the Obama BC.) I was really surprised at the the sheer number of sites in the USA that are inaccessible at any given time.