The Chinese communist flagAccording to TechCrunch today it appears that China is hijacking traffic that is meant to go to Yahoo and Google and transfering it to Baidu.com; China’s banner search engine rife with legally (in China) ripped music and thick with communist party censorship.

Out of interest I tried surfing China’s network using a Chinese-based proxy. I tested the network and definitely found many websites that were “unavailable” but Google, Yahoo and MSN were not being redirected on my tests… I guess the Chinese filters are playing favorites intermittently.

Harvard posted an interesting study on Internet censorship in China they conducted in 2002 called an “Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China“. I find this topic fascinating and disturbing so it stole a little more time out of my day than I had expected. In the report they listed a sampling of sites banned in China along with the regularity in which they were blocked during their study. The list shows 126 websites including: