Blocked 12:10:04 PM

Contradictory 11:55:49 AM

Blocked 11:37:07 AM

Contradictory 11:20:47 AM

Contradictory 10:15:02 AM

This sounds like some sort of automatic system, and might be related to Hong Kong protest posts appearing and dropping off the frontpage.

Unlikely, since even the "blocked" results don't show a complete block. It's more likely to be either location-dependent (less censorship in metropolises, more in Tibet and Xinjiang) or it's simply being flaky.

To accommodate the demands of CPC on this site would do this site more harm than good. It's obvious they don't respect the need for free and open speech. You can't really dialog with people like that without losing as over time they will strong arm you into only saying what is acceptable to them.

Doesn't ycombinator have operations in China? If so it should be pretty easy for the CPC to twist yc's arm until they start censoring hackernews.

Nothing like that has come close to happening, not just about China but about anything, for as long as I've been admin. Our world would have to go through a series of state changes for anything of that nature to become possible. That would be dismaying, so it's good that there aren't any signs of it.

Yes, they hired Qi Lu, former COO of Baidu and last I checked thye had a start-up program based in China. I'm sure they have the technical abilites to censor if they choose to.

For whatever it’s worth, I can access HN from China right now.

I also don’t remember any access issues since living here. But I don’t often access it on the open net.

At the same time, there is an article about "Hong Kong protesters shooting lasers to thwart Chinese facial recognition tech"

I wonder if it's coincidence

There's dozens of anti-China articles daily. Very good chance it is, the gfw is a mysterious beast that I doubt even the regulators truly understand.

One could argue that articles critical of the Chinese government are _pro_-China rather than anti-China.

That is complete nonsense.

I haven't seen any anti-China articles on HN. There have been news articles that threw light on how people from Hong Kong and mainland China suffer under the communist government of mainland China.

I heard of a technique to wear shirts with faces on them to throw off the detection.

A dangerous game - if they save the footage, they can re-examine it with improved facial recognition later.

Should be easy to fix for them with pose estimation or something.

I redid the check and the result is now "contradictory" and not "blocked". Previously, GreatFire's reported China-1 being able to access HN while the others were blocked, the second test shows China-3 getting through while the others don't. Maybe GreatFire randomizes the numbering of their servers between tests to avoid leaking their location? In any case, the site doesn't appear to be completely blocked yet.

Edit: And now the test results have changed again, showing 5 servers, of which 2 receive a response. The assignment of server numbers is also definitely different from before.