Exhaustive study puts China’s infamous Great Firewall under the microscope

China’s notorious website-blocking technology is impacting the global DNS system as well as restricting access to content locally, according to a comprehensive analysis of the technology.

China’s DNS-based Internet filtering apparatus – popularly known as the ‘Great Firewall’ – was observed for nine months by Citizen Lab-affiliated computer scientists using GFWatch, a platform capable of testing hundreds of domains a day.

The platform, which enabled continuous monitoring of the Great Firewall’s filtering behavior detected that a total of 311,000 domains were being censored.