Re: http status code for site blocked

At 12:06 PM 12/4/2002 -0500, Tex Texin wrote:

>I am currently in China trying to access my own site XenCraft and I am
>getting 404 page not found.
>At first I thought my server might be down. I suspect however, that the
>site is blocked for some reason by Chinese government.
>I note that I can also not retrieved the cached image from google.

Can you reach i18n.com?

1) Would proposing a status code for "access denied by local government"
>make sense? 

No - if a govt firewallis going to block a site, why is it in their interests to tell you about it?

>2) Also, is there a way to look up which sites are blocked by China, or
>more generally by any government?
>(I imagine there are people making investments in promoting sites that
>cannot in fact be accessed.)

Yes, I have a story on i18n.com to post about that later today. 


>3) Is there a procedure/protocol/process for becoming unblocked?

Doubtful at this point.


>I don't want to address the political issues around this. I think it is
>important for the web to distinguish when a page is blocked vs. other
>causes, and for there to be a way to know which pages are blocked.

But you don't really know you are blocked - the first test I would run is do a traceroute and see if/where the request fails.

Then, I would do a "host [ip address]" where ip address is the last ip that shows up in the traceroute, to find out who owns that IP address.

Next test is to do a telnet to the server on port 80. 

Then, if you can, telnet to a different shell account outside china and try the same tests.

Barry

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2002 13:05:37 UTC