Re:500 miles (2002)
by nostrademons on Thursday December 13, 2018 @07:06PM
(#18677312)
It's extra fun when you're debugging strange connection resets that occur on a seemingly-random subset of A/B tests, and then find out that it's because a substring of the digits in the experiment ID happens to match the numeric date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which is censored by the Great Firewall.
Re:500 miles (2002)
by vermilingua on Thursday December 13, 2018 @07:30PM
(#18677410)
Re:500 miles (2002)
by Allan_Smithee on Thursday December 13, 2018 @10:47PM
(#18678311)
I just tried https://www.microsoft.com/19890604 from inside China (Wuhan, to be specific) on a naked (non-back-doored) connection. I got Microsoft's 404, not any of the GFW behaviour I've come to know and loathe.
I think I'll be calling bullshit on this.
Re:500 miles (2002)
by Allan_Smithee on Friday December 14, 2018 @12:09AM
(#18678610)
And another data point.
https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=19890604&rsv_spt=1&rsv_iqid=0xfd2...
No blocking there and it's a Chinese search engine!
Re:500 miles (2002)
by nostrademons on Friday December 14, 2018 @12:33AM
(#18678685)
Read vermilingua's Wikipedia link on Illegal Numbers. This was in 2012, which lines up with the reference cited on Wikipedia for the GFW blocking the numbers 89, 6, and 4. They reversed course after getting called out for this being brain dead.
Re:500 miles (2002)
by Allan_Smithee on Friday December 14, 2018 @12:06AM
(#18678602)
To clarify, I actually queried http://www.microsoft.com/19890604 and had it redirected to https://... by Microsoft's server. So the URL query was in plaintext.
Just, you know, so the undies come unbunched before people comment.
“China” would have been my first answer to that question.
After spending so much time in a project that deals with massive amounts of HTTP requests from China, I realized that the majority of web developers are making too many assumptions. Several times I have found myself patching pieces of code because the connection was suddenly dropping in the middle of the operation, so I had to add retries and read incomplete streams of bytes to recover at least pieces of the actual data from our Chinese netizens.
In retrospective, I have learned a lot about TCP in the last year with this project.