BBC uses “collateral freedom” system to bypass Chinese censorship

Authorities in China have been blocking Chinese-language BBC content since Oct 2014, after the British state broadcaster carried footage of Hong Kong police beating a protestor. However, on Nov 24 the anti-censorship campaign group Greatfire.org said it was working with the BBC to make its content available to Chinese web users again.

Greatfire.org attempts to sneak content around China’s Great Firewall through a “collateral freedom” system of “unblockable” mirror sites delivered through content delivery network (CDN) services such as Amazon‘s CloudFront. It claims these are unblockable because the Great Firewall’s DNS cache poisoning techniques block entire domains, and doing so with something as widely used as Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be somewhat over-the-top, even for Chinese censors. Judging by a screenshot included in Greatfire.org’s Nov 24 blog post, the BBC’s Chinese-language content is currently being delivered through pages hosted in Microsoft‘s Azure cloud.