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八月份是中国的多事之秋。以下是我们检测到的重要的互联网审查新闻的摘要。

四月十二日断网事件后并无大的变化

四月十二日的时候中国发生了一次大规模断网事件，很多网友反映，在两个小时的时间内，所有的国外网站全部不能访问。我们的数据也证实了，有的没有被屏蔽的网站也不可访问，但是很有趣的是，其他的一些国外网站仍是可以访问的。如欲了解更多信息，请参见我们在 Quora 上的回答。有人推测说当局正在测试一个新的、更严格的防火墙。但是这种推断与我们的数据不符。正如你从下面第一张图表中可以看到的，在中国被封锁的主要网站数据并没有大的变化。而且，第二张图显示了事实上在四月份的时候访问国外网站的速度比之前的月份更加快了。

Alexa排名前500的网站 被封锁50%及以上的数目, 每个月. 来源.

中国互联网监测着成千上万的敏感词。如果你使用谷歌搜索任一个敏感词，你的网络链接会被重置。但如果你使用加密的谷歌搜索，GFW将无法重置你的网络链接。加密版的谷歌搜索没被屏蔽，但要使用加密版要费点功夫。你使用的谷歌版本不同，谷歌会把你定向到不同谷歌搜索版本。可参考下表：

所以，当键入https://www.google.com.hk 或 https://www.google.co.uk时，你不会被重定向，而且搜索是加密的，即你可搜索任何敏感词。

你也可以使用适用于火狐和Chrome的HTTPS Everywhere插件。

*www.google.cn上的重定向是手动的，你只有点击才能进入Google.com.hk。其他重定向都是自动完成，且不会停止用户。

Until a week ago, few Chinese had ever heard of Neil Heywood, and fewer still raised any questions when the 41-year-old British business consultant was found dead in his hotel room. Today, he is so famous — and such a sensitive topic — that China’s Internet censors have banned searches of Heywood’s Chinese name, Hai Wu De.

翻译：一周前，还没几个中国人听说过海伍德，也没几个会问为什么这个41岁的英国商业顾问会死在自己的酒店房间里。现在，他是如此的出名，以至于中国网络审查机构屏蔽掉他的名字。

以上摘自华盛顿邮报。经测试，我们确认“海伍德”确实被屏蔽。具体可参考下表：

百度

baidu: Neil Heywood

baidu: Heywood

baidu: 海伍德 (his Chinese name)

谷歌

Test now

google: Heywood

google: 海伍德

微博

weibo: Neil Heywood

weibo: Heywood

weibo: 海伍德

维基百科

en.wikipedia: Neil Heywood

en.wikipedia: Heywood

zh.wikipedia: 海伍德

中国的实际最高领导机构是由25人组成的中共中央政治局。

China's top leadership body is the Politburo which has 25 members. Of these, nine make up the Standing Committee which is the Chinese government's most important decision-making group. Seven of the nine are expected to be replaced this year. One of the candidates to fill these vacancies, Bo Xilai, was recently ousted in a scandal. Not surprisingly, much of the reporting on this incident is censored in China. More surprising, perhaps, is that all other members of the Politburo are censored on the Chinese Internet.

The following is a summary of all Politburo members and whether they are censored on Baidu, Google and Wikipedia, searching for their names in Chinese or Pinyin, respectively. Censorship on Baidu is marked in yellow and refers to confirmed self-censorship. Censorship on Google and Wikipedia is marked in red and refers to complete blocking of those pages. You can click on either to get more info on the results, or to test again in real time.

The discrepancy in results between Chinese character searches and searches in Pinyin may shed a little light on who is deemed to be a true danger when it comes to censorship.

GreatFire.org's mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China and to that end we are continuously making our own improvements to how we monitor blocked searches and key words. This past week we launched a new version of our web site where we now provide real-time searches so concerned netizens can keep up to date with information which is being censored via the Great Firewall of China.

We are also fortunate in that we have a core of super users who are constantly and consistently testing our technology to keep abreast of censorship in China. After we launched the new version of the site, we received feedback from a user via Twitter:

Congrats on ur update. But it seems connection reset for https is not detected by ur server. e.g https://en.greatfire.org/https/www.youtube.com

After receiving this message we logged on to Facebook, checked out Google Plus and did some searches on Google, specifically for freedom and 六四. What's so special about that? These websites and searches are blocked in China but we were able to access them without using a VPN or proxy, the tools people commonly use to get around this censorship.

We are very pleased to unveil a new version of GreatFire.org today. Here are some things we've been working on in an effort to improve the web site and to bring transparency to online censorship in China. 

Real Time Testing 

You can now test whether any URL is blocked or restricted in China in real time. Just enter any website in the main search field on the top of this page and click Test Now. Or, when browsing a report on a particular URL, you can request to have it retested immediately by clicking Test Now on its page. This is the first time that real-time monitoring of key words in China has ever been publicly available. Other web sites share information about key words which may have been blocked in the past but which are now unblocked (or vice versa). Our real-time service will allow visitors to the site to monitor blocked key words in relation to breaking news stories in China. Visitors will also gain insight into anomalies that sometimes occur with the Great Firewall including the ability to see if blocked sites like Facebook and Twitter happen to be open in China for short periods of time. 

Percentages 

We now report blocks and restrictions as percentages over the last 30 days. For example, if a URL has been tested 10 times in the last 30 days, and as a result of those tests the connection was reset 5 times and the download speed was slower than 5 kbps 2 times, our report would state that the web site is 50% blocked (5 /10) and 20% otherwise restricted (2 / 10). This means that our reports will be more reliable by providing more information about how exactly these sites are being blocked or throttled. There are frequent glitches in the Great Firewall and the previous version of our website reported only on the latest status of a web site, which could give distorted impressions. 

Connection reset. That is the famous response shown to web users in China when they are trying to access one of the over 2600 websites and searches that have been blocked by the authorities. But what is actually blocked and what is causing the connection disruption? Our research suggests that the Great Firewall (GFW) does not filter any incoming data, but only the outgoing traffic.

It is often said that the GFW imposes three types of censorship. The first one is DNS poisoning. For example, this happens when users in China attempt to access facebook.com. The name servers return an incorrect IP address which doesn't work. The browser tries to load the website for a certain period of time until the whole exercise 'times out'.

The second type of censorship is keyword-based. For example, if one tries to search on Google for facebook, freedom  or some of the other 250+ blocked searches, the connection is immediately reset. In addition, users are restricted from accessing any content on the same website for a minute or so.

The third type is supposed to be content based. Regardless of what was searched for or the address that was entered, if the content contains certain keywords, it is supposed to be blocked. This is where our findings become relevant. They suggest that the GFW doesn't interfere at all with the content that is sent back to the web user in China.