BBC Migrates Everything To HTTPS, Immediately Finds Itself Blocked By The Chinese Government

from the weird-freedom-of-not-giving-a-damn-how-much-it-sucks-for-your-constituents dept

Mon, Aug 6th 2018 1:35pm — Tim Cushing

Move to HTTPS; lose the Chinese. That's the revised internet maxim. China's Great Firewall has gradually reduced the number of foreign sites accessible by Chinese citizens... "gradually" only in the sense that it's been a continuous rollout steadily decreasing web access. The government blocked an entire content delivery network at one point, so even this gradual rollout has seen its share of spikes.

As is being collaboratively reported at WikiTribune, the BBC says the move to HTTPS for all of it properties has resulted in Chinese citizens being unable to access their contents.

"In accordance with internet industry good practice, the BBC is currently changing the format of internet sites from HTTP to HTTPS. This means content is less vulnerable to tampering and specific pages on our websites can no longer be blocked. Recently the BBC Chinese language site has changed to this new format," a BBC spokesperson told WikiTribune on Wednesday.

The spokesperson added that the corporation’s online audience in China has had no access to any of the BBC’s websites for "around a week."

The BBC recommends a VPN to bypass Chinese web filtering, but that suggestion only goes so far in country where VPN use has been banned for the most part. Businesses still rely on VPNs for securing their communications and content, so the capitalist heart of the authoritarian government has granted exceptions. But the exceptions are limited to VPNs registered with the government, which presumably contain government backdoors.

Government-approved VPNs won't be much use to citizens looking to read news the government has already expressed an interest in blocking. And citizens looking to keep their Citizen Scores™ from dropping will be better off seeking out approved news sources using the heavily-regulated web the government provides.

Filed Under: blocked, china, encryption, https
Companies: bbc

14 Comments

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inblue, 6 Aug 2018 @ 2:06pm

Minor typo

in country

Don't you mean "in a country?"
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Aug 2018 @ 2:21pm

Yay BBC!
The Chinese government has used it's Great Cannon at least once. By using HTTPS, the BBC limits the damage governments can do if they decide to use such a tool.
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carlb, 6 Aug 2018 @ 2:36pm

CDN
"The government blocked an entire content delivery network at one point..."

Just one? I've had many complaints from users over the years that mainland China is blocking Cloudflare, breaking every site hosted under it.
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- Christenson, 6 Aug 2018 @ 2:54pm
  
  Re: CDN
  We can’t have *EVERYONE* reading the same thing all at once, now can we? <\sarc>That might start a revolution or something!
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Aug 2018 @ 4:54pm

Quite frankly I'm surprised the BBC wasn't blocked in China to already.
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Anonymous Coward, 6 Aug 2018 @ 5:09pm

People in China can use Tor network bridges to bypass censorship.
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Anonymous Anonymous Coward (profile), 6 Aug 2018 @ 5:09pm

Truth is antithetical to our cause
Truth hurts, not allowed here.

1,415,603,613 people will only sit around for this for a certain amount of time. Then...
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freedomfan (profile), 6 Aug 2018 @ 7:23pm

the capitalist heart of the authoritarian government

That's an... interesting take.

Dickering aside, this is yet more evidence that authoritarian regimes consistently fear an informed populace.
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  Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2018 @ 12:10am
  
  Re:
  Including the Techdirt Authoritarian Regime. Witness the number of comments blocked from sight. Fear, no doubt.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 7 Aug 2018 @ 1:10am
    
    Re: Re:
    You haven't been keeping up with Trump's talking points, have you Hamilton? Trump likes China. Trump is a fan of the authoritarian regime they have over there.
    
    If you think Techdirt has an authoritarian regime, according to Trump, that means you support Techdirt as is.
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Steve, 7 Aug 2018 @ 6:34am

We get the same problem in many corporate environments. HTTP is allowed unless blocked, but as the waf cannot scan https (without screwing around with certs), so HTTPS is blocked unless allowed.
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Ninja (profile), 7 Aug 2018 @ 6:49am

I don't know but it feels that if you can tap into Chinese market as information services or anything that deals with data (ie: BBC, Apple etc) you already failed at security and generally at Human Rights.
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Thad, 7 Aug 2018 @ 6:54am

Toads!
Read my blog.
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bob, 7 Aug 2018 @ 11:05am

wait till Christopher Robin hears about this.
BBC: we are folliwing Internet standards and switching to HTTPS.

China: oh bother.
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