A few days ago china recently blocked google. How can sites be banned ? My best guess it has something to do with the port on which the site is "hosted". If a site is banned is it not easy to circumvent it by some means of accessing the site through another site ( think of it this way, a website has a link to the google site that opens up a window as a part of the original website like one of those stock tickers, the address in the adress bar doesnt point to gooogle) ? Any other thoughts/strategies about this ?

Regards,
Raffi.

this isnt the first site that the Chinese Government has blocked out.. and yeah, your right. there are ways to get around it, but the whole purpose of it is to keep a hold on what is influencing the Billion plus people. Only about .5% might know enough to 'hack' their way around it. That isnt enough to matter.

Easy, put the IP address of the offending site on the blacklist of the router/firewall/whatever between your network and the site. UMR did it at one point with traffic to and from Napster a while back. In this particular case, though, it's called the Great Firewall of China, and it's fairly well known about.

There are software which can block websites on the basis of conten. Administrators can search specific keywordfs in the page descriptions and those pages could be filtered out.

this is almost as messed up as that china crap.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956357.html

I spent the summer in China. Even parts of Yahoo come up with a dns error (because the govt blocked it). but nothing beats the sight of a mass seizure and arrest in the streets while enjoying breakfast.

greets-
Not sure what Chinese people read this but you don't have to 'hack' to get around the China bullshit. Visit http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/ or goto http://www.cultdeadcow.org and get peek-a-booty.