2011-kathuria-bypassing
findings extracted from this paper
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The BBC's Geostats prototype (2010) detects censorship events by normalizing hourly traffic from two sources — a web-bug-based Livestats API and approximately 30GB/day of uncompressed Akamai streaming logs — alerting when traffic deviates ±60% from a rolling historical average keyed to hour-of-day and day-of-week. A key limitation identified is that CDN log files arrive up to 24 hours behind real-time, preventing timely detection of live blocking events.
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The BBC has distributed international audio and video through Akamai CDN since 2003 using URLs that do not include bbc.co.uk, making URL and IP-based blocking harder than targeting *.bbc.co.uk directly. However, individual Akamai edge machines have been blocked in China, causing thousands of co-hosted websites to become collaterally unavailable, illustrating the concentration risk when many services share CDN IP space.
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During the December 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony blocking in China, of two Psiphon nodes brought online for the BBC English News site, one was blocked almost immediately while the other remained available throughout the weekend, serving 387 logins on the ceremony day with no direct promotional channel available. A non-BBC-branded live-stream page promoted via a bit.ly URL released one hour before the ceremony received 4,236 clicks, with approximately 50% from China, accounting for about one-third of total stream viewers.
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During the June 2009 blocking of BBC Persian in Iran, the BBC observed a more-than-fourfold increase in traffic to its BBC Persian TV Internet live stream, with geographic IP lookups confirming the majority of streaming originated from inside Iran. The BBC deployed Psiphon web-proxy nodes — chosen over alternatives because they required no executable installation on the user's PC and could be hosted by a trusted third party — promoted via email newsletters, Twitter, Facebook, and on-air announcements.
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BBC Chinese's multi-channel Psiphon promotion — radio broadcasts three times daily with additional trails, daily email newsletters, and ad hoc tweets — allowed its service to reach page-view parity with BBC Persian's established Psiphon deployment within eight weeks of launch in September 2010. Separately, a third-party BBC Persian iPhone app using full-text RSS feeds received over 50% of its downloads from inside China, demonstrating that syndicated full-text content distributed across multiple third-party sites and apps is difficult for censors to enumerate and block.