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Monday, February 05, 2007

Is China blocking OA to Chinese Marxist texts?

Noam Cohen, Who’s Attacking an Online Marxist Archive? China Is Suspected of Trying to Block Access to Texts, New York Times, February 5, 2007.  Excerpt:

...According to the Marxist Internet Archive, an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing [open access] Marxist library...computer attacks primarily from China are jeopardizing its ability to provide Marxist texts, perhaps forcing the library to stop providing material in Chinese.

“We are not 100 percent sure this is the Chinese government; there are a lot of possibilities,” said Brian Basgen, who has worked on the archive since 1990. But he noted that the archive has been temporarily banned by the Chinese government before, about two years ago. “There is a motive,” he said. “They have done it to us in the past. What they are doing is targeting just the Chinese files.”

Since January there have been hundreds of “denial of service attacks,” Mr. Basgen said, 99 percent of which emanate from China....He said the site has managed to stay ahead of the attackers by creating “mirror sites” around the world, but the attacks have prevented the archive from updating its collection since they began....

Also see the archive's own annotated log of the attacks.