from Hacker News

Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions

by ryzvonusef on 12/8/24, 7:29 AM with 18 comments

• by ryzvonusef on 12/8/24, 7:29 AM

      > In a bombshell accusation, Todai Shimbum, the student-run paper of Tokyo University, alleges that a graduate admissions site embedded a keyword related to Tiananmen Square for over a year. The goal was apparently to prevent the page from loading in mainland Chinese and thus block Chinese students from attending, the paper alleges.
  
      > Todai Shimbun reports that the keyword appeared on the website for graduate admissions to its Computational Biology and Medical Sciences Program (メディカル情報生命専攻). The keyword used was 六四天安門 (roku-shi tenanmon), or “June 4th Tiananmen.” June 4th was the date of the student Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.

• by maeil on 12/8/24, 11:17 AM

  To my knowledge, as much as this tactic is made fun of, it does work to prevent the page from being accessible from China without a solid VPN. Is there anyone with enough experience in China to confirm or deny this?

• by ggm on 12/8/24, 8:13 AM

  Not sure I see a problem here. Certainly for Chinese individuals there was a huge downside impact.

  Geopolitically being overt you want to reduce the impact of Chinese applications and .. I dunno maintain access for other communities? That would have been very confronting and invited overt Chinese state action. This way... they made the Chinese state apply back pressure for them.

  Maybe it's short sighted, engagement is the best path to changing oppositional views in the long term.

• by libpcap on 12/8/24, 7:19 PM

  It's the CCP who blocked its own netizens from accessing the admission page, not Todai.

• by seanmcdirmid on 12/8/24, 7:41 AM

  Bound to happen. It’s like that guys name that causes ChatGPT to seize up, people who don’t like ChatGPT will just weaponize that behavior against them. Foreign websites intentionally tripping up the GVW to unofficially shape policy sounds very feasible in comparison.

• by pech0rin on 12/8/24, 11:40 AM

  why is this site allowed to be posted? most of his stories are completely fabricated with no evidence. he doesn’t even live in Japan but just cosplays as being a resident here. so frustrating seeing his content taken seriously anywhere online.

• by n144q on 12/8/24, 12:03 PM

  I can't tell how this would work, given that the URL in the screenshot uses https for the website (yes the .ac.jp one). GFW is powerful, but it can't just do MITM however it wants. Most of what it does these days is blocking based on known domain names/IP addresses/traffic pattern, not magically reading E2E encrypted content, for a single page out of a domain. If there is a problem with the content, with https, the entire domain gets blocked (which is a bigger problem), not just that single page of the site. GFW doesn't even know which page you are reading.

  It might be true back in the day when most of the traffic is in HTTP, and Wikipedia pages would be blocked simply based on the URL which contains the page title. But this story just doesn't make any sense.

  PS: The article says "That means there’s a strong possibility that the admissions page wouldn’t load for Chinese students ..." it either loads or doesn't load, which is very easy to verify. But all it says is "strong possibility". What kind of nonsense is this? If you want to write about this topic, use some concrete evidence to prove that.

  To people who downvote me: provide your technical analysis instead of just disagreeing like a coward